2') Alexander Pushkin, Thru Comic Poems, ed. and trans. William E. Harkins (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1977), 25.

30 Alexander Dlok, Zapisnye knizhki (Notebooks) (Moscow, 1965), 127. 31 Andrei Bely. "Teatr i sovremennaya drama" (Theater and the modern drama), Kniga

o novom Uatre (A book on the new theater) (Moscow, 1908), 274. 32 There are no wall-crashing sequences in The "?"Motorist, only shots of a car crashing

through a ceiling. The wall-crashing trick was introduced by Melies for Voyage a travers /'impossible (1904).

33 Andrei Bely, "Gorod" (The city), Nash ponedel'nik (Our Monday paper) 1 (9 Novem-ber 1907): 2.

34 Bcly, "Go rod," 2. 3 5 Isaiah 24:18-20. 36 Bely, "Go rod," 2. 37 That Fatal Sneeze is now available on videotape in the collection, The Movies Begin,

released by the British Film Institute in 1990 and Kino Video in 1994. 3 8 Andrei Bely, Petersburg (Moscow, 1978), 259-6<>. For other English versions of this

passage see Andrey Beily, St. Petersburg, introduced by George Reavey and trans. John Courno~ (New York: Grove, 1959), 250-51; and Andrei Bcly, Prtrrsb11rx, trans., annotated and introduced by Robert A. Maguire and John Malrnstad (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978), 226-27.

39 Tom Gunning has kindly drawn my attention to the precinematic series of comic strips, Little Sammy Sneeze, as a possible source and an evident parallel to the film -as well as to other comic cartoons dealing with exploding characters. Sneezing (found in a number of similar films) was just one motif of those clustering around the figure of exploding man in early cinema. A Giant Hiccup (Riesenschlucker, 1909?), while it does not actually throw the character into the air, is a grotesque "scare-it­away" film in which a cannon is finally brought into the poor man's room. In more serious, realistic films the themes nearest to this were those of anarchists and bombs. As for Bely, apart from the cinematic source already mentioned, the exploding hero also alluded to the fable in which the frog wanted to become bigger than the bull, and to Dostoyevsky's idea that revolutionary thought is a mental disease that turns the fanatic's brain into ever-expanding matter. Roman Timenchik has suggested to me that a possible source for Bely's Petersburg was G. K. Chesterton's novel, The Man W1ro Was Thursday, which contains an image of a terrorist as a person whose skull is filled with dynamite.

40 Bcly, Petersburg, 259·

Gunf\1~ \am.""The. W'na\e.lowns Go..wKi03: Eo..r\j Cne.Mo.. a.rd. +he.. \Ji s.uo..\ Cx?e, ... ~~f\c.e.. ~ Y\ad.e.mi~~~~ 'idJrl:S"ou:(f'o..\ ~ G-i-\iG\.SM /. 'l.

(ro.l\ l<\qJ..t'): \1lq- 'Z_o\.

188 TIIF. YALF. JOURNAL OF CRITICISM

Tom Gumzing

The Whole Town's Gawking: Early Cinema and the Visual Experience of Modernity

From my perspective, the essential gesture of the recent reexamination

of the history of early film lies in a rejection oflinear models. Rejecting

biological schema of infancy and maturity that were abandoned long

ago in the histories of other art forms, researchers av~ided viewing

cinema's first decades as embryonic forms oflater practkes or stuttering attempts at later achievements. Instead of a linear and organic model of

development, a jagged rhythm of competing practices emerged, prac­

tices whose modes and models were not necessarily sketches or approx­

imations of later cinema. Instead of continuity we discover difference,

and rather than organic development, a series of contrasting concep­

tualizations of cinema's social role, mode of exhibition, and method of address.'

While reviewing all this may seem like beating a dead horse or self­

congratulation for victories easily won over naive and nontheorized

assumptions, I want to emphasize the key role narrative played in the

earlier linear conception of cinema's history. Its assumptions were per­

suasive partly because they offered a simple narrative of a cryptobiolog­

ical teleology. But the telos to be achieved-the climax of the story­

lay precisely in cinema's mastery of narrative form, the ability of cin­

ematic devices to convey narrative information and perform narrative

functions. A surprisingly candid laying out of this assumption (and a

consequent devaluing of the work of early filmmakers) can be found in

Rachel Low and Roger Manvell's first volume of The History of the

Britislz Film, J896-1go6:

In the history of the film one has a unique opportunity to trace the steps by which the elementary technique of a new :~rt force$ itself upon its unprepared exponents. The film mnnufacturers, as they stumbled inevitably on the devices proper to the telling of a story or an idea. by means of a celluloid film, almost all misunderstood and misused their discoveries, and exploited as tricks and theatrical effects what should in fact have been integral elements of a new medium. 2

Th~ Yal~Journal ofCriticism, volume 7, number 2, © 1994 by Yale University. Published by Blackwell Publishers, 23R Main Stre-et, Cambridge. MA 02142, and roS Cowley Road, Oxford, OX4 rJF. UK.

TOM CUNNING 189

Low and Manvell not only assume an "inevitable" teleology to the "proper" development of the cinema, they claim most early filmmakers somehow deviated from the proper growth chart of the young art form. The careful attention given to early cinema in this pioneering volume actually complicates its linear assumptions and transforms an inevitable progress into an erring pathway. Aware of the actual variety of early film practices, Low and Manvell find moments in early cinema that throw obstacles in the course of its proper maturation. Since these don't fit into the linear narrative, they are described as inappropriate errors.

