Where Was Early Cinema in the Russian Empire? Rethinking Empire through Film Geography

Abstract

This article rethinks early cinema in the Russian Empire from a spatial perspective, shifting attention away from St. Petersburg and Moscow toward the Empire’s western and southern borderlands. Using the trade journal Sine-Fono (1907–1918), it reconstructs cinema activity across several hundred towns and cities and visualises these patterns through cultural-geographical mapping and heatmaps. The analysis demonstrates that early cinema developed most intensively across a broad zone from the Baltic to the Black Sea, challenging capital-centred and nation-centred historiographies and redefining notions of ‘centre’ and ‘periphery’ in the history of Imperial Russian cinema.