| Sumario: | Early cinema is a burgeoning subfield of film studies and film history. But despite the wealth of research on the subject, work on early cinema in the colonies is limited. This is especially unfortunate, given that around 1900 more people lived in the colonies than in imperial countries. To address this research gap, the article provides an overview of existing scholarship focusing on the colonies in the British Empire. The piece also proposes that neither local film production nor the link to modernity should be the defining parameters for ascertaining until when early cinema lasts in a particular locale. The local endpoint of early cinema should depend instead on how rich the complex of local production, promotion, distribution, exhibition, and reception was in the period during which cinema was yet to be modelled on Classical Hollywood.
|
|---|