It was precisely these "errors" that fascinated me as I began to study early cinema and that led me not only to diverge from the model of linear progression but also to question the hegemony of storytelling as the guiding telos of film history. This is the context for my (along with Andre Gaudreault's) characterization of early cinema as a "cinema of attractions. "3 Attractions could be opposed to narrative construction in a number of ways. First, attractions address the viewer directly, solic­iting attention and curiosity through acts of display. As moments of spectacle, their purpose lies in the attention they draw to themselves, · rather than in developing the basic donnees of narrative: characterization (motives and psychology); causality (or the causal concatenation of actions, which Roland Barthes calls the proairetic); narrative suspense (spectator involvement with the outcome of events, which Barthes calls the chain of enigmas); or the creation of a consistent fictional world

(the diegesis of classical film semiotics). As Low and Manvell observe rather perceptively, early filmmakers

employ cinematic devices "improperly" from a narrative point of view, as "tricks and theatrical effects" -attractions-rather than devices inte­gral to storytelling. Attractions are temporally punctual as opposed to the extended uses of time required for narrative. And rather than cre­ating the imaginary constructs needed for a diegetic presentation of action, attractions openly acknowledge their own process of display and the viewer's role as an "outside observer." The viewer of attractions is positioned less as a spectator-in-the-text, absorbed into a fictional world, than as a gawker who stands alongside, held for the moment

by curiosity or amazement. To cite a famous example, whereas the close-up appears within linear

film history as the narrative device par excellence (used to accent an important narrative detail or reveal a character's reaction through facial expression), in early cinema the close-up more often functions as a moment of visual display, a way of attracting attention to a trick or a grotesque (rather than characterizing) facial expression. The 1906 Hep­worth catalogue description of the film Comic Grimacer (ca. 1901) clearly

1!/0 TilE YALE JOURNAL OF CRITICISM

describes the close-up as an attraction: "A human face shown the full size of the screen is always a comic and interesting sight."~ Advertising the attraction of this film, the film company emphasizes things a nar­rative film would strive to conceal-the distortion of the enlargement and the actual medium of display (the screen)-in order to arouse and satisfy a viewer's acknowledged curiosity and amusement. Rather than a story, a diegesis, or a characte!, the film manufacturer offers "a comic and interesting sight," an attraction boldly offered to viewers. We are clearly in a different world from that of the enraptured absorption produced by a close-up of Lillian Gish as the anguished Anna Moore of Way Down East.

As with any historical schema, the idea of a cinema .of attractions can oversimplify and obscure as much as it illuminatt·s if uscd without careful textual analysis. While I define attractions in opposition to nar­rative structure, in acrual practice these two different modes of spectator address often interact within a single film. Although theoretically dif­ferentiated, in the processes of actual texts they struggle with each other and this interplay frequently creates the most interesting aspects of early films. Theoretically I conceive of every text as a process in which different schema of organization jostle each other. Following the dynamic understanding of texts proposed by the Russian Formalists, I see attractions serving as a domi11a11t in most early films (before approx­imately 1907), rather than as the only aspect operating within early cinema. 5

There arc some early films (such as the facial close-ups) that are basically pure attractions. And there are others, such as the Passion play films, in which narrative plays a key (although possibly not a dominant) role. In addition, attractions form a fundamental mode of visual address and appear in periods other than early cinema. Certain genres, such as pornography, musical comedies, or newsreels, remain closely tied to the methods of the cinema of attractions throughout cinema history. Likewise, the concept of attractions allows us to look at even classical Hollywood cinema as a dynamic process. While narrative serves as the dominant which integrates the various elements of the classical Holly­wood film, attractions persist in the interaction between spectacle and n:nrativc so frequently observed in Hollywood genres. Perhaps even the close-up of Lillian Gish in Way Dow11 East retains something of an attraction beneath its clear narrative function.

For my continued writing and research in early cinema, however, the attraction serves not only as a cornerstone of formal analysis but as a window that opens up the study of the origins of cinema to broader cultural dimensions. The concept of the attraction is fruitful largely

TOM GUNNING 191

because it directs attention away from early films as archival fragments and focuses on the way these films imply a spectator and a mode of reception. While formal analysis may only reveal an implied spectator (the receiver of the many nods, glances, and gestures directed at the camera in early cinema), further research gives that implied spectator an historical place. Catalogue descriptions and trade journals (such as the Hepworth catalogue quoted above) at least give a sense of intended reception. Research into the actual modes of exhibition, particularly the pioneering work of Charles Musser, fleshes out the actual encounters between viewers and films. These sources show the mode of attractions at work in the reception of early cinema. Catalogues hawk numerous films as offering attractions rather than providing narrative absorption. And the modes of early film exhibition, while covering an enormous range of methods, contrast with later methods precisely by emphasizing the actual gesture of display. The presence of a showman and often a lecturer presenting the spectacle to the audience continues the tradition of highly conscious exhibition found in fairgrounds and expositions, as opposed to the seamless creation of a fictional world delivered by the realist novel or naturalist theater. While these lecture presentations may often aspire (as Musser's research has shown) to an involving narrative, the consistent role of lecturer as mediator between audience and images, as the presenter of the films, does not allow the viewers to forget their presence as addressees positioned before a series of images on display; they are not the invisible, bodiless voyeurs of classical narrative cinema.

