The subject of the project is early cinema exhibition and other forms of popular entertainment in big cities and small town environment of Polish provinces of the Russian Empire before WWI in the context of modernity and modernization. In this way I would like to contribute to two academic debates: 1) on the history of early cinema and 2) on the cultural dimension of modernization. In the first case I am going to examine how the cinema developed on the peripheries of the modern world-system, in the second, what was the role of cinema in the development of peripheral regions.