Cinema Before the World

Michael Allan is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Cinema Studies at the University of Oregon. He is the author of In the Shadow of World Literature: Sites of Reading in Colonial Egypt (Princeton, 2016, winner, MLA First Book Prize) and serves as editor of the journal Comparative Literature.

• Introduction: Microhistory: Envisioning Ellipsis 1A Flashback to Cinema’s Elsewhere, 5 Microhistory: Excess as Method, 10 Illusions of Index, or the Ethnographic Mirage, 13 Conceptual Cartography, 17 A Preface to Prehistory: A Potential Future of Cinema, 201 World: The Labor of Representation 23On Atlases and Adjacency, 26 An Archive of Potential Worlds, 31 Iteration and Empire, or the Labor of World Cinema, 35 Afterimages of Future Pasts: Glass and Bricks, 392 Location: Locating Looks in World Cinema 43Mirror: A Local History of World Cinema, 47 Window: A World History of Local Cinema, 51 (The Postcolonial) Pivot: Unlearning Imperial Enchantment, 56 Portal: Beyond the World Picture, 603 Frames: De-Centering Orientalist Optics 62A Frame Story, 65 Enframing the Unpredictable, 70 Beyond Icon and Index, or a Prayer for Mimesis, 72 An Expanded Field, 75 The Photorama, or a World without Frames, 80 De-Orientalizing Optics, 824 Sovereignty: Iterations of Cinematic Statecraft 85Serial Sovereigns, 88 The Khedive’s Two Bodies, 91 Sovereign Cuts, 95 Sovereign Afterlives, 99 The Sovereign Image?, 1035 History: The Duration of Myth 105Perfecting Place, 108 Picturing the Past, 110 The Image ofDuration, 114 Cinematic Futures, 119 The Cinematic Event, 1226 Tracks: Tracking the World in/as Cinema 124Placing Perceptual Paradigms, 129 Middle East Trains, 132 World in/as Motion, 138 Arriving at a Farewell, 1407 Scale: The World as Close-Up 145The Figure in the Carpet, 148 The Close-Up at a Formal Distance, 151 Looking and Masking, 158 Zoom Out: Facing the Globe, 162Epilogue: Planet: Otherworldly Futures 167Toward a Planetary Cinema, 169 Planetarity, 173 The Promise ofa Future Planet, 176 A World beyond Compare, 178Acknowledgments 181Notes 187Bibliography 215Index 231

"In this boldly original work Michael Allan scrutinizes films of the Middle East shot by Alexandre Promio for the Lumière company in 1897. Analyzed formally and in terms of their historical and cultural significance, these films, lasting less than a minute, reveal the promise of a world cinema yet to be fulfilled." - Tom Gunning, University of Chicago "Early ‘travelogue’ films are often perceived as static: at worst Orientalist clichés, at best indexical witnesses. In contrast, Allan conceives of the Lumières’ films from cities like Cairo and Jerusalem as in motion, in relation, inexhaustible: worthy of being the origin moments of a decolonized world cinema." - Laura Marks, Simon Fraser University