While the concept of attractions inevitably leads us to the modes of reception and exhibition of early cinema, it has even wider applications. Investigating the cinema of attractions illuminates the changes in envi­ronment brought about by the growth of capitalism in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and its consequent technological transfor­mations of daily life. It seems to me that attractions provide a key concept for exploring what a primarily German tradition describes as "modernity. "6 While the changes produced by modernity have been analyzed by scholars reaching from Weber and Durkheim to Jiirgen Habermas, the lineage outlined by David Frisby of George Simmel, Siegfried Kracauer, and Walter Benjamin converges with startling clarity on the emergence of cinema-and not simply because Kracauer and Benjamin produced major works dealing with film. The investigation of early cinema in relation to this tradition has already been approached, not only by some of my essays but also with great insight by the work of such scholars as Miriam Hansen, Jonathan Crary, Giuliana Bruno, Ben Singer, and, .most recently, Ann Friedberg in her book Window

Shoppin~. 7

IS/2 TilE YALE JOURNAL OF CRITICISM

;7

·i

For these authors (as well as others), Baudelaire's essay, "The Painter of Modern Life." remains not on) y a source for the concept of modernity but one of its definitive statements. The motifs of modernity that Baudelaire sets out-"thc ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingcnt"~­evoke the discontinuous and punctual temporality of the attraction: something that appears, attracts attention, and then disappears without either developing a narrative trajectory or a coherent diegetic world. Attractions work by interruption. and constant change rather.than steady development. Baudelaire describes the essential figure of modernity, the urban man of the crowd, as "a passionate spectator. "9 His description not only captures the essentially visual nature of all that attracts the modern urban spectator's curiosity, but it uses metaphors that seem to anticipate the apparatus of tht· cinema itsdf:

Or we might liken him to a mirror as vast as the crowd itself; or to a kaleidoscope gifted with consciousness, responding to each one of its move­ments and reproducing the multiplicity· of life aJ)d the flickering grace of all the elements of life. He is an "!" with an insatiable appetite for the "non­!", at every instant rendering and explaining it in pictures more living than life itself ·which is always unstable and fugitive. 10

Not only docs Baudelaire imagine a picture-taking capability able to match the fugitive and accelerated tempo of modern life, he also antic­ipates one of the first attractions of early cinema, the crowd scene or "effet des foules," which Louis Lumicrc cited as perhaps the finest spectacle the cincmatographc could manage. 11

If the experience of modernity finds its lows classiws in big city streets and their crowds, the unique stimulus offered by this new environment discovers its aesthetic form in attractions. The very term indicates the need to attract attention in an atmosphere in which the contemplative absorption associated with traditional artworks has become anachronis­tic. The attraction appears against a background of distraction, a force field of multiple and fast-paced sensations. Attractions express the fugi­tive nature of modem life, with their brief form and lack of narrative development, as well as their aggressivity. Benjamin, extending Bau­delaire's notion of urban modernity, t•mphasized the con~tant experience of shock, the sudden eruption of the unpredictable as one navigated the city streets. 12 Attractions both mime and compete with the succession of shocks and distractions of modernity through an equally aggressive purchase on the spectator. Sergei Eisenstein, who first poached the term "attractions" from both the realm of science and the fairground, defined it in aesthetic terms as any aggressive element that "subjects the spec­tator to a sensual or psychological impact. " 1.\ But the punctual tcmpor-

TOM GUNNING I 93

ality and shocklike nature of the attraction provide only one link between the aesthetic of attractions and modernity.

Attractions do more than reflect modernity; they provide one of its methods. The need to draw a gawker's attention-to make one stop and stare-reflects not only the ebb and flow of the distracted urban crowd but also a new culture of consumption which arouses desire through an aggressive visuality. In this sense, the prehistory of the cinema of attractions need not be restricted to the apparatuses that led to the kinetoscope or cinematographe. Instead, cinema appears within a modern channeling of visuality towards the production of desire essential for the creation of a consumer culture. 14 We recognize here at least some of the central topoi of modernity outlined by Walter Benjamin as he approached his grand explication of modernity, the PassaRrii­Werk.1s Uesides the arcades themselves, attractions appear in the other devices of display thrown up by a developing consumer culture. World fairs, the department store (and its shop windows), the billboard, and the amusement park all exploited visual attractions, creating the context in which early cinema shaped itsel(

As Friedberg points out (extending Benjamin), the gaze directed at the desire-provoking commodity produces the ultimate example of Marx's commodity fetish, in which attractiveness overruns use value. 16

The cinema of attractions develops out of a visual culture obsessed with creating and circulating a series of visual experiences to stimulate con­sumption. These attractions, however, do not simply arouse desire for commodities, but paradoxically begin to serve as ends in themselves, doses of scopic pleasure tailored to the nervous pace of modem urban reality. Attractions trace out the visual topology of modernity: a visual environment which is fragmented and atomized; a gaze which, rather than resting on a landscape in contemplation, seems to be pushed and pulled in conflicting orientations, hurried and intensified, and therefore less coherent or anchored.

