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THE CINEMA OF ATTRACTnONS RELOADEDEdited by Wanda StrauvenAmsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2006, 460 pp

t is rare enough for a critical slogan to gain the wide currency that Thm Gun-ning's "the cinema of attractions" has, but what is there to discuss further

about the idea, which Gunning has explained variously but always clearly? The

Cinema of Attractions Reloaded, or a third of it, seeks to answer that question.

Another third is a kind of intellectual archeology. The remainder is speculative

dilation and re-tasking of the concept.In 1982, four years before the "attractions" coinage, Gunning took his first

swipe at the idea with "The Non-Continuous Style of Early Film, 1900-1906" and

pursued it in "An Unseen Energy Swallows Space: The Space in Early Film andIts Relation to American Avant-Garde Film" (1983). Finally putting the phrase

into play with "The Cinema of Attraction: Early Cinema, Its Spectator, and the

Avant-Garde" (1986), Gunning saw it anthologized and gaining its plural "Attrac-

tions" in 1990 in Thomas Elsaesser's important anthology Early Cinema: Space

Frame Narrative.IThe back-story chronology is developed further in editor Wanda Strauven's

wonderfully wacky flow chart, embedded in her earnest introduction to Cinema

of Attractions Reloaded. Here in brief: "The Cinema of Attraction" (singular)

began as a conference paper in 1985, close by Andr6 Gaudreault's "Le cinema

des premier temps: un d6fi A l'histoire de cinema?" Gaudreault's lecture was

published, in Japanese, in the Tokyo journal Gendai Shiso. Just before this, Don-ald Grafton used the term "attraction" in a talk on slapstick comedy at MOMA

(Gunning was present). However, Grafton published his talk late enough (in

1987) to be quoting Gunning's 1986 essay as if it preceded his own use of theterm.

There were more "attractions" essays to come, with surprisingly few redun-dancies, up to as recently as 2005 when Gunning published "Cinema of Attrac-

tions" in Richard Abel's Encyclopedia of Early Cinema.2 The direct impact of

these texts is probably less remarkable than the career of the phrase "cinema of

attractions" itself, which persuades one that the explanatory aspects of a volume,even one as unwieldy as The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded, and as peculiarly

CANADIAN JOURNAL OF FILM STUDIES * REVUE CANADIENNE D'1TUDES CINAMATOGRAPHIQUESVOLUME 16 NO. 2 - FALL - AUTOMNE 2007 - pp 119-126

decorated as it is with a still from The Matrix, are to be welcomed. Gunning hasnever gathered his essays into a book of his own but prefers that readers con-tinue to dig them out from academic journals like Art & Text, Modernism/Moder-nity, and new-film-history organs Iris and Film History.3 In any case, by the1990s, "the cinema of attractions" had taken on a life of its own to become oneof those talismanic slogans anchoring innumerable and various articles and partsof books. It is a sign of the slogan's established relevance to undergraduateteaching that the 1999 edition of the standard Film Theory and Criticism includesGunning's 1989 "An Aesthetic of Astonishment."

There are perils attending all this. The most obvious is overuse. Repeatinga slogan eventually provokes irritation rather than insight. The other two dangersmirror one another: its meaning can become too widely diffused, or the conceptcan harden into dogma. Gunning devised the attractions model narrowly as aheuristic device in aid of cinema historiography. He has kept his own hand in toprotect his idea from dogmatic stiffening by writing on associated topics andfresh examples, including later speculations such as "Re-Newing Old Technolo-gies" (2003).1 That essay prompts Vivian Sobchak to spin out a fascinating Hei-deggerian speculation around slow motion in Zhang Yimou's Hero in her essay"Cutting to the Quick." This is in fact where the Reloaded volume concludes,aside from a useful "Dossier" collection of Gunning's previously publishedessays and some by his critics.

Naturally, Gunning can't do much about overuse of the term, except to rec-ognize that "cinema of attractions" now serves more purposes than he probablyanticipated. These purposes stem, on the one hand, from its becoming a key con-cept in the ever-widening so-called "modernity thesis" about silent cinema, andon the other, from the fact that contemporary CGI-driven popular cinema has,some have speculated, released "attractions" from the bonds of narrative in ourperiod of promiscuous intermedia attractions. The latter is a question to whichReloaded devotes no less than four chapters and its cover.

