---- Damian Peter Sutton <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> Bill,
> Tom Gunning, "Cinema of Attractions: Early film, its 
> spectator, and the avant-garde", in Early Cinema: Space
> Frame Narrative, ed. Thomas Elsaesser, London, BFI, 1990
>   
> ISBN 0-85170-245-7

   Thanks, Damian! That one isn't at my local university
library, but one edited by Elsaesser is: Cinema Futures:
Cain, Abel or Cable?: the Screen Arts in the Digital Age.
But I haven't even read Jaen Mitry's Aesthetics and Psychology
of the Cinema yet, so I'm way behind.

> In fact, the whole book is pretty good, and can be 
> described as a sort of revision of film history. It's
> also got a good solid article by Gunning on 'primitive'
cinema and why we shouldn't think of early cinema like that;
as well as articles by Miriam Hansen, Jacques Aumont, Raymond
Bellour, to name but a few. It's a 'revisionist' title because
it seems to have come about from a general feeling of misrepresentation
of early cinema in so-called established histories, and
the groundswell of conferences such as the 1978 Brighton
International Federation of Film Archives Conference.
> 
> I think the general feeling was that the period of early
> cinema has been taught to people as being a primitive
> state of the modern narrative fiction-based cinema that
we know today. 'Evolution' theory tells us that what went
before was logically more primitive, but that's not always
the case. Also, the 'evolution' argument is responsible
for
> the common belief that audiences must have been more aware
of the 'magic' or 'aura' of early cinema because they were
themselves culturally more primitive. This too is 
> misguided. As Gunning's article shows, as does later work
> by Nicholas Hiley, cinema audiences wanted and got a very
> different thing from cinema than we do. They were already
> very sophisticated audiences by the time cinema was 
> developed as a mass entertainment. We only have to look
> at the already complex spectator environment that was
in
> place as early as Robertson's Phantasmagorie of the 1780s.

> 
> Early cinema, especially in the period from 1896 to 1906,
> was dominated not by stories, nor the wonder of the 
> mechanical apparatus (although there has been, and it
> seems always will be, a real affection for cinema 'magic')
but instead by filmed sketches from vaudeville (which it
often replaced as part of vaudeville bills), travelogue/exotica
films, magic tricks/special effect films and other visual
wonders. The interest for the audience was the ability to
see wonderful, funny, or interesting things >on screen.

   Thanks! I was fortunate enough to see the video anthology
The Movies Begin in the early 90s, and that was one of my
peak cinematic experiences of the decade. It also revealed
how significant the UKs contribution was to the early development
of film language.

> Whichever format they saw it on was largely irrelevent.
> Don't forget, there were quite a few different 
> film/projector/camera manufacturers in this period, all
> selling or renting their variations of generic products.

   Very true!

> This attraction-led cinema was subsumed into narrative
> partly as a way of introducing novelty to keep houses
> filled, and partly as a way of inducing the custom of
> the middle-classes who frowmed on the vulgar entertainment
of the music hall. Cinema was under threat from many other
spectator/participatory activities in this period. I recently
attended a seminar by Nick Hiley, a national archivist,
who has done some extraordinary research into business activities
in Britian at this time. He has found that for a while cinema
seemed doomed as just another of the fads that were sweeping
across Britian and America. The principle threat to cinema
seemed to come from 'rinking' (ice-skating), which offered
much the same sort of leisure/social pleasure benefits as
cinema. Indeed, for
> a while, skating rinks doubled as cinemas.

   Interestin and surreal! :)

> As cinema took to narrative - with early films such as
_Traffic in Souls_ and _Buy Your Own Cherries_  - the interest
in representation took over from the interest in cinema
technology. From this and the articles in Elsaesser's book,
there is very good reason to believe that once narrative
had taken over, cinema was at the behest of >the tales it
told rather than the means of telling.

   Why hasn't any