The variety of factors that converge to create an emerging culture of consumption affect the appearance of attractions as both a form of entertainment and a means of promoting consumption. Both mass production and a mass of consumers call for strategies for arousing a mass desire for commodities. In the United States the figure of Phineas T. Uarnum looms as an important point of origin, not only for the perfection of ballyhoo as a way to attract the attention of the crowd, but for creating a mixture of skepticism and credulity that defines a particularly modern reception for the exotic fragments his museum (and later his circus) displayed. 17 If the attraction also announces the growth of modern advertising (and here I feel as much attention should be paid

194 THE YALE JOURNAL OF CRITICISM

to the phenomenon of the billboard as to the magazine copy and illus­tration that have dominated most histories of advertising), Barnum also shows the thin line that exists between attractions as a means to an end (the purchase of a commodity) and attractions as an end in themselves (entertainment).

While we can trace this interplay within show business itself through the variety of attraction-based forms of amusement-circus, fair­ground, amusement park, and "vaudeville-it can also be found in businesses whose products were mass produced. The department store and the world's fair introduce a form of consumption via attractions that Friedberg appropriately calls "window shopping." Rosalind Wil­liams, in her book Dream Worlds, describes department stores as "places where consumers arc an audil·nn· to bc l'lllcrtaincd by rommoditics, where selling is mingled with amusement, where arousal of free-floating desire is as important as immediate purchase of particular items. " 18

Commercial displays as attractions created a. visual fascination that enwrapped the consumer in the spell of the commodity, through its novelty and attractiveness. Georg Simmel observed that the world expositions displayed the latest technology and commodities with a "wealth and colorfulness of overhastened impressions,·· separate from any opportunity of purchase. •~ In department stores and expositions, items were presented in a manner that constructed a gawking consumer, as the commodity in massed variety became a form of entertainment.

Such an extension of the concept of attractions could imperil the specificity (and hence the usefulness) of the term, however. Attractions should not simply evaporate into a synonym for modern society's obsession with the visual or the rise of a culture of desire motivated by the growth of mass consumption. Rather, as in the study of early cinema, the term will prove useful as a tool of analysis for the investi­gation of these topoi of modernity. As in textual analysis, we are dealing here not only with equivalences and interpretations, but with actual intersections among the diverse manifestations of modernity.

Early cinema, for instance, plays an important role in the four topoi I mentioned: the billboard, the world's fair, the department store, and the amusement park. Soon after the premiere of animatl•d photography as a form of scientific entertainment, nwtion pictures were projected onto billboards in key urban locations to hawk commodities in a striking and novel way, based on earlier uses of magic lantems. 20 The world's fairs from the nineties onward displayed cinematic and protocinematic devices, both as examples of new technology and as attractions for visitors, with fairs premiering a variety of novel uses of the new medium (from the kinetoscopc scheduled to appear at the Chicago Exposition

TOM GUNNING 195

in 1893, to the Cineorama at the Paris Exposition in 1900, to the Hale's Tours at the St. Louis Fair in 1904). 21 Cinema intersects with the depart­ment store in a number of ways, one of the most curious being the establishment, early in the century, of film theaters within the great Parisian department store Dufayel at which women shoppers could park their children while they shopped. 22 And not only were film shows a continuous attraction at Coney Island and other amusement parks at the turn of century, providing one of the first stable venues for film exhibition, but the parks themselves served as subjects for actualities and settings for the emerging story films. 23

I cite these encounters between cinema and other attraction-based systems of display not merely as a list of historical facts, but as complex areas for investigation. Such intersections (and there are many others -for instance, the wax museum, the city street, the tourist lecture, the illustrated press, theatrical sensation dramas, and spectacles based on magical illusions, as well as the theatrical use and display of a host "sister technologies" such as the telephone and the X-ray) provide the researcher not only with examples but with systems of meaning that must be read and investigated as carefully as any other text. Here again, Benjamin, Simmel, and Kracauer not only point out areas for scholar­ship but provide a method. These scholars manque (none of whom ever really achieved a long-lasting academic position) challenge us to investigate the phenomena of modem life in their complex and fugitive aspects, tracing patterns that acknowledge their ephemerality and contingency-in short, their modernity.

But ifl propose attractions as a tool for the investigation of modernity, one based on a model of a dynamic textual analysis, attractions must not be conceived simply as formal elements whose basic contours can be traced across a number of other cultural artifacts. The attraction in film consists of a specific relation between viewer and film that reveals aspects of the experience of modernity. While this experience of visual attraction plays a fundamental role in the phantasmagoria of commod­ities, its exploration may also allow us to uncover a realm of modem experience otherwise elusive. The shock and discontinuous time that attractions share with the experience of modernity as analyzed by Ben­jamin deserve to be unfolded as realms of experience that do more than simply support the process of commodity consumption.

The cinema of attractions, as is most immediately evident in the genre of the trick or magic films, provides a rich realm of fantasy beyond its miming of the drama of the fascination and mystification of commod­ities that magic film's endless series of substitutions seems to reflect. We need to investigate these scenarios of attraction not only as reflec-

191i Tl!E YAl.F. JOURNAL OF CRITICISM

tions of what we already know about the culture of consumption, but for what they can reveal about the experience of modernity that has not yet come to the surface. If an era of purported post modernity provides a new vantage point from which to observe the origins of the modern environment, we must not limit ourselves to the self-righteous pleasures of unmasking historical deceptions. Attractions also reveal those aspects of modernity-utopian, uncanny, or fantastic-that tend to remain repressed or were curtailed, and that constitute the forgotten future of our recent past.

