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THE CINEMA OF ATTRACTnONS RELOADED Edited by Wanda Strauven Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2006, 460 pp

t is rare enough for a critical slogan to gain the wide currency that Thm Gunning'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 and Its 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 "Attractions" in 1990 in Thomas Elsaesser's important anthology Early Cinema: Space Frame Narrative.I The 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, Donald 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 the term. There were more "attractions" essays to come, with surprisingly few redundancies, up to as recently as 2005 when Gunning published "Cinema of Attractions" 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

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decorated as it is with a still from The Matrix, are to be welcomed. Gunning has never gathered his essays into a book of his own but prefers that readers continue to dig them out from academic journals like Art & Text, Modernism/Moder3 nity, and new-film-history organs Iris and Film History. In any case, by the 1990s, "the cinema of attractions" had taken on a life of its own to become one of those talismanic slogans anchoring innumerable and various articles and parts of books. It is a sign of the slogan's established relevance to undergraduate teaching that the 1999 edition of the standard Film Theory and Criticismincludes Gunning's 1989 "An Aesthetic of Astonishment." There are perils attending all this. The most obvious is overuse. Repeating a slogan eventually provokes irritation rather than insight. The other two dangers mirror one another: its meaning can become too widely diffused, or the concept can harden into dogma. Gunning devised the attractions model narrowly as a heuristic device in aid of cinema historiography. He has kept his own hand in to protect his idea from dogmatic stiffening by writing on associated topics and fresh examples, including later speculations such as "Re-Newing Old Technologies" (2003).1 That essay prompts Vivian Sobchak to spin out a fascinating Heideggerian 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 published essays and some by his critics. Naturally, Gunning can't do much about overuse of the term, except to recognize that "cinema of attractions" now serves more purposes than he probably anticipated. These purposes stem, on the one hand, from its becoming a key concept in the ever-widening so-called "modernity thesis" about silent cinema, and on the other, from the fact that contemporary CGI-driven popular cinema has, some have speculated, released "attractions" from the bonds of narrative in our period of promiscuous intermedia attractions. The latter is a question to which Reloaded 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 framework that early-film historians might use to identify, in positive terms, the archival objects of their research, specifically, the movies made before 1906. This was the era that orthodox film history dismissed as "primitive cinema." After a moment's excitement over the Lumieres' novelty, the received wisdom was that early movies quickly sank into lassitude awaiting the engine of film history to boot up and carry the medium toward a fully awakened narrative mobility and thence transport it to the Emerald City-or, better yet, Burbank, California. The requirement for a more positive framework for comprehending cinema's first 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 primitive) needed a heuristic to reveal its formal integrity as something else. Only then could this remote period be made to stand out as more than the dim foyer of later greatness, discrete in possessing a cinematic character all its own, and connected to 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 prepared for their task by several factors: first, they had a marked suspicion of classical narrative cinema, having been schooled in twenty years of cine-semiotics and the hermeneutics of suspicion. It was no longer possible to think that classical narrative was the natural fit in defining the film medium. They recognized that to remake film history entailed recognizing a range of film forms that could variously 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 integral period. Another factor was the trend toward primary-document historical research that focused on film archival collections that were then beginning to be scrutinized and pressed into service for a new style of film history. Early cinema research in the late 1970s became the test case, and was then established as the example of this trend. It was a measured reaction to a generation of grand theorizing. It was in accord with a slow-growing recognition that film study could house historical scholarship. Charles Musser was already advancing the cause as he developed toward Before the Nickelodeon (the 1982 archival film, followed by the 1990 book), but something more than a precise antiquarian cinephilia was needed before the historical investigation could catch fire. The "cinema of attractions" provided the spark. In Gunning's case, the instruction he took at NYU and his experience as a film 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 of attractions" simultaneously with Baudry's theory of the apparatus (a connection confirmed by Jacques Aumont's Montage Eisenstein). Gunning also grasped the implications of a "non-narrative" and formally self-defining minority cinema as they unfolded from an untypical (for most film historians) vantage through encounters with the idiosyncratic rigor of experimental filmmakers such as Ernie Gehr, Hollis Frampton and Ken Jacobs. These artists drew on their appreciative regard for early cinema by making early film their "object matter." Jacobs's epic reconsideration of Billy Bitzer's 1903 Tom, Tom, the Piper's Son, Gehr's Eureka and Frampton's Magellan drew together their own high formalism and the formal difference of early cinema. Gunning's appreciation of their instruction appears in black 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 in the season before the crucial 1978 Brighton conference and that some of these avant-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 connection with the cinema of attractions, just the juxtaposition of the two cinemas in his essays indicated that these two remote styles of non-classical narrative film could be secret sharers in what film is. The avant-garde provided Gunning with a model of a cinematic form that possessed its own formal integrity and its formal 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 unusual among 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 through the theoretical terms of a Marxist neo-formalism of his own brewing (in Life to Those 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 the formal import of early film. Meanwhile, a young and extremely engaging Qu6b& cois graduate student working in Paris, Andr6 Gaudreault, was already moving in counterpoint to Gunning through his own studies in French narratology and film semiotics toward his fresh formal considerations of early cinema. It was Gaudreault's brief and incredibly fruitful collaboration with Gunning that led to their formulations, at the 1978 Brighton congress, of the model on which Gunning 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-categories dealing with time, space, and viewer reception) and busily exemplify in his own essays. At Brighton itself, the surviving international archive of early cinema was screened for an international crowd of film scholars, archivists and students. These included Gunning and Gaudreault in active roles. 6 It was the first time a close examination of these films had occurred. At Brighton a new cinematic terrain was discovered that could be excavated as film's ancient ground. To have condensed that complicated development into a short phrase in the following decade was Gunning's career-making accomplishment. "The cinema of attractions" provided the needed formal distinction, and a productive slogan and banner. Gunning is a strong and original research scholar and a forceful and extremely smart critical writer. He saw the connections between early cinema and Benjamin no less than he did early film and Eisenstein, and he was quick to discern echoes of both in figures like Fernand L6ger commenting on Gance's La Roue in the months leading up to L1ger's and Dudley Murphy's Le ballet m6canique. But what was accomplished? Well, what Gunning developed was a resonant descriptive framework that could cover the variety of tactics that early filmmakers used and their audiences experienced. And that is basically a "sensation"-something that happens in a short span of film time that demonstrates the 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 moves and implications of the "cinema of attractions" and the different ways the effect was achieved. Gunning then generalized it as something modem, something that rhymed with the novel sensationalism of modern urbanity, which formed the main staging area of the production and reception of early cinema. It is this correlation of early film and modernity that lends Gunning's essays their theoretical suggestiveness. This is roughly the point at which Scott Bukatman's "Spectacle, Attractions and Visual Pleasure" in Reloaded starts to elaborate on how Gunning's historical model displaced Mulvey's theoretical one. Bukatman explains Gunning's influence as a new emphasis on spectacle over the prevailing practice of narrative analysis. Mulvey had given spectacle (of the looked-at woman) a crucial role, although in her argument, spectacle was almost always contained by the patriarchal machinations of classical plotting. Starting from very different premises and historical zones, Wanda Strauven brings early cinema and Marinetti's Futurism into alignment. Gunning's supposed historicist's alliance with "post-theory" was overrated and he was obviously open to theoretical suggestiveness and this eventually cast him (in the suspicious eyes of David Bordwell, for example) as one of the "culturalist" successors of "grand theory," 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 be characteristic of industrial media, and especially of film. The tendency to define pre-1906 films as a non-narrative "cinema of attractions" and the films that followed as a cinema of "narrative integration" eventually led some to ask whether that meant narrative was really and wholly meant to be excluded from the "cinema of attractions." This problem is the basis of Charles Musser's critique of Gunning included in the "Dossier" of formative essays and which Musser rehearses again in his new contribution to Reloaded. He argues that exhibition practices saw projectionists string together very short early films and were thus already creating narrative sequences from discrete pieces.! This exhibition logic led to a figure like Edwin S. Porter, a projectionist who became a cameraman and a crucial transitional director around 1901-03, which is the story-line of Musser's film Before the Nickelodeon. Of course, Burch, when writing on Porter, had already allowed that early filmmaking saw a contest between established narrative forms that were validated in bourgeois entertainment, and proletarian entertainment forms adapted from the fairground, circus and burlesque. These were combined in early cinema as a site where class dialectic was being played out as a conflict of aesthetic forms.8 It was Gaudreault's and Gunning's finer point that while early films did employ stories, they did not yet narrate-they monstrated-and it is evident on the screen that even in story films the devices of narration were eschewed in favour of showing and therefore, the dynamics 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, if by no means all-encompassing, distinction of early cinema as a formal system all its own. Nor have they offered counter-examples or convincing counter-analyses of the films themselves. Other critics have done greater damage to Gunning's theoretical correlation with respect to the "modernity thesis." Gunning has treated it with considerably greater caution than some of his readers who have taken up the idea of "cinema of attractions" as a symptom of modernity, but the claim is surely there in Gunning that early cinema assumed the forms it did because it belonged to the new experiences of modern urbanity. In his contribution to Reloaded, Charlie Keil recaps his critique published elsewhere as "From Here to Modernity"9 before moving on to more nuanced remarks. Keil's objection in his earlier essay is stronger than his corrections here: if the attractions model is linked to the sharpened experiences of modernity, how is it that early cinema after 1906 developed toward narrative integration when, obviously, modernity did not change in the character of its experiences? One of the problems with Reloaded is that one would like to have Keil's tougher and more thoroughgoing critique here and not just his next step in the debate, and the same goes for Gunning's sharpest response to Keil, found elsewhere in "Modernity and Cinema: A Culture of Shocks and Flows.""' For a book this big, it is a shortcoming that one still has to go to several other sources to get a sure grasp on the debates developed around the core concept. One surely prefers those essays in this debate to Warren Buckland's pedantic and unconvincing attempt at "A Rational Reconstruction of 'The Cinema of Attractions."' It is, therefore, good to have Musser's "Rethinking Early Cinema" 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" got strung together in exhibition with greater coherence than Gunning allows for). The correlation of film and modernity behind the "modernity thesis" does not hold up, critics like Keil suggest, because it leaves no room to explain developments toward narrative-to which there are obvious and already known replies. The popularity of the first movies led to an industry that required a regularized product, and fictions adapted from theatre and using its personnel moved filmmaking toward quasi-theatrical forms. There is also the ideological reply: that the bourgeoisie would sooner rather than later demand that movies be secured to what they found aesthetically and politically comfortable. These seem to me to suffice in explaining why "the cinema of attractions" disappeared. These arguments may not invalidate Gunning's correlation, but they do indicate that the forms early filmmakers devised were not self-conscious or tied to aesthetic commitments; so they were never defended and simply fell by the wayside." Nonetheless, that the cinema would become less modern as it matured industrially and formally is an old story, one that we find, for example, in LUger's response 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 experiences 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 of attractions," 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 popular genres as well, such as the musical and the action film. It is with respect to Gunning's barely hinted hypothesis of the endurance of the 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 experimental films by Al Razutis and Bill Morrison and then goes on to a productive analysis of Jacobs's film performance pieces. While Malte Hagener's "Programming Attractions" article on what German and French cinema clubs put on the screen beside avant-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. PierreEmmanuel Jacques's "The Associational Attractions of the Musical" more or less overturns the suggestion that the musical genre carries the attraction concept into later filmmaking. The numbers are simply too well integrated with the narratives and, even where they are not, their associational relations (in the Eisensteinian sense) are too smooth and compact for the attractions concept to fly. Dick Tomasovic makes a reasonably strong case for contemporary Hollywood blockbusters in "The Hollywood Cobweb: New Laws of Attraction." While he 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. Dismissing some blockbusters and embracing just Spiderman (for specific reasons, such as Raimi's distinctive camera angles in action passages), he sticks to the one-film-at-a-time methodology. However, his dismissal of Bay and Cameron on the basis of "spectacle" makes no sense-any more than it would to dismiss Charlie'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 the cinema of attractions while containing and circumscribing the idea, the currency of which is aptly demonstrated by this collection. NOTES 1. Early Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative, Thomas Elsaesser, ed. (London: British Film Institute, 1990). Gunning has three articles included: "The Cinema of Attraction: Early Cinema. 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 Early Film and Its Relation to American Avant-Garde Film' appears in Film Before Griffith, John Fell, ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 355-366. Wanda Strauven includes a very through bibliography in The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded, 421-433. 2. 3. Richard Abel, Encyclopedia of Early Cinema (New York: Routledge, 2005). See, for example, Gunning's "AQuarter of a Century Later. Is Early Cinema Still Early?" KiNtop 12 (2003): 17-31; "in Your Face: Physiognomy, and the Gnostic Mission of Early Film,' Modernism/Modernity 4.1 (1997): 1-29; 'The World as Object Lesson: Cinema Audiences, 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 in Early Film," Griffithiana47 (May 1993): 111-135. Tom Gunning, 'Re-Newing Old Technologies: Astonishment, Second Nature, and the Uncanny in Technology from the Previous Turn of the Century," Rethinking Media Change: The Aesthetic of Transition, David Thornburn and Henry Jenkins, eds. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003), 39-59. Noal Burch, To the DistantObserver: Form and Meaning in the Japanese Cinema (Berkeley: University of California, 1979); Noil Burch, Life to Those Shadows, Ben Brewster, trans. and ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990). Gaudreault and Gunning gave a collaborative paper at Brighton, which appeared in Cinema 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. For Musser, the practices of early cinema were shaped by what he terms 'screen practices,' a set of presentation procedures in slide show lectures and other entertainments that incorporated projected (and sometimes moving) images well before cinema was invented and projected films were exhibited. These practices incorporated images into discursive or narrative lecture presentations that gave their often-considerable diversity a unity and coherence. See Noil Burch, 'Porter, or Ambivalence," Screen 19.4 (1978-1979): 91-105. The "ambivalence" in Burch's title refers to the fact that Porter could make as formally advanced and dynamic a film as The GreatTrain Robbery and as flat and theatrical a series of tableaux as he used in filming Uncle Tom's Cabin in the same period, in this case, 1903. Charlie Keil, "From Here to Modernity," in American Cinema's TransitionalEra, Charlie Keil and Shelly Stamp eds., (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004). See also Keil's 'Visualized Narratives,' Transitional Cinema, and the Modernity Thesis,' in Le Cindma au tourant du si6cle / Cinema at the Turn of the Century, Clairee Dupr6 la Tour, Andre Gaudreault and Roberta Peterson, eds. (Lausanne/Qu6bec: Payot/Nota Bene, 1998), 123-137. Tom Gunning, "Modernity and Cinema: A Culture of Shocks and Flows," in Cinema and Modernity, Murray Pomerance, ed. (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2006), 297-315, especially 302-309. Gunning, 'Modernity and Cinema,' 309-315. Gunning attempts to expand on this practical explanation by saying that modernity entailed containment, regulation and such things as Taylorism just as it did shocks and disjunctions. The ambivalence of early cinema and its development into something else flowed out of both features of the modem. This, he says, is a revision of the explanation he previously preferred, which, like Burch's, takes it that early cinema succumbed to the control of bourgeois cultural forms.

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TITLE: The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded SOURCE: Can J Film Stud 16 no2 Fall 2007 The magazine publisher is the copyright holder of this article and it is reproduced with permission. Further reproduction of this article in violation of the copyright is prohibited. To contact the publisher: http://www.filmstudies.ca/CJFS_completeINDEX.htm