Film and Attraction: From Kinematography to Cinema (review)

"In the earliest days of cinema our ancestors were thrilled to behold images of galloping horses, hurtling trains and capering dancers. Though our entertainments are now more elaborate, our appetites are not so different. A large part of what we crave is action: running, jumping, fighting, driving, flying. Sometimes everything else - plot, character, emotion - can seem superfluous."

A.O. Scott

"Who would have dreamed film would die so quickly?"

Roger Ebert

Cultural beginnings tend to be problematic. On the one hand, a certain long ago vagueness may readily lend itself to myth. On the other, myth is sought after to dramatize, to make clear that something new and perhaps original - not to say wonderful and fantastic - has occurred.

These claims tend mostly to be artificial, settling as they do on a point in a continuum. There may be arguments on behalf of competing claims, the value of one claim over another a matter of how effectively the privileged origin may explain what occurred subsequently. In all the back and forth, biological metaphors of birth and death ought to be eschewed as much as possible

André Gaudreault's key concern seems less the emergence of the movies than an attempt to re-define certain historiographical categories: cinema, early cinema, primitive cinema, etc. Underlying this effort is the difference represented by the terms that lend the essay its title - film and attraction - such as that difference may be understood. To put it another way, the core argument seems to be that one may achieve a more precise understanding of the cinema's beginning by a rigorous clarification of the terms employed to talk about it.

A fundamental point is that the cultural institution we know as cinema dates from 1908-1910, and that the moving image shows of 1894-1908 were an altogether different creature. Gaudreault is here as merciless as a Mélièsian scimitar-wielding Turkish executioner.

The larger context is the revisionist accounts of a new generation of film historians, apparently dating from the FIAF meeting of scholars and archivists in Brighton, England in 1978.

True, hundreds of cans of film arrived at this pleasant seaside town from archives all over the planet - from both sides of the Iron Curtain, from Brussels, Berlin, Jerusalem, Rochester, Moscow, Prague, Mexico City, Warsaw, and elsewhere - material that had been out there for limited viewing but never before in one place. Five-hundred-and-forty-eight fiction and border-line fiction films from the 1900-1906 period (produced by a couple of dozen production companies) were screened. Papers dealing with a range of topics were circulated, including, for example, the evolution of film form up to 1906, fake newsreels and re-enactments, and the early cinema of Edwin Porter. Official and unofficial attendance was a who's who of the film history and film archive intelligentsia, the Brighton meeting becoming "symptomatic of a new urgency about the preservation and accessibility of materials from the early period".¹ There may also have been ghosts in attendance - Ferdinand de Saussure, Georges Sadoul, Terry Ramsaye, Walter Benjamin, perhaps Sergei Eisenstein, among others, as well as some of the living gods of structuralism, there in spirit if not in the flesh - Roland Barthes, Christian Metz, Jacques Lacan.

On the other hand, if a new historiographical era was underway, Brighton did not in fact initiate that new era. The importance of the Brighton proceedings was that they gave the revisionist enterprise in progress an important stamp of approval.

Before Brighton, the most common view of what occurred in the cinema's early decades took the form of a sentimental Dickensian narrative. In the standard version, a mechanical babe of uncertain parentage, deposited on the doorstep of the twentieth century, was removed from the care of plebian foster parents by a brilliant gentleman, an action that enabled the waif to discover its true aristocratic status. D.W. Griffith was cast as the brilliant gentleman...