Historical investigations of experiences contained in complex texts should not be limited by condescending assumptions about encounters between the emerging conditions of modernity and. its original wit­nesses. Janet Staiger, in her rt•rcnt book on film ren·ption, lJUite properly questions whether a 1905 viewer of a film like Biograph's Interior N.Y.

Subway, 14th Street to 4211d Street might be able to experience the shifting depth cues, the play with two and· three dimensions that this trip through the Manhattan subway tunnels provides, in the same ways as would a contemporary viewer famili_arized with modernist art and rep­resentation.2~ While it is important to raise such questions rather than base interpretations on current horizons of reception and viewing habits, it is equally important not to discount the complt·x experience that attractions-based films offered to their original audiences. There is a great deal of evidence that early train films similar to the Biograph subway film did, in tact, provide complex visual experiences for tum­of-the-century spectators. The evidence for this is particularly strong for films shot from trains going through tunnels. which provided a rapid transformation of space and vision.

I will explore two examples. First, a quote I cited a decade ago (but which merits being raised again and unpacked further), from the New

York Mail arrd Express's September 25, I 897 review of the Biograph program that featured a film made from the front of a locomotive traveling through the Haverstraw tunnel:

The \vay in which the unseen energy swallows up space and flings itself into the distance is as mysterious and impressive as an allegory. A sensation is produced akin to that which Poe in his "Fall of thc I louse- of Ushe-r." relates was communicated to him by his doomed companion when he sketched the shaft in the heart of the earth, with an unearthly radiance thrilling through it. One holds his breath instinctively as he is swept along in the rush of phantom cars. His attention is held almost with the vise of fate. 25

This instance of reception hardly views this film as a simple simulacrum of everyday experience. Not only docs this journalist evoke a pro-

TOM GUNNING 197

foundly uncanny experience of the film's portrayal of movement and space through a dialectic of the seen and the unseen, he describes a magnetic channeling of his attention. Perhaps most complexly, he seeks to understand his sensations through a literary reference, the painting produced by Roderick Usher in Poe's tale.

This reference is worth lingering over. The reviewer explains his new experience of the representation of movement and space by turning to the writer that Baudelaire greeted with a shock of recognition, the writer whose "Man of the Crowd" offered Benjamin insight into the visual nature of the metropolis and whose Roderick Usher provided the pro­totype of the sufferer from neurasthenia, the archetypal modern malady. The painting described in Poe's text is a fascinating example of ekplzrasis,

the literary trope of describing in words a purely visual work of art. And Poe's description takes this trope to the limits of visuality, invoking a sort of abstraction that anticipates later modernist experiments in painting.

A small picture presented the interior of an immensely long and rectangular vault or tunnel, with low walls, smooth, white; and without interruption or device. Certain accessory points of the design served well to convey the idea that this excavation lay at an exceeding depth below the surface of the earth. No outlet was observed in any portion of its vast extent, and no torch, or other artificial source of light, was discernable; yet a Rood of intense rays rolled throughout, and bathed the whole in a ghastly and inappropriate splendour. 26

This image of splendid isolation, of a hermetic and nearly autonomous work of art, sublimely expresses the psyche of Roderick Usher, whose protosymbolist hypersensitivity houses itself within an illuminated tomb rather than an ivory tower. Yet the image's uncanny sense of titanic construction, its violating of the bowels of the earth with the geometry of man, and its praeternatural illumination recalls for this 1897 reviewer less the myths of infernal reaches than the triumphs of technology and the new experience of locomotion portrayed by the latest novelty of motion pictures. While a complete explication of this nearly hieroglyphic reception of an attraction is not possible here, I believe it shows the complex associations the new experience of cinema could provoke. A psychoanalytic dimension intersects with a new dream world of technology and a new conception of space and time­all within an experience of visual fascination, which holds attention like the grip of fate. Whatever else it may express, this reception shows how such novel visual experiences pushed viewers to new thresholds of perception encountering the limits of representation.

My second example comes from the 1902 Edison Film Catalogue, which

198 THE YALE JOURNAL OF CRITICISM

offered new films for purchase to exhibitors. This example also describes a film shot from a train as it enters a tunnel, Rrmnin.e tlrror~~h Gallitzer, Pemrsylvania RR. As a catalogue description, it indicated to potential buyers something of the experience the film would provide for audiences. Written five years after the New York Mail review, this description lacks the astonishment at novelty found there, but still conveys a complex experience outside the protocpls of narrative.

We overtake a freight train as we approach the tunnel. The track curves and we see a cavern in the hillside. An eye-wink and we're in the tunnel. As we become adjusted to the gloom, we see an EYE far ahead, a half closed eye, growing larger and larger as we approach. It glistens on con­verging rails; it grows larger; it grows brighter. We see a delicate picture outlined in that tiny $pace: a picturc of a ~tat ion. of towcrin~~: hriRht trcc~. shining mc.-adows, and Sll(hknly wc'rl' right in th(· midst of it all, the tree clad slopes that make famous the scenery all along the Pennsylvania R. R. 27

Although this response does not employ the. cultural references found in the 1897 review, it calls up almost surreal imagery· to evoke an experience that challenges conventional representations of space, move­ment, and framing. The relentless approach towards a half-opened eye, which becomes the frame of a picture and finally the portal to a famous landscape, presents a visual experience rich with surprise, transforma­tion, and fantasy. An eye looks back at us, images a scene, and then dissolves as we penetrate it. This description shuttles along a course of metaphors, tracing a tum-of-the-century film experience alive to a vari­ety of visual pleasures and spatial and representational ambiguities­without having taken a course in high modernism or seen films by Ernie Gehr or Luis 13uiiuel.

