Cinema before the World: The Global Routes of the Lumière Brothers

Cinema before the World investigates the transnational origins of filmmaking by focusing on a case study in world cinema—the 1896-1897 voyage of one of the Lumière Brothers camera operators, Alexandre Promio, across North Africa and the Middle East. The book shows how the sites in these early films are not simply backdrops, but integral to film form and its global history.

Connecting a series of filmic principles (framing, tracking shots, close-ups) to the sites where they are made visible (...