Fear: Across the Disciplines

8. LIVING DEAD: FEARFUL ATTRACTIONS OF FILM

148 Adam Lowenstein FEAR AND FILM have always been intimate companions. One of cinema’s primal scenes testifies to this intimacy and originates from the medium’s very beginnings: the famous screening in 1895 of Louis and Auguste Lumière’s L’Arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat (Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat, also known as Arrival of a Train at the Station) at the Grand Café in Paris. The spectators in the Grand Café, among cinema’s very first public audiences, responded to the image of a train pulling into a station with pure terror. The power of this new technology to grant movement to photography was so overwhelming that viewers turned and fled from the train as if it threatened to crush them. For this audience, the cinematic image of the train became the train itself—something to fear. At least that’s how the story goes. The film historian Tom Gunning points out how the oft-repeated accounts of this incident appear more mythological than truthful after careful study of evidence from the period. Writing in 1989, Gunning observes how “this primal scene at the cinema” lives on nevertheless, how “the terrorized spectator of the LIVING DEAD FEARFUL ATTRACTIONS OF FILM 8 Living Dead 149 Grand Café still stalks the imagination of film theorists who envision audiences submitting passively to an all-dominating apparatus, hypnotized and transfixed by its illusionist power.”1 Today, this situation in film studies has changed considerably, due in no small part to Gunning’s own pathbreaking scholarship.2 His description of early cinema (1895–1906) as dominated by an aesthetic he calls “the cinema of attractions” has become perhaps the single most influential concept in film studies over the last twenty years.3 Gunning’s definition of the cinema of attractions is worth quoting at some length, as I will use it to anchor my own discussion of fear and film to key debates within the discipline of cinema and media studies: The cinema of attractions directly solicits spectator attention, inciting visual curiosity, and supplying pleasure through an exciting spectacle— a unique event, whether fictional or documentary, that is of interest in itself. The attraction to be displayed may also be of a cinematic nature, such as . . . trick films in which a cinematic manipulation (slow motion, reverse motion, substitution, multiple exposure) provides the film’s novelty. Fictional situations tend to be restricted to gags, vaudeville numbers or recreations of shocking or curious incidents (executions, current events). It is the direct address of the audience, in which an attraction is offered to the spectator by a cinema showman, that defines this approach to filmmaking. Theatrical display dominates over narrative absorption, emphasizing the direct stimulation of shock or surprise at the expense of unfolding a story or creating a diegetic universe. The cinema of attractions expends little energy creating characters with psychological motivations or individual personality. Making use of both fictional and non-fictional attractions, its energy moves outward towards an acknowledged spectator rather than inward towards the character-based situations essential to classical narrative.4 This initial formulation of the cinema of attractions, revised and expanded by Gunning in a series of linked essays he began publishing in 1986, already suggests a number of reasons why the concept has continued to resonate so powerfully with film scholars within and beyond the subfield of early cinema. A cinema of attractions uncovers an alternative set of film aesthetics and film histories that had been relegated previously to the margins of what was usually assumed to be central: film’s evolution as a narrative-based, storytelling medium. Prior to the recognition of a cinema of attractions, film historians routinely proceeded as if it were cinema’s destiny to develop the sort of narratives we now associate 150 Adam Lowenstein with the classical Hollywood style—the dominant form of commercial film style in the United States from roughly 1917 to the present, with remarkable worldwide influence.5 Classical Hollywood style emphasizes psychologically motivated, goal-oriented characters as the active agents who move through cause-effect chains of events. These events are based on a series of temporal deadlines that resolve with a strong degree of closure by the time the film concludes.6 The result is a film style where “telling a story is the basic formal concern” and conventions of “realism” arise from commitments to concealment of artifice...