The complex experience of the cinema of attractions returns one to a fresh encounter with a new visual reality, one whose imbrication with (and exploitation by) an emerging consumer culture does not reduce its fascinating and even liberating possibilities. If the concept of attractions reveals a common seedbed for both the experience of modernity and aspects of the aesthetic of modernism, this in itself should indicate its potential value for our understanding of our own cultural history. An aesthetic of attractions undermines the historical dichotomy ofhi~h and popular art on which much of the canonical understanding of modern art is based. One can see certain aspects of modern ·art reasserting the prima<:y of contemplation over the dispersed attractions of the modem environment. But more than complicating the genealogy of modem art by capturing the way popular culture reflected modern experience, investigating attractions also allows us to glimpse an experience that was perhaps never fully realized in either a popular culture under the

TOM GUNNING I 99

domination of consumer capitalism or the aesthetic of a contemplative modernism that tried to flee from its consequences and conditions.

Notes

1 Key overviews in the recent reshaping of the history of early film (avoiding for the moment works centered on individual filmmakers) include: Eileen Bowser, Tht Transformation of Cinema, 1907-1915 (New York: Scribners, 1990); Noel Burch, Lift to T/Jose Slrodows (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991); Paolo Cherchi Usai, Una Passione In.fiammabile: Gr1ida alTo studio del cinema muto (Torino: Utet Libreria, 1991); Miriam Hansen, Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991); Charles Musser, Tht Emergence of Cinema: The American Scretn to 1907 (New York: Scribners, 1990); Emmanuelle Toulet, Cinematographt invention du siecle (Paris: Gallimard, 1988). Anthologies of recent work on eorly cinemo include: Thomos Els2esser, Et~rly Cintma: Spau­!'rtJmt-Norrative (London: British Film Institute:, 1991); ltoland CoS2ndey, Andr~ Gaudreault, and Tom Gunning, eds., Une lnrwllion du Viable? Cinema des premiers temps et religion (Lausanne: Editions Payot, 1992); John Fell, ed., Film &fore Griffith (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983); Pierre Guibbert, ed., Lts premiers ans du cinrma Fra11cais (Pcrpignon: Institute Jean Vigo, 1985); and Andre Gaudreault, ed., Ce qr1e je vois dans mon cine? (Paris: Meridiens Klincksieck, 1988). Special issues of film journals devoted to early cinema include Les Cahiers dt Ia Cinematheque (Winter 1979); Iris 2.1 (1984) and II (Summer 1990); Persistence of Vision 9 (1991); and L'Avant scme Cinema (November 1984). The film journals 1895, Griffithiana, and Film History regubrly publish articles on early film history.

2 Rachel Low and Roger Manvell, The History of Britislr Film, 1896-1906 (London: Allen and Unwin, 1948), 43· Gaudreault and I first introduced the term "cinema of attractions" at the 1985 Col­loquium on Film History at Cerisy. This intervention has been published as "Le cinema des premier temps: un defi a histoire du film?" in Histoirt du Cinema: Nor1vtllts Approches, ed. Jacques Aumont, Andre Gaudreault, and Michel Marie (Paris: Publi­cations de Ia Sorbonne, 1989). I have tried to define the term in the essay "The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant-Garde" included in the Elsaesser anthology cited above, and more recently in "Now You See It, Now You Don't: The Temporality of the Cinema of Attractions," Tht Velvet Light Trap

(November 1993). 4 Hepworth catalogue quoted in Low and 'Man veil, History, 76. 5 The concept of the dominant comes from the Russian Formalists. For good sum­

maries see Victor Erlich, Russian Formalism: History-Doctrine (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), 212-233; and Peter Steiner, Russian Formalism: A Mttapottics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984), 76-77, 104-106. Kristin Thompson has used the concept in a number of fruitful ways in film arialysis in Breaking the Glass Armor: Neoformalist Film Analysis (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), 43-45, 89-

13 I. r, The concept of modernity has been widely discussed in a number of contexts. A

gooJ introJuction to the German traJition I refer to here: is David Frisby, Fragments of Modemity: Theories of Modernity in tire Work of Simmel, Kracauer and Bf!'lljamin

(Cambridge: MIT Press, 1986). 7 For Hansen, see not only Babel and Babylon cited above, but her series of articles on

Benjamin, Kracauer and Adorno, including "Benjamin, Cinema and Experience: The Blue Flower in the Land of Technology," New German Critiqr1e 40 (Winter 1987); "Of Mice and Ducks: Benjamin and Adorno on Disney," South Atlantic Quarurly 92. 1 (Winter 1993); and "Decentric Perspectives: Kracauer's Early Writings on Film

200 TIIF. YALF. JOURNAL ()f CRITICISM

and Mass Culture," Nro• Gmnan Critique 54 (Fall 1991); Guiliana Bruno, Strmu•alkin)/ <'II a Rr1inrd Map: Tire City Film.< (I_( ElPira Notari (Princeton: Princeton Univ~r~ity Press, 1992); Anne Friedberg, B'ind<'w Slroppin.~: Cinrma atrd tire l'ostmodrm (lkrk~lcv: Unh·ersity of California Press. 199J);Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Obsm•er: On Vision and Mod!'Tnity in rlre Ninetrrntlr Crrrwry (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990); Uen Singer, "Modernity, Hyper-Stimulus and the Rise of Popular Sensationalism," in the very relevant anthology Cinmra and tire lrwention of Modern Life, ed. Leo Chamcy and Vanessa Schwartz (Berkeley: Uni,•ersity of California Press, forthcoming), which will include a number of other important essays by the above authors and others.

