CINEMA OF ATTRACTIONS

Cinema Of Attractions

Cinema Of Attractions

As early cinema began, its fascination with the image itself is what Tom Gunning describes as the lead attribute towards his idea of the Cinema of Attractions. Many early filmmakers were still discovering the capabilities of film, aiding them in focusing on what they could show instead of what they could tell. The image itself represented more than the story behind it. This reasoning led Gunning to believe that film before 1906 had a different relationship with the audience, and to describe this early film with a term he coins as 'the Cinema of Attraction.' First, to define what Gunning refers to when he uses the term cinema of attractions. In his article 'The Cinema Of Attractions: Early Film, Its Spectator, and the Avant-Garde,' Gunning states, “it is a cinema that bases itself on the quality that Léger celebrated: its ability to show something,” (230). It directly interacts the viewers with the images they see, stimulating on a level that is purely exhibitionist. While narrative film aims to give the sense of being a voyeur to the unsuspecting characters, the cinema of attractions is aware of the audience, and in reply is creating images specifically for them to see.

Gunning further discusses the eye contact made by the camera and the actors, breaking down the 'realistic illusion' of the cinema (230). This eye contact with the camera gives the viewer the sense that they in turn are being watched by what they are watching, making them self aware as an audience. As for the 'realistic illusion', it is destroyed by the presentation of a character being conscious of the fact that there is an unseen viewer who is aware of their actions. As Gunning so eloquently articulates, “this is a cinema that displaces its visibility, willing to rupture a self enclosed fictional world for a chance to solicit the attention of the spectator,”(230). More simply put, it is the idea of having a moving image that interacts with a viewer in order to keep their focus on nothing other than the image they are being show. This is not to say that narrative films are entirely separate to the world of the cinema of attraction. On the contrary, narratives will often incorporate this form of cinema into their development. (Mitchell and Kenyon, 2006, 52-73)

However, since this method of cinema does tend to disrupt the realistic illusion created by the audience's lack of self-awareness, incorporating it usually has a result of slowing down the progression of the narrative. For example, Edwin Porter's The Great Train Robbery (US, 1903), incorporated a segment that portrayed a life size (or larger than life, depending on the size of the screen) image of an outlaw shooting a gun at the audience.

Gunning relates this shot to the stimulus one gets from being on a carnival ride (234). This 'life-size' bandit stares directly out at the audience, points his pistol at the screen, and shoots it to release a billow of ...