Movies were the center of social mores, fashion and design, politics in short, at the center of culture and, in so being, dictated the terms of their dominance to the other art forms: literature, theater, and painting were all redefined by their relationship to cinema. The cinema of Bangladesh is one of the least discussed Asian cinemas, so debates about issues such as its originating moment are still in their infancy. As part of a broader endeavor of articulating a framework within which Bangladesh cinema can be analyzed, this article asks: “When did Bangladesh cinema begin. ” Previous historians of Bangladesh cinema, who are generally concerned only with theatrical feature film production, are in consensus in answering this question: they locate the beginning of Bangladeshi cinema with the making of The face and the mask in 1956, and call this the “first” theatrical feature produced in the then East Pakistan/East Bengal. However, there are other less-celebrated “beginnings” of cinema in Bangladesh, in the early decades of the twentieth century. This short summary of Bangladesh national history demonstrates that the nation-state came into being more than seven decades after the arrival of cinema in this land. The traditional view of the beginning of cinema in Bangladesh The “starting point” of a history of a national cinema always denotes the historian’s “principles” or implicit understandings of key concepts such as “history”, “nation” and “cinema”. Similar to the concept “cinema”, the historians of Bangladesh cinema aspire to fit the face and the mask unquestioningly and unproblematic ally within the dominant discourse around the idea of Bangladesh as a “nation”, the discourse of cultural nationalism based on the distinctiveness and greatness of Bengali language and culture, incorporating also a flavour of socialism and a secular worldview.