8 Charles Baudelaire, "The Painter of·Modem Life," in Tire Painter of Modern Life and Otl1er Essays, ed. and trans. Jonathan Mayne (London: Phaidon Press, 1963), 13.

9 Baudelaire, "Painter of Modem Life," 9.

10 Baudelaire, "Painter of Modem Life," 9-10. See also Baudelaire's prose poem "The Crowd" in Paris Spleen, trans. Louise Vart-se (New York: New Directions, 1947).

11 Louis Lumihe quoted in Jacques Andre and Marie Andre, Une Saison Lr1mirrr a Montpelleir (Perpignon: Institute Jean Vigo. 19R7), 64.

12 Wahcr ll<'njamin, "Smn<' Mol if• in ll>n<I<'J.ir<'," in C:/r,rr/r• /1,,,,/rf,rirr: II l.)'rir l'••rt in rlu lira ••f 1/(clr C<Jpitalism, I ram. Harry Zohn (LonJon: New Left Uooks, 1973), 109-154·

13 Sergei Eisenstein, "The Montage of Attractions," trans. Daniel Gerould, The Drama Rt••ieu• 18.1 (March 1974): 78.

14 Consumer culture is an aspect of film history that a variety of scholars have recently in\·estigated. The social historian William Leach has provided an important account of consumer culture in Land of Desire: llfi'Tclrant.<, Poll'er and the Rise (I_( a Nru• American Cl1/turc (New York: Pantheon, 1993), especially 39-70.

15 Benjamin, "Paris. Capital of the Nineteenth Century." in Charlrs n.wdrlairr, I 57-176.

16 Friedberg, Window Slroppin.~, 53-59. 17 The method of Barnum is brillantly laid out by Neil Harris in H11mb11g: The Art (I_(

P. T. Barnum (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973). 18 Rosalind H. Williams, Dream Worlds: ,\foss Comrtmption in Late Ninrtrrntlr-Crntrlry

Frarrce (Berkeley: University of California Prcss, 19R2), 67. 19 Simmcl quoted in Frisby, Fragnrrrrts (I_( Modernity, 94. 20 On billboard movies see Musser, Tire EmerJ!rnce ofCirrema, 169-170. 21 The most thorough treatment of cinema at a world exposition is Emmanuel Toulet's

"Le Cinema a !'Exposition Uoiversclle de 1900," Rn•r1e d'Histoirr modemr et contrm­poraine 33 (April-June 1986), translated in Persistence of Vision 9 (1991).

22 Dufayel's role in the exhibition of films is described in Jacques Deslandes and Jacques Richard, Histoirt comparee du cinema, vol. 2, Dr1 cincmatographr ar1 cirrcma, 1896-1906 (Paris: Casterman, 1968), 16-17, 28.

23 The cinema in relation to the amusement park is described in Musser, The Emergmce ofCirrema, 128, 133, 166, 199, 374, 429-30; and in Lauren Rabinovitz, "The Temp­tations of Pleasure: Nickelodeons, Amusement Parks, and the Sights of Female Sexuality," Camera Obse~~ra 23 (May 1990).

24 Janet Staiger, Irrtrrprrtirr.~ Films: Studirs in tlrr Hi.<toricnl Reception of i\mericnn Cinema (Princeton: Princeton University Pre~~. 1992). 122.

25 This review is reprinted in K~mp 1'. Niv<'r, l!i·~~r"l''' l!ulfrtill.<, rSo6-roo.~ (Ln• AnR<'­Ies: Locare Research Group, 1971), 2H-29.

26 Edgar Poe, "The Fall of the House of Usher," in Po~try arrd Tales (New York: Library of America, 1984), 325.

27 1902 Edisorr Film Catalogue, 109, in Charles Musser, et al., Motiorr Pict11re CattJlogs by Am<'Tican Prodl4rers and DistributM5, 1894-1908, A Microfomr Editiorr (Frederick, Md.: University Publications of America, 1985).

TOM GUNNING 201

THE FILM STUDIES

READER

Edited by

Joanne Hollows Senior Lecturer in Media and Cultural Studies,

Nottingham Trent University

Peter Hutchings Senior Lecturer in Film Studies, University of Northumbria

and

Mark Jancovich Director of the Institute of Film Studies, University of Nottingham

~ ARNOLD

A member of the Hodder Headline Group LONDON

Co-published in the United States of An:erica by Oxford University Press Inc., New York

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24 The cinema of attractions: early film, its spectator and the avant-garde

Tom Gunning

Writing in 1922, flushed with the excitement of seeing Abel Gance's La Roue, Femand Leger tried to define something of the radical possibilities of the cinema. The potential of the new art did not lie in 'imitating the movements of nature' or in 'the mistaken path' of its resemblance to theatre. Its unique power was a 'matter of making images seen' .1 It is precisely this harnessing of visibility, this act of showing and exhibition, which I feel cinema before 1906 displays most intensely. Its inspira­tion for the avant-garde of the early decades of this century needs to be re-explored.

