Especially over the past thirty years, serious research on early cinema has blossomed as never before. This rapid growth has included the establishment of international organizations such as Domitor (founded in 1987), with its biannual conferences; film festivals such as Le Giorante del cinema muto (established in Pordenone, Italy, in 1984); the centenary celebrations of cinema’s emergence (in 1994–6); and a host of publications, culminating with the release by Routledge of the Encyclopedia of Early Cinema (2005) (reissued in a revised paperback edition in 2010).

Early Cinema is a new title in Routledge’s Major Works series, Critical Concepts in Media and Cultural Studies. It meets the need for an authoritative reference work to enable users to navigate and make sense of the subject’s large literature and the continuing explosion in research output. Edited with the assistance of an international board of consultants by Richard Abel, a leading scholar in the field, this collection brings together in four volumes the foundational and the very best cutting-edge scholarship on early cinema.

Early Cinema includes a full index and a comprehensive introduction, newly written by the editor, which places the collected material in its historical and intellectual context. It is an essential work of reference and is destined to be valued by scholars and advanced students of film studies as a vital research tool.