His original purpose, as Gunning explains in his contribution to Reloaded,"Attractions: How They Came into the World," was to devise a descriptive frame-work that early-film historians might use to identify, in positive terms, thearchival objects of their research, specifically, the movies made before 1906. Thiswas the era that orthodox film history dismissed as "primitive cinema." After amoment's excitement over the Lumieres' novelty, the received wisdom was thatearly movies quickly sank into lassitude awaiting the engine of film history toboot up and carry the medium toward a fully awakened narrative mobility andthence transport it to the Emerald City-or, better yet, Burbank, California.

The requirement for a more positive framework for comprehending cinema'sfirst era, which endures in a surprisingly robust and large archival remnant,meant effecting nothing less than a change in the common regard for these films'formal properties. Devising some account of early cinema that might sever it

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from the teleology of the filmmaking to come (against which they do look primi-tive) needed a heuristic to reveal its formal integrity as something else. Only thencould this remote period be made to stand out as more than the dim foyer of latergreatness, discrete in possessing a cinematic character all its own, and connectedto the consciousness that gave rise to it, and to which it in turn gave rise.

The new film historians of Gunning's generation in the late 1970s were pre-pared for their task by several factors: first, they had a marked suspicion of clas-sical narrative cinema, having been schooled in twenty years of cine-semioticsand the hermeneutics of suspicion. It was no longer possible to think that clas-sical narrative was the natural fit in defining the film medium. They recognizedthat to remake film history entailed recognizing a range of film forms that couldvariously lay claim to the history of the "cinematic." Each era deserved a critical

invention of a fresh analytical model to be regarded as a distinct and integralperiod. Another factor was the trend toward primary-document historicalresearch that focused on film archival collections that were then beginning to bescrutinized and pressed into service for a new style of film history. Early cinemaresearch in the late 1970s became the test case, and was then established as theexample of this trend. It was a measured reaction to a generation of grand theo-rizing. It was in accord with a slow-growing recognition that film study couldhouse historical scholarship. Charles Musser was already advancing the cause ashe developed toward Before the Nickelodeon (the 1982 archival film, followed bythe 1990 book), but something more than a precise antiquarian cinephilia wasneeded before the historical investigation could catch fire. The "cinema of attrac-tions" provided the spark.

In Gunning's case, the instruction he took at NYU and his experience as afilm viewer in New York were both crucial. As a student of Annette Michelson,

he had occasion to ponder Eisenstein's original consideration of "a montage ofattractions" simultaneously with Baudry's theory of the apparatus (a connectionconfirmed by Jacques Aumont's Montage Eisenstein). Gunning also grasped theimplications of a "non-narrative" and formally self-defining minority cinema asthey unfolded from an untypical (for most film historians) vantage throughencounters with the idiosyncratic rigor of experimental filmmakers such as ErnieGehr, Hollis Frampton and Ken Jacobs. These artists drew on their appreciativeregard for early cinema by making early film their "object matter." Jacobs's epicreconsideration of Billy Bitzer's 1903 Tom, Tom, the Piper's Son, Gehr's Eurekaand Frampton's Magellan drew together their own high formalism and the formaldifference of early cinema. Gunning's appreciation of their instruction appears inblack and white in almost every article on early cinema he wrote in the 1980s.In his contribution to Reloaded he mentions watching early films at MOMA inthe season before the crucial 1978 Brighton conference and that some of theseavant-garde filmmakers were in the audience and contributed to the discussions.Gunning regards them as key collaborators in framing the new research into

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early films and if he has never written at length on experimental films in con-nection with the cinema of attractions, just the juxtaposition of the two cinemasin his essays indicated that these two remote styles of non-classical narrative filmcould be secret sharers in what film is. The avant-garde provided Gunning witha model of a cinematic form that possessed its own formal integrity and its for-mal self-centeredness, suggesting how early cinema stood resistant, for a time,to the gravitational pull of classical narrativity.

Although his formation as a critic in some of these respects was unusualamong historians of early cinema, Gunning was by no means alone. Noel Burch,a frequent NYU visitor, remodeled 1930s Japanese cinema as a modernist praxis(in To the Distant Observer) and then channeled the "primitive" cinema throughthe theoretical terms of a Marxist neo-formalism of his own brewing (in Life toThose Shadows).' Another NYU professor, Jay Leyda-the translator and erstwhile

student of Eisenstein-at the very end of his life, was also pointing the way to theformal import of early film. Meanwhile, a young and extremely engaging Qu6b&cois graduate student working in Paris, Andr6 Gaudreault, was already movingin counterpoint to Gunning through his own studies in French narratology andfilm semiotics toward his fresh formal considerations of early cinema. It wasGaudreault's brief and incredibly fruitful collaboration with Gunning that led totheir formulations, at the 1978 Brighton congress, of the model on which Gun-ning would, a bit belatedly, slap the slogan "the cinema of attractions." But it was

Gaudreault who first systematically distinguished "narration" from "monstration,"a root distinction that Gunning would develop (adding his own sub-categoriesdealing with time, space, and viewer reception) and busily exemplify in his ownessays. At Brighton itself, the surviving international archive of early cinema wasscreened for an international crowd of film scholars, archivists and students.These included Gunning and Gaudreault in active roles. 6 It was the first time aclose examination of these films had occurred. At Brighton a new cinematic ter-rain was discovered that could be excavated as film's ancient ground.

