A Prayer for Mimesis? Reframing Islam in Cinema

A Frame Story

In 1896, mere months after revealing their revolutionary cinematograph in Lyon, the Lumière Brothers dispatched a team of operators around the globe to showcase the new device and capture moving images for international circulation. Among this cadre of pioneering cinematographers was Alexandre Promio, who traveled to Spain, England, and Italy, before embarking on a journey to Algeria in December that same year. This broader story is part of my forthcoming book, Cinema before the World: The Global Routes of the Lumière Brothers, but here I focus on a smaller detail. In Algiers and Tlemcen, Promio turned his camera to scenes of everyday life: urban pedestrians, bustling port commerce, a vibrant Arab market, and modern government buildings. Of Promio’s ten films in the Lumière catalogue from his 1896 journey to Algeria, one in particular, Prière du muezzin, stands out for its evocative depiction of a prayer on a rooftop in Algiers (fig. 1).[1]

Fig. 1. Vue 197 in the Lumière Catalogue, Prière du muezzin (1897), depicts a figure rising in falling in a performance of prayer; via YouTube.

What is immediately striking about Prière du muezzin is the visual dissonance at its core: the prayer, though carefully staged, is off-center, so much so that the figure drifts in and out of frame. The rooftop in Algiers offers a minimalist setting: a plain floor, a line of ceramic tiles, and a clear sky. The dress of the praying man (a black caftan and a white head covering) helps distinguish him against the prominent horizontal axis of the shot. There is a distinct flatness to the image: no flow of crowds from deep space, no approach of an oncoming train, and no interplay between the foreground and background characteristic of other Lumière films of this period. Instead, the long shot of a solitary, misaligned figure within an otherwise symmetrical composition unsettles the gaze, introducing a tension between subject and frame.

In the documentary compilation The Lumière Brothers’ First Films, Bertrand Tavernier’s voiceover draws attention to what is immediately apparent: “When we said that Louis Lumière always put the camera at the right place, this is an exception. The film is not well framed.” Tavernier also points out another crucial detail, revealing that—according to his “Muslim colleague”—this is “not a real prayer.” What we have before our eyes in Prière du muezzin is both mis-framed and fabricated. A note in the Lumière catalogue adds that the film’s title is “misleading” [trompeur]: “It is not a muezzin calling to prayer, nor a real prayer.” Functioning like the caption to René Magritte’s famous pipe, the catalogue description negates what the film purportedly shows, as though to say, “ceci n’est pas une prière.”[2] Indeed, this is not a prayer.

Why, then, linger on this curious film? What might it reveal about Islam’s place in early cinema? On one level, Prière du muezzin exemplifies the colonial gaze, presenting Algeria as an exoticized elsewhere and perpetuating Orientalist tropes—a critique echoed in works like Jack Shaheen’s Reel Bad Arabs and Malek Alloula’s The Colonial Harem.[3] On another level, though, the film’s blatant mis-framing does more than simply distort its subject—it estranges it. The otherness of the prayer is eclipsed by the otherness of its framing. This visual misalignment accentuates the artifice of the performance, turning the colonial gaze upon itself. In an almost Brechtian gesture, the rupture of the frame draws attention to the mechanics of representation, unsettling the central viewing position that underpins the colonial gaze—a gaze that, here, is itself off-center.

Caught between two critical frameworks—Orientalist objectification and formalist disruption—the film invites a deeper question: what does it mean to represent a prayer cinematically? Can a prayer be represented at all? A prayer recorded and reproduced is no more a prayer than a wedding vow onscreen instantiates a marriage. The issue is not one of mimesis (how properly to depict a prayer), but rather of performativity: how to engage with an act that is embodied, enacted, and oriented toward something beyond the frame. Prayer, as a practice and orientation, resists containment within the visual logic of cinema.