Writings by the early modernists (Futurists, Dadaists and Surrealists) on the cinema follow a pattern similar to Leger: enthusiasm for this new medium and its possibilities, and disappointment at the way it has already developed, its enslave­ment to traditional art forms, particularly theatre and literature. This fascination with the potential of a medium (and the accompanying fantasy of rescuing the cinema from its enslavement to alien and passe forms) can be understood from a number of viewpoints. I want to use it to illuminate a topic I have also approached before, the strangely heterogeneous relation that film before 1906 (or so) bears to the films that follow, and the way a taking account of this heterogeneity signals a new conception of film history and film form. My work in this area has been pursued in collaboration with Andre Gaudreault.2

The history of early cinema, like the history of cinema generally, has been written and theorized under the hegemony of narrative films. Early film-makers like Smith, Melies and Porter have been studied primarily from the viewpoint of their contribu­tion to film as a storytelling medium, particularly the evolution of narrative editing. Although such approaches are not totally misguided, they are one-sided and poten­tially distort both the work of these film-makers and the actual forces shaping cinema before 1906. A few observations will indicate the way that early cinema was not dominated by the narrative impulse that later asserted its sway over the medium. First there is the extremely important role that actuality film plays in early film production. Investigation of the films copyrighted in the US shows that actuality films outnumbered fictional films untill906. 3 The Lumiere tradition of 'placing the world within one's reach' through travel films and topicals did not disappear with the exit of the Cinematographe from film production. But even within non-actuality filming- what has sometimes been referred to as the 'Melies tradition'- the role narrative plays is quite different from in traditional narrative film. ~lt~lies himself declared in discussing his working method:

As for the scenario, the 'fable,' or 'tale,' I only consider it at the end. I can state that the scenario constructed in this manner has no importance, since I use it merely as a pretext for the 'stage effects,' the 'tricks,' or for a nicely arranged tableau.4

Whatever differences one might find between Lumiere and Melies, they should not represent the opposition between narrative and non-narrative film-making, at least

162 Tom Gunning

as it is understood today. Rather, one can unite them in a conception that sees cinelllii less as a way of telling stories than as a way of presenting a series of views to an audi. ence, fascinating because of their illusory power (whether the realistic illusion J motion offered to the first audiences by Lumiere, or the magical illusion concocted by Melies), and exoticism. In other words, I believe that the relation to the spectator set up by the films of both Lumiere and Melies (and many other film-makers before 1906) had a common basis, and one that differs from the primary spectator relations set up by narrative film after 1906. I will call this earlier conception of cinema, 'the cinema o attractions'. I believe that this conception dominates cinema until about 1906-7· Although different from the fascination in storytelling exploited by the cinema frolit the time of Griffith, it is not necessarily opposed to it. In fact the cinema of attractionS does not disappear with the dominance of narrative, but rather goes underground, both into certain avant-garde practices and as a component of narrative films, more evidert in some genres (e.g. the musical) than in others. ·~

What precisely is the cinema of attractions? First, it is a cinema that bases itself ori the quality that Leger celebratecl: its ability to show something. Contrasted to the voyeuristic aspect of narrative cinema analysed by Christian Metz,5 this is an exhi: bitionist cinema. An aspect of early cinema which I have written about in other artil' des is emblematic of this different relationship the cinema of attractions construca with its spectator: the recurring look at the camera by actors. This action, which if later perceived as spoiling the realistic illusions of the cinema, is here undertaketi· with brio, establishing contact with the audience. From comedians smirking at tli~:­camera, to the constant bowing and gesturing of the conjurors in magic films, this is-~-­a cinema that disp~a~s its visibi~ity, willing to rupture a self-e~closed fictional world: __ for a chance to sohc1t the attentiOn of the spectator. . >

Exhibitionism becomes literal in the series of erotic films which play an impor~ .: tant role in early film production (the same Pathe catalogue would advertise the , Passion Play along with 'scenes grivoises d' un caractere piquant', erotic films ofteri 1 including full nudity), also driven underground in later years. As No"il Burch has 't shown in his film Correction Please: How We Got into Pictures ( 1979), a film like~ The Bride Retires (France, 1902) reveals a fundamental conflict between this exhi- ~1 bitionistic tendency of early film and the creation of a fictional diegcsis. A woman -~ undresses for bed while her new husband peers at her from behind a screen. ~ However, it is to the camera and the audience that the bride addresses her erotic ,~ striptease, winking at us as she faces ~s. smiling in erotic display. [ ... ] ·1

Modes of exhibition in early cinema also reflect this lack of concern with creating ~ a self-sufficient narrative world upon the screen. As Charles Musser has shown,6 the -~ early showmen exhibitors exerted a great deal of control over the shows they -~ presented, actually re-editing the films they had purchased and supplying a series of ~ offscreen supplements, such as sound effects and spoken commentary. Perhaps ~1

' most extreme is the Hale's Tours, the largest chain of theatres exclusively showing ~

films before 1906. Not only did the films consist of non-narrative sequence's taken ,!_

from moving vehicles (usually trains), but the theatre itself was arranged as a train 1 car with a conductor who took tickets, and sound effects simulating the click-clack ~

1 of wheels and hiss of air brakes.7 Such viewing experiences relate more to the attrac- ~

tions of the fairground than to the traditions of the legitimate theatre. The relation ~--.·_· between films and the emergence of the great amusement parks, such as Coney ~