Michael Allan, "Cinema before the World: The Global Routes of the Lumière Brothers" (Fordham UP, 2026)

Mar 29, 2026

Michael Allan, Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Cinema Studies, explores the Lumière Brothers’ 1896-97 voyages and Alexandre Promio’s films across North Africa and the Middle East. He traces how specific sites shape film techniques like framing and tracking shots. The conversation highlights archives, regional reception, language around cinema, and how early film complicates national film histories.

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INSIGHT

Cinematograph Portability Made Cinema Global

The Lumière cinematograph differed from Edison's model by being portable and able to both record and project films.
Alexandre Promio used this portability to shoot short 40–50 second scenes across North Africa and the Middle East in 1896–1897, revealing global circulation from the start.

ANECDOTE

Following Promio's Camera Across Alexandria and Cairo

Alexandre Promio's 1896–1897 voyage filmed trains, ports, stations, and iconic tourist sites across Alexandria, Cairo, Giza and beyond.
Allan followed Promio's catalog on foot in Alexandria and Tunis to locate exact camera positions and matched frames to present-day sites.

INSIGHT

Microhistory From Saturated 40-Second Films

Allan approaches early Lumière films as a microhistory anchored in single 40-second films, privileging visual excess over lacking written records.
He uses the films' saturated frames to recover details absent from Promio's later written travelogue.

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Cinema Before the World: The Global Routes of the Lumière Brothers (Fordham UP, 2026) 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 (a rooftop in Algiers, a train station and the Jaffa Gate in Jerusalem), Allan unsettles a familiar narrative of imperial vision. In the interplay of local history and global media, he highlights tensions between ethnography, observation, and visual capture, revealing how the Lumière Brothers films persist as living archives.

The book evokes a formative moment when cinema stood before the world—both as a technological marvel and as a medium that shaped how space and time were perceived. Tracing a journey from Algeria to Egypt and Palestine, and moving across media from lithography to photography and panoramas, Allan shows how in the hands of later filmmakers, such as Egyptian director Youssef Chahine and the Syrian collective Abounaddara, the Lumière films continue to enrich and inform visions of what cinema—and the world—can be.

Cinema before the World offers a critical historical intervention in the global story of the cinematograph and a visionary method for film scholarship grounded in transnational analysis across languages, regions, and media.

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.

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