To have condensed that complicated development into a short phrase in thefollowing decade was Gunning's career-making accomplishment. "The cinema ofattractions" provided the needed formal distinction, and a productive slogan andbanner. Gunning is a strong and original research scholar and a forceful andextremely smart critical writer. He saw the connections between early cinemaand Benjamin no less than he did early film and Eisenstein, and he was quick todiscern echoes of both in figures like Fernand L6ger commenting on Gance'sLa Roue in the months leading up to L1ger's and Dudley Murphy's Le balletm6canique. But what was accomplished? Well, what Gunning developed was aresonant descriptive framework that could cover the variety of tactics that earlyfilmmakers used and their audiences experienced. And that is basically a "sen-sation"-something that happens in a short span of film time that demonstratesthe capacities of the cinematic device in a forceful, novel and compressed way.

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Gunning's various essays provide a careful cataloguing of the variety of movesand implications of the "cinema of attractions" and the different ways the effectwas achieved. Gunning then generalized it as something modem, something thatrhymed with the novel sensationalism of modern urbanity, which formed themain staging area of the production and reception of early cinema.

It is this correlation of early film and modernity that lends Gunning's essaystheir theoretical suggestiveness. This is roughly the point at which Scott Bukat-man's "Spectacle, Attractions and Visual Pleasure" in Reloaded starts to elabo-rate on how Gunning's historical model displaced Mulvey's theoretical one.Bukatman explains Gunning's influence as a new emphasis on spectacle over theprevailing practice of narrative analysis. Mulvey had given spectacle (of thelooked-at woman) a crucial role, although in her argument, spectacle was almostalways contained by the patriarchal machinations of classical plotting. Startingfrom very different premises and historical zones, Wanda Strauven brings earlycinema and Marinetti's Futurism into alignment. Gunning's supposed histori-cist's alliance with "post-theory" was overrated and he was obviously open totheoretical suggestiveness and this eventually cast him (in the suspicious eyes ofDavid Bordwell, for example) as one of the "culturalist" successors of "grand the-ory," particularly through his use of Walter Benjamin. In the theorization of the"cinema of attractions" the attraction is readily conflatable with Benjamin's"shock" (versus immersion and contemplation), which Benjamin takes to becharacteristic of industrial media, and especially of film.

The tendency to define pre-1906 films as a non-narrative "cinema of attrac-tions" and the films that followed as a cinema of "narrative integration" eventuallyled some to ask whether that meant narrative was really and wholly meant to beexcluded from the "cinema of attractions." This problem is the basis of CharlesMusser's critique of Gunning included in the "Dossier" of formative essays andwhich Musser rehearses again in his new contribution to Reloaded. He arguesthat exhibition practices saw projectionists string together very short early filmsand were thus already creating narrative sequences from discrete pieces.! Thisexhibition logic led to a figure like Edwin S. Porter, a projectionist who becamea cameraman and a crucial transitional director around 1901-03, which is thestory-line of Musser's film Before the Nickelodeon. Of course, Burch, when writingon Porter, had already allowed that early filmmaking saw a contest betweenestablished narrative forms that were validated in bourgeois entertainment, andproletarian entertainment forms adapted from the fairground, circus and bur-lesque. These were combined in early cinema as a site where class dialectic wasbeing played out as a conflict of aesthetic forms.8 It was Gaudreault's andGunning's finer point that while early films did employ stories, they did not yetnarrate-they monstrated-and it is evident on the screen that even in story filmsthe devices of narration were eschewed in favour of showing and therefore, thedynamics of the attraction ruled over whatever mode or degree of story-telling

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existed. No one in this volume, or elsewhere, has really broken this significant, ifby no means all-encompassing, distinction of early cinema as a formal system allits own. Nor have they offered counter-examples or convincing counter-analysesof the films themselves.

