Tom Gunning (1997)

- became one of the most quoted historical works on popular audiences (since Mulvey)
- shift in focus
- little was known about the early years of motion pictures
- contrast to narrative film – cinema of attraction is in part an attempt to take the earlier period on its own terms rather than anomaly or mistake etc
- cinema of instance – present a single happening/performance
- audience participation is integral to the “show” rather than a focus on the screen
- 1895 to 1903/04 – shift to film telling stories – intro to editing – move from one location to another and efforts to break down or vary perspectives
- 1915 – birth of the nation – begin to see solidification of techniques of narrative progression – films get longer (feature) – spectators – from rambunctious to quiet
- 1927 – sound is more predominant – standardizing audience, viewing conditions etc – high pt of classical era, demanding that audience arrive at beginning and leave at end and to be quiet
- built in situational, architectural, etc – absorbed into the film
- mid 80s through mid 90s – attempt to understand that motion picture practice did not stand on its own
- relationship to everyday life – industries, businesses, etc
- writers today try to take full advantage of this - other kinds of congregations – morgue, panaroma, main drag, etc
- expanded investment in theoretical works (Kracauer – deemed to simple/too realist/too reflectionist)
- Kracauer: analysis like W Benjamin – wants to understand products of capital culture as legitimate
- makes sense that this org of power and resources wou;d produce an arc that is like this – performance, sites and architecture etc exactly like this
- method is about taken seriously things abound rather than approaching it with assertive stance of making judgment
- 1895 – arrivee d’un train – lumieres bros
- about a passenger train – movement to urban
- mass as force of irrationality – cannot on its own figure out their own world – can’t tell real from what they see
- confusing it for the real – this is why we have to be concerned with what people watch
- invisible editing – to hide the elements of construction – to increase absorption into narrative
- - people were afraid of the first Lumieres Bros. Train film

Critique of Metz:

example #1
- "panicked reaction as part of the audience as a displacement of the contemporary viewer's crudility onto a mythical childhood of the medium" 115
- "allows us to disavow our own belief in the face of the cinema" 115 (infancy of cinema)

- terror of early projections?
- attraction to new tech rather than disturbance?
- Trompe l'oeil as genre of aesthetic illusion - a conflict of messages
- aware of the illusion - but rendered speechless by the illusion itself

example #2
- illusionist/quick sketch artist Blackton
- set up orally the expectations for the viewers

THE CINEMA OF ATTRACTIONS is after narrative cinema (and before non-linear db narratives?)
- solicits a highly conscious awareness of the film image engaging the viewer's curiosity -121