In the collision between the figural prayer and the formal frame, the film enacts a disruption of a mimetic fantasy—the fantasy that prayer can be represented through the conventions of realism. As scholars across the humanities and social sciences reckon with good and bad depictions of Islam—often by searching for “religion” in “texts”—the film offers a different proposition. Through its performative iteration of prayer in a choreography of light, shadow, and motion, it invites us to consider not what prayer looks like, but the formal conundrum it poses: how its representation eludes cinematic capture. Projected onto a screen, the film performs prayer as an event—an act that calls attention to the gap between representation and enactment.

The Photorama, Or a World Without Frames

When first introduced, the cinematograph was thought by its inventors to have a limited future, and the various camera operators hired were expected to be shortly out of a job. Louis Lumière himself purportedly referred to the cinematograph as “an invention without a future.”[4] It was taken as a given that this machine would not enjoy commercial success, and even the early shows were seen to derive more from scientific curiosity than from a specific aesthetic investment in the medium. So it was that Auguste and Louis Lumière continued their inventions well beyond the discovery of the cinematograph. Auguste would explore the world of x-ray photography, and in 1900, at the Exposition Universelle in Paris, Louis unveiled his photorama—a device that employed twelve different lenses to capture a full scene that was projected around the spectator on a circular screen measuring six meters in height (fig. 2). Gone was the perspective of painting, and in turn, the world was made visible with the viewer surrounded, enveloped by the scene the camera captured.

For his part, sensing the end of cinema, Promio eventually retired to the very place where he shot his early films: Algeria. And believing that cinema had run its course, he too turned his attention to the photorama and the promise of a world without frames. In 1903, Promio shot the port of Algiers in a sweeping photorama, employing the new technology to bring the scene to life. Where William Henry Jackson had in 1895 published images of this same location in Harper’s Magazine, Promio’s photorama placed the viewer in the midst of a world as part of the image. Almost in direct contrast to the highly abstracted shot of the prayer, Promio’s photorama unfurled an elaborate scene with water, boats, and modern buildings lining the street. Its duration was seemingly indefinite. The glimmer of the water, the shadows flickering on the street, and the movements of the people all looped around the screen, giving the impression of a continuously bustling scene.

Allow me to now reframe the film previously at the center of our story. By 1903, at precisely the moment film was emerging in narrative form with cuts and storyboarding, Promio was imagining a future of a different sort, and he was, in this process, investing in an alternate mode of visual representation. Whereas the early Lumière films echoed in form and subject matter the formal attributes of painting, binding a scene in four frames and playing with deep space, the photorama made possible a viewing experience of a different sort: a world without a center. It did away with the frame as it had been known in both painting and as it would come to be known in cinema.

That said, the panorama was not unknown in nineteenth-century visual culture. The painter Robert Barker had at the end of the eighteenth century experimented with panoramic scenes of battles and military conquest. As Denise Oleksijczuk remarks: “Barker’s innovation lay in improving on a painting’s form by translating the rules of perspective to a curved and continuous surface, and by making it possible for a painting to do what late-eighteenth-century theorists felt was beyond the limits of the medium, namely, to represent a total view, open on all sides.”[5] His son Henry Aston Barker would go on to extend this fantasy to sites long known in an Orientalist imaginary. In 1801, Henry Barker presented his Panorama of Constantinople, and shortly afterwards he offered a Panoramic View of Grand Cairo, which he painted over 10,000 feet of canvas for display in Leicester Square (Fig. 3).

Each of these panoramas involved multiple viewing positions, not only displacing the centered viewing position long considered the staple of Renaissance perspective, but making possible a sort of embodied viewing experience surrounding the viewer in the image.[6] Women and men were seen to respond differently to this aesthetic experience, and even animals were apparently tricked by the realism involved. A journal of the period reports a Newfoundland dog leaping over a handrail at a panorama to rescue men in the painting seemingly drowning at sea; and an entry years later describes a cat being chased from a panorama attempting to find refuge by climbing a tree only to find, in the end, the tree merely painted on the canvas.[7]

Scholars rightfully note the embeddedness of this visual form within Orientalist visual regimes. Ali Behdad, for example, describes how panoramic views “engendered a sense of mastery over the landscape, positioning the viewer to have a total view of the cityscape below, representing the ‘right of (over)sight’ that the European tourist assumed in Istanbul.”[8] Yet Promio’s photorama, the supposed afterlife of cinema, offers us not only a way of understanding the limitations of the frame, but also an image of what cinema might have otherwise been. It is especially telling that the camera operator did not simply correct his perceived error in Prière du muezzin by reshooting it. Instead, he imagined an aesthetic world without frames—reframing the medium rather than adjusting the tableau.

What might the history of cinema and Orientalist visuality have looked like had the path of the panorama been taken instead of the tableau? How different might the world look if presented without a center? The panorama indeed undoes the logic of a singular viewing position.[9] Lecturers helped coordinate what viewers saw and drew attention to certain locations in the viewing area; later, printed guides, initially circular and then linear, oriented the viewer on their own. In either case, though, how the world was to be seen was given over to multiple viewing positions, uncut and expansive, immersing the spectator in the scene itself.

Years later, when André Bazin famously contrasted the centripetal frames of painting with the outer edges of the screen, he—like many of us—ignored the vision of those who, in the fantasy of defeating frames, sought to surpass the medium they themselves labored so intently to develop.[10] The photorama would unveil a reality of a different sort—a world without frames, a scene without borders, and an experience for seeing the world anew.

Such was the case with Promio’s photorama of the port in Algiers. How small, how provincial, how bounded the cinematic image comes to appear in relation to these monumental panoramas. Promio’s experiment with the photorama thus marks not a failure, nor the pursuit of an unrealizable dream, but rather a striking embodiment of Bazin’s famous claim that “the cinema has not yet been invented.”[11]

De-Orientalizing Optics

As cinema did develop, the utopianism embraced by these pioneers of the photorama was soon eclipsed by the staying power of the framed world of moving images. While panoramas were challenging to disseminate and costly to reproduce in mass form, films continued to live on as the foundations of a now globalized medium. The cinematic cut would make possible the emergence of narrative space in cinema, and films ranging from Julien Duvivier’s Pépé le Moko to Gilles Pontecorvo’s Battle of Algiers to Merzak Allouache’s Bab El Oued would splice the tableau, breaking apart the streets of Algiers into shots arranged in narrative form.[12] The casbah, in this regard, would transform from the panoptic overhead map to images corresponding to the travels of the camera through the streets. The cut would make possible the dissolution of the frame into the spatial logic of narrative, and a world would be slowly revealed by storytellers’ scripts, the camera’s movements, and the editor’s scissors.

I return to the questions with which I began—that is, the place of Prière du muezzin in early cinema, and especially the meanings of its mis-framed scene of a prayer on a rooftop in Algeria. This film formally undoes the logic of Orientalism, disrupting the conventions of perspective and the centering of the camera; moreover, it opens onto Promio’s efforts to think and work past the cinematic frame. Promio did not simply follow the path of narrative cinema—as the Edison company, Edwin Porter, and Cecil Hepworth would do, for instance—but he instead rethought the very basis of the medium.

To ask what it means to see the world otherwise is to move beyond the framed image toward an immersive, panoramic experience. Scholars such as Lina Khatib and Derek Gregory have shown how Orientalism operates visually through a distinction between the observer—who sees, maps, and controls—and the observed—who is rendered visible through the rationalizing lens of perspective.[13] (Recently on the Visualities forum, too, Ria Banerjee has explored the visual rhetorics of Orientalism—including at the formal level of color—in popular film at mid-century.) The peculiar case of Prière du muezzin offers an alternate story for thinking about seeing—one that, in mis-framing prayer, reveals different relations to film, to the history of the medium, and to the world it makes visible.

I would emphasize, in closing, the importance of thinking prayer at the intersections of film form and film theory. This approach moves us beyond thematic treatments of religious content and toward an inquiry into how performance itself is inscribed in the signifying practices of the medium. By attending to the performance of form and the form of performance, we can reframe what it means to see prayer on film—not simply as a representation, but as a transformation of how prayer is understood and experienced through cinematic means. And it is here—both at the edge of the frame and in the panoramic world beyond—that we might ultimately imagine alternate futures of representation in visual culture.