Cinema of Attraction (Gunning)

Though I had read this article before, re-reading it after having taken a Film Theory course was extremely interesting. Early cinema seems so different and foreign to us, yet Gunning points out a lot of interesting similarities to more modern cinema at the end of his article. He goes as far as to say that “the system of attraction remains an essential part of popular filmmaking.” I think a great example of this is with the action film genre. In this genre, we are shown quick cuts without much interest in more than just flashy special effects. There is a conscious effort not to further the story line if it means taking away a five minute long “bad-ass” fight scene. While they are feature length movies with plot arcs and a fourth wall separating the audience from what is happening on the screen, there is still the emphasis on aesthetic appeal that often overrides the necessity for intricacies in the narrative.

Gunning mentions the “Lumière tradition of ‘placing the world within one’s reach’.” This is shown a lot in today’s television series. The MTV reality show I was working on this summer was one such show that had a lot of references to the audience to try to gain empathy or a connection with the girl the show follows around. There were many points in the first season where she would reference the camera, and they had many clips of her in front of a white screen explaining her inner monologue to the audience while looking directly at the camera. This acknowledgement of the audience as part of the show is something that is tied to the “cinema of attractions” and its ability to “solicit the attention of the spectator.”

Aesthetic of Astonishment (Gunning)

I love this article because it shows how jaded we have become with effects and visual shocks. Through new technology and greater access to technological media, it is harder to create a shock effect in an audience nowadays than it was when special effects were in the distant future and film had just become a popularized medium. Throughout the years, moviegoers have become more and more desensitized to scenes with war, blood, gore, magic, illusion, dinosaurs, and other things they may not see every day. A scene where a pig flies is no longer only possible in the cartoon world. This means that we have also become less easy to shock and more accustomed to expecting the unexpected or something out of the ordinary. Even if a movie is supposed to take place in the real world, we tend to take it with a grain of salt.

During the times of early cinema, before narrative film became the norm, what was on the screen tended toward the real but exotic, and was there to produce shock effect. There were very limited means to mangle or play with the film to change it from the original reel to something different. This means that people were unaccustomed to seeing things that were out of the ordinary because something that was on the screen was something that was almost surely directly filmed from reality. We never think in these terms today, during the age of computer animation and 3D graphics, but it’s nice to look back at the days when people were more likely to be shocked by film.

The Pickford Paradox (Jenkins)

This article was a stroke of pure genius. It takes a smart man to make a connection between the flashy and two dimensional visuals of video games and the movies of the silent era. Feature films back then still held a lot of remnants of “cinema of attractions” in that they were more theatrical and had a different aesthetic quality to them than that which we are accustomed to today. Video games today have the same two dimensional quality as a set created for one of the old films, and they are also full of a great amount of physical movement. When one plays video game, there tends to be a hero that’s running, jumping, ducking, and attacking. The old school video games compared to old movies in this article are no exception. When one thinks of 1920’s movies, one thinks of Charlie Chaplin’s tramp character, but also of chase scenes and a lot of running around.

I liked what Jenkins said about the use of the frame. Video games have a tight frame to work with because we need to see all of the obstacles we are dealing with. In old movies, humans were limited within the frame, and there needed to be just as much spatial awareness in order to create a world for the audience. In the “cinema of attractions” a circus act or exotic trick could take up the entire frame, but to fit it in without moving the heavy, hard to handle cameras of the time, it was necessary to fit everything into the screen, which Jenkins compares to a Tetris game. This is an extremely interesting observation I would never have thought of myself.