Other critics have done greater damage to Gunning's theoretical correlationwith respect to the "modernity thesis." Gunning has treated it with considerablygreater caution than some of his readers who have taken up the idea of "cine-ma of attractions" as a symptom of modernity, but the claim is surely there inGunning that early cinema assumed the forms it did because it belonged to thenew experiences of modern urbanity. In his contribution to Reloaded, CharlieKeil recaps his critique published elsewhere as "From Here to Modernity"9 beforemoving on to more nuanced remarks. Keil's objection in his earlier essay isstronger than his corrections here: if the attractions model is linked to the sharp-ened experiences of modernity, how is it that early cinema after 1906 developedtoward narrative integration when, obviously, modernity did not change in thecharacter of its experiences? One of the problems with Reloaded is that onewould like to have Keil's tougher and more thoroughgoing critique here and notjust his next step in the debate, and the same goes for Gunning's sharpestresponse to Keil, found elsewhere in "Modernity and Cinema: A Culture ofShocks and Flows.""' For a book this big, it is a shortcoming that one still has togo to several other sources to get a sure grasp on the debates developed aroundthe core concept. One surely prefers those essays in this debate to Warren Buck-land's pedantic and unconvincing attempt at "A Rational Reconstruction of 'TheCinema of Attractions."' It is, therefore, good to have Musser's "Rethinking EarlyCinema" in the "Dossier" section, and even better to read the follow-up article"A Cinema of Contemplation" (which is a case study of how "attractions" gotstrung together in exhibition with greater coherence than Gunning allows for).

The correlation of film and modernity behind the "modernity thesis" doesnot hold up, critics like Keil suggest, because it leaves no room to explain devel-opments toward narrative-to which there are obvious and already known replies.The popularity of the first movies led to an industry that required a regularizedproduct, and fictions adapted from theatre and using its personnel moved film-making toward quasi-theatrical forms. There is also the ideological reply: that thebourgeoisie would sooner rather than later demand that movies be secured towhat they found aesthetically and politically comfortable. These seem to me tosuffice in explaining why "the cinema of attractions" disappeared. These argu-ments may not invalidate Gunning's correlation, but they do indicate that the

forms early filmmakers devised were not self-conscious or tied to aesthetic com-mitments; so they were never defended and simply fell by the wayside."

Nonetheless, that the cinema would become less modern as it maturedindustrially and formally is an old story, one that we find, for example, in LUger'sresponse to cinema (which Gunning is fond of citing). It is a story L6ger and the

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other members of the French avant-garde of the 1920s tell repeatedly with regret,

even if they do not tell it in an historian's way. (If they remembered their expe-

riences of early cinema in 1902 at all, they did not mention them in the 1920s.)Gunning has long made a generous space for that regret, and changes it into a

potentiality, suggesting that the avant-garde secretly holds on to the "cinema ofattractions," and that the early mode does not vanish but goes "underground."And it is not just the avant-garde: "attractions" are said to inform certain populargenres as well, such as the musical and the action film.

It is with respect to Gunning's barely hinted hypothesis of the endurance ofthe cinema of attractions (as a "resource" for later filmmakers), that the essays

which expand on the idea prove interesting. Christa Blilmlinger's "Lumiere, the

Train and the Avant-Garde" offers good discussions of train-themed experimentalfilms by Al Razutis and Bill Morrison and then goes on to a productive analysis ofJacobs's film performance pieces. While Malte Hagener's "Programming Attrac-

tions" article on what German and French cinema clubs put on the screen besideavant-garde films (i.e., Sennett, Chaplin, Keaton) does not seem to belong here,Alison McMahan's "Chez le Photographe c'est chez moi" is an interesting and

fresh discussion of camera angles in early films that depict cameras in use. Pierre-

Emmanuel Jacques's "The Associational Attractions of the Musical" more or lessoverturns the suggestion that the musical genre carries the attraction concept intolater filmmaking. The numbers are simply too well integrated with the narratives

and, even where they are not, their associational relations (in the Eisensteiniansense) are too smooth and compact for the attractions concept to fly.

