Over the last two decades the world has emerged as a ubiquitous trope in our audiovisual landscape: whether we think of multinarrative films directed by global auteurs, such as Babel (Alejandro González Inárritu, 2006), 360 (Fernando Meirelles, 2011) and Mammoth (Lukas Moodysson, 2009); the explosion of documentaries and TV series that have the planet as their focus, including Planet Earth (BBC, 2007 and 2016), Home (Yann Arthus-Bertrand, 2009), and countless others carrying Earth in their titles; the 3D variations of this genre as produced for the IMAX theatre, such as Sacred Planet (Jon Long, 2004) and A Beautiful Planet (Toni Myers, 2016); ‘world symphony’ films like Samsara (Ron Fricke, 2011), One Day on Earth (Kyle Ruddick, 2012) and Life in a Day (Kevin Macdonald, Loressa Clisby, 2011); or even a single web-environment like Google Earth. Connecting these otherwise disparate audiovisual forms and formats is a simple – though of course ultimately unattainable – goal: to depict not a world, but the world, that is to say, the entire world.

No doubt such a proliferation of world-encompassing formulations is largely connected to socio-economic globalising processes on the one hand, and an acute sense of our global environmental crisis on the other, and thus restricted to contemporary phenomena. Yet a quest to encompass the whole world certainly has precedents in media and film history. In this essay I argue that the global imaginaries surrounding the emergence of cinema provide a meaningful field against which contemporary ones can be held up and deconstructed, and vice versa. While globalising phenomena and discourses are often associated with the end of the twentieth century, a look at the media-scape within which cinema emerges reveals that grappling with the world as a – and in its – totality was deeply built into the visual culture of the time – a phenomenon that resulted in no small measure from the contemporary popularity (and feasibility) of round-the-world travels and imperialist expeditions. To investigate some of the earliest examples by which the world was visually encompassed and the respective discourses they mobilised might thus help us shed a more nuanced light on the ways we currently conceive of and perceive the Earth.