In 1897, a Lumière Brothers’ camera operator shot a fifty-second film at the Jaffa Gate in Jerusalem. Of the many scenes the Lumière Brothers collected from North Africa and the Middle East, this particular film is considered to be the first instance of a close-up--with a pedestrian approaching the camera from deep space. Over the course of the fifty seconds, a man strolls forward through a crowd, appears briefly in close-up, and then vanishes suddenly in the street scene. Recent scholarship in film and media studies has much to say about the close-up as the most affect-laden shot of filmic discourse, but how might we understand that one of its earliest instances occurs in Palestine? Can the formal analysis of a filmic concept be divorced from the location at which it is made thinkable? My paper is attentive to the challenges this Lumière Brothers’ film poses to national cinema and film theory--on the one hand, the site of the film’s production, and on the other, the relationship staged between film form (here the close-up on a Palestinian face) and film history (the Lumière Brothers at the Jaffa Gate). Returning to the close-up in this early film allows us ultimately to consider the place of Palestine in a history of film form and the possibilities of facing the camera differently.