Dick Tomasovic makes a reasonably strong case for contemporary Holly-wood blockbusters in "The Hollywood Cobweb: New Laws of Attraction." Whilehe tosses to one side Michael Bay (The Rock, Con Air, etc.), Jan de Bont (Speed)and James Cameron (Aliens, The Abyss) for making "a cinema of permanent

spectacle," he seizes on Sam Raimi's first two Spiderman films as exemplary of

a "new" cinema of attractions, and makes a reasonable case for these films. Dis-missing some blockbusters and embracing just Spiderman (for specific reasons,such as Raimi's distinctive camera angles in action passages), he sticks to theone-film-at-a-time methodology. However, his dismissal of Bay and Cameron onthe basis of "spectacle" makes no sense-any more than it would to dismiss Char-lie's Angels or Hero, Sobchak's aptly chosen and insightfully analyzed examples.In a paradoxical way, Tomasovic follows Gunning's own tendency to show his

idea at work in one film at a time, letting the reader experience similarities

between them. This strategy allows Gunning to expand the specific effects of thecinema of attractions while containing and circumscribing the idea, the currencyof which is aptly demonstrated by this collection.NOTES1. Early Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative, Thomas Elsaesser, ed. (London: British Film Insti-

tute, 1990). Gunning has three articles included: "The Cinema of Attraction: Early Cine-ma. Its Spectator, and the Avant-Garde," 56-63; 'Non-Continuity, Continuity,

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Discontinuity: A Theory of Genres in Early Film," 86-94; "Primitive' Cinema: A Frame-Up?Or the Trick's on Us,' 95-103. 'An Unseen Energy Swallows Space: The Space in EarlyFilm and Its Relation to American Avant-Garde Film' appears in Film Before Griffith, JohnFell, ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 355-366. Wanda Strauvenincludes a very through bibliography in The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded, 421-433.

2. Richard Abel, Encyclopedia of Early Cinema (New York: Routledge, 2005).

3. See, for example, Gunning's "A Quarter of a Century Later. Is Early Cinema Still Early?"KiNtop 12 (2003): 17-31; "in Your Face: Physiognomy, and the Gnostic Mission of EarlyFilm,' Modernism/Modernity 4.1 (1997): 1-29; 'The World as Object Lesson: CinemaAudiences, Visual Culture and the St. Louis World's Fair, 1904," Film History 6.4 (1994):422-444; "Attractions, Detection, Disguise: Zigomar, Jasset and the History of Genres inEarly Film," Griffithiana 47 (May 1993): 111-135.

4. Tom Gunning, 'Re-Newing Old Technologies: Astonishment, Second Nature, and theUncanny in Technology from the Previous Turn of the Century," Rethinking MediaChange: The Aesthetic of Transition, David Thornburn and Henry Jenkins, eds. (Cam-bridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003), 39-59.

5. Noal Burch, To the Distant Observer: Form and Meaning in the Japanese Cinema(Berkeley: University of California, 1979); Noil Burch, Life to Those Shadows, Ben Brew-ster, trans. and ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990).

6. Gaudreault and Gunning gave a collaborative paper at Brighton, which appeared in Cine-ma 1900-1906: An Analytical Study (FIAFF, 1982). A French edition came out in 1980.Their joint essay, 'Early Cinema as a Challenge to Film History,' appears in the "Dossier"section of Reloaded.

7. For Musser, the practices of early cinema were shaped by what he terms 'screen prac-tices,' a set of presentation procedures in slide show lectures and other entertainmentsthat incorporated projected (and sometimes moving) images well before cinema wasinvented and projected films were exhibited. These practices incorporated images intodiscursive or narrative lecture presentations that gave their often-considerable diversity aunity and coherence.

8. See Noil Burch, 'Porter, or Ambivalence," Screen 19.4 (1978-1979): 91-105. The "ambiva-lence" in Burch's title refers to the fact that Porter could make as formally advanced anddynamic a film as The Great Train Robbery and as flat and theatrical a series of tableauxas he used in filming Uncle Tom's Cabin in the same period, in this case, 1903.

9. Charlie Keil, "From Here to Modernity," in American Cinema's Transitional Era, CharlieKeil and Shelly Stamp eds., (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004). See alsoKeil's 'Visualized Narratives,' Transitional Cinema, and the Modernity Thesis,' inLe Cindma au tourant du si6cle / Cinema at the Turn of the Century, Clairee Dupr6 laTour, Andre Gaudreault and Roberta Peterson, eds. (Lausanne/Qu6bec: Payot/NotaBene, 1998), 123-137.

10. Tom Gunning, "Modernity and Cinema: A Culture of Shocks and Flows," in Cinema andModernity, Murray Pomerance, ed. (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2006),297-315, especially 302-309.

11. Gunning, 'Modernity and Cinema,' 309-315. Gunning attempts to expand on this practicalexplanation by saying that modernity entailed containment, regulation and such thingsas Taylorism just as it did shocks and disjunctions. The ambivalence of early cinema andits development into something else flowed out of both features of the modem. This, hesays, is a revision of the explanation he previously preferred, which, like Burch's, takes itthat early cinema succumbed to the control of bourgeois cultural forms.

University of Toronto

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