ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to debunk presentist assumptions about film-making and cinema culture in the Gulf and excavate genealogies of the moving image rooted in the early formations of hydrocarbon modernity. It traces the history of film and visual representation in the countries of the Arabian Peninsula in multiple historical stages. Despite the increasing appeal of the turn to archival research in film studies, any attempt to historicize the moving image in the Gulf, however, immediately encounters significant methodological and empirical challenges. In order to produce such a history, one has no other choice but to start with the official colonial archives of the British India Office Records or corporate archives of the oil companies that operated in the Gulf. Reading these archives against the grain, however, could enable us to critically reveal the transcolonial, transregional, and transnational set of directions that the history of the moving image in the Gulf followed.
