Introduction: Microhistory: Envisioning Ellipsis 1 A 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, 20 1 World: The Labor of Representation 23 On 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, 39 2 Location: Locating Looks in World Cinema 43 Mirror: 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, 60 3 Frames: De-Centering Orientalist Optics 62 A 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, 82 4 Sovereignty: Iterations of Cinematic Statecraft 85 Serial Sovereigns, 88 * The Khedive's Two Bodies, 91 * Sovereign Cuts, 95 * Sovereign Afterlives, 99 * The Sovereign Image?, 103 5 History: The Duration of Myth 105 Perfecting Place, 108 * Picturing the Past, 110 * The Image of Duration, 114 * Cinematic Futures, 119 * The Cinematic Event, 122 6 Tracks: Tracking the World in/as Cinema 124 Placing Perceptual Paradigms, 129 * Middle East Trains, 132 * World in/as Motion, 138 * Arriving at a Farewell, 140 7 Scale: The World as Close-Up 145 The Figure in the Carpet, 148 * The Close-Up at a Formal Distance, 151 * Looking and Masking, 158 * Zoom Out: Facing the Globe, 162 Epilogue: Planet: Otherworldly Futures 167 Toward a Planetary Cinema, 169 * Planetarity, 173 * The Promise of a Future Planet, 176 * A World beyond Compare, 178 Acknowledgments 181 Notes 187 Bibliography 215 Index 231.