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.

"In this boldly original work Michael Allan scrutinizes films of the Middle East shot by Alexandre Promio for the Lumiere 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 cliches, at best indexical witnesses. In contrast, Allan conceives of the Lumieres' 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