Cinema before the World

Cinema Before the World: The Global Routes of the Lumière Brothers reimagines the origins of cinema through a transnational lens, following camera operator Alexandre Promio’s 1896–1897 journey across North Africa and the Middle East. Drawing on French and Arabic sources, the book treats these early films not as static records of place, but as sites where film form and global history converge.

Each chapter links a cinematic principle—framing, the tracking shot, the close-up—to the specific locales where they first came alive: a rooftop in Algiers, a Jerusalem train station, the Jaffa Gate. Refusing a simple tale of imperial vision, the study foregrounds the tensions between ethnography, observation, and visual capture, revealing how Lumière films persist as living archives.

In dialogue with contemporary artists and filmmakers, this groundbreaking book unsettles, enriches, and expands our sense of what cinema—and the world—can be.