Electrocuting an Elephant at Coney Island: Attraction, Story, and the Curious Spectator

At the heart of Tom Gunning’s concept of the cinema of attractions is the complex and contested relationship between attraction and narrative and their presumably different modes of spectatorial involvement. By situating early cinema spectatorship within the broader history of a nineteenth-century exhibition culture, I argue that popular attractions (cinematic and noncinematic) relied on story and narrative much more than the concept of the cinema of attractions allows. Correspondingly, I argue that the spectator’s experience of attractions is marked by an active intellectual curiosity stimulated through a variety of contextualizing discourses.