The Cinema of Attractions - Essay Example

? The Cinema of Attractions The development of early cinema can be considered as a new stage of social life of people. This development is consideredto be one of the most important inventions. It was initially developed for attraction of the audience and critics refer to early cinema as the “cinema of attractions”. The images played a great role that time. To show was more important for the directors than to tell. The images were more important than their background stories. Films of the early period of cinema (before 1906) established a different relations with the audience unlike cinema in its later years (MacDonald & Haller, 2006). Still, the cinema of attractions is a way of the audience identification and the reflection of the needs of the society of nineteenth and early twentieth century. In case the cinema was able to show something, it was considered to be a good cinema. The early cinema is of the exhibitionist nature. The audience is targeted by the specific images they want to see. Gunning claims that it was very important the way camera interacted with the eyes of an actor. In such a way, the audience had a chance to feel an interaction with heroes on the screen. Both of them were watchers (Diiorio, 2003). The attention of a spectator was very important for the directors of early cinema. This aspect was specially supervised. That is why they were really concerned about visual contact between the viewers and the actors. Only images, which were shown to the audience, were important for them. We can illustrate this claim by the film directed by Edwin Porter “The Great Train Robbery” in 1903. In this film the bandit looks at the audience and makes a shot. The viewers are able to see the smoke of the gun. This scene happens in the beginning of the film and the audience catches its breath in a foretaste of further events or images. This move is referred by Gunning as exhibitionist move showing the views what will happen next. Gunning claims that: “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 evident in some genres (e.g. the musical) than in others”(Gunning, 2000). If not images are practiced as the tools to exert influence on the audience, then music is often used by the directors of the later films (after 1906). In the film directed by Victor Fleming “The Wizard of Oz” (1939), the events are surrounded by music (Faden, 2001). We can see the way the main characters show their inner states. This technique is used by the directors in order to make them understand further development of events. Therefore, the narrative is supported by music and there is a lack of exhibitionist strategy in it. Viewers obtain help from the directors in order to perceive what is going on the screen correctly. Thus, attractions in the early films were used as tools to grasp attention of the audience and in later films director’s techniques were used to understand moods of the cinema’s characters (Brewster & Jacobs, 1997). According to Gunning, “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. 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” (Gunning, 2000). Therefore, the cinema of attractions comprises films before 1906 and avant-garde films, but nowadays many directors use these techniques as well. Modern Hollywood films are also based on the techniques of attraction, when the audience can see the face of the main character clearly and feel with him or understand him better. The exhibitionist nature of the cinema of attractions was mainly used for creation of a special atmosphere on the screen. There are special concepts of attraction in the early cinema and they should be acknowledged by the contemporaries as an essential contribution into the history of cinematography (Chanan, 1995). The techniques of the early cinema were developed with regards to the needs of the audience of those times, cultural and social context and many other external factors. In the end of the nineteenth century and in the beginning of the twentieth century, the society was taken by the iron arms of the rulers. People used to be constraint and it was natural of them to sit in their theatre or cinema chair and be oppressed by the images they were shown. On the other hand, in the cinema people managed to restore their self-identifications and turn into individuals from grey anonymous masses. Dai Vaughn claims that the audience in the cinema was focused on “what would now be considered the incidentals of scenes: smoke from a forge, steam from a locomotive, brick-dust from a demolished wall" (Faden, 2001). The patterns of audience were unpredictable and very often images, which were shown to the audience, were developed in a rash act. There were two basic periods of synchronization and industrialization in the early cinema.  The production through exhibition was one of the most important actions, taken by the directors of the cinema of attractions. Of course, these early films were often incomprehensible and inconsistent. The directors supplemented their films with music, and very often “a film's reception depended on its exhibition context, a context often beyond a production company's control” (Turner, 1994). Therefore, the early cinema of attraction was developed in accordance with the needs of the society and cultural and social context. Thus, images invented and developed by the directors are correlated with the needs and wants of the audience, which wanted to feel themselves participants of the events shown on the screen. We can underline that contemporaries would hardly view the films of the attractions, but the modern films are also capturing our attention by different strategies of attraction. References Brewster, B., & Jacobs, L. (1997). Theatre to Cinema: Stage Pictorialism and the Early Feature Film. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Chanan, M., 1995. The Dream That Kicks: The Prehistory and Early Years of Cinema in Britain. New York: Routledge. Diiorio, S. (2003). Gordon, Rae Beth. Why the French Love Jerry Lewis: From Cabaret to Early Cinema. French Forum, 28(1), 142+. Faden, E. S., 2001. Crowd Control: Early Cinema, Sound, and Digital Images.Journal of Film and Video, 53(2/3), 93+. Gunning, T., 1993. Now You See It, Now You Don't: The Temporality of the Cinema of Attractions. Velvet Light Trap, not cited(32), 3-12. Gunning, Tom., 2000. The Cinema of Attraction: Early Film, Its Spectator, and the Avant-Garde. Film and Theory: An Anthology. Eds. Robert Stam & Toby Miller. Blackwell, pp. 229-235. MacDonald, S. & Haller, R. A. (Eds.), 2006. Art in Cinema: Documents toward a History of the Film Society. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Turner, G., 1994, November. Early American Cinema. American Cinematographer,75, 101+. Read More