In this major A-Z work, 'early cinema' refers to the first twenty or twenty-five years of the cinema's emergence at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries, from the early 1890s to the middle 1910s. Coverage of the pre-cinema period is also given in order to describe not only the apparatus, and its inventors, on the basis of which cinema would develop, but also those mass-cultural forms and practices within which cinema was to emerge. The Encyclopedia presents information on the basic trajectory of early cinema history, with coverage of film production, filmmakers, film genres, and individual films, but in addition a major task of the work is to present information from the revisionist history of early cinema, with its focus on the changing nature of film exhibition and the changing patterns of reception. The Encyclopedia reveals that early cinema was so inextricably bound up with other forms and practices of mass culture, that it emerged as a combination of existing and innovative elements, and that it was an unusually hybrid medium that only gradually coalesced into something more or less distinct.
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