An attempt to locate cinema alongside philosophy, painting, geography and travel in terms of a history of modernism. The book focuses on a collection of geographical and ethnographic films and photographs amassed by banker Albert Kahn, in the 1900s - arguably an instance of French modernism.

The volume explores diverse aspects of French-language travel writing. Arranged chronologically by topic, the essays cover the medieval Anglo-Norman story of the Irish traveller Saint Brendan's fantastical visit to hell; the sixteenth-century French expeditions to Florida; the seventeenth-century Dernières découvertes dans l’Amérique septentrionale de M. de la Sale mises au jour par le chevalier Tonti, 1697; the eighteenth-century Histoire générale des voyages by l’abbé Prévost; the eighteenth-century Impressions d' Orient et d'Arabie written in French by the Polish count Waclaw Seweryn Rzewuski; nineteenth-century tales of travel in Algeria by the orientalist painter Eugène Fromentin; early twentieth-century travel narratives by the modernist Blaise Cendrars; the 1936 visit to the Soviet Union by Louis-Ferdinand Céline and André Gide, odyssean thematics in the late twentieth-century work of Nobel prize winner Patrick Modiano; the thematics of nomadism in the twentieth-century writing of Albert Memmi, and the thematics of travel in works by Bernard Ollivier, Rachid Bouchareb, Fatou Diome, Christine Montalbetti, Marie Ndiaye and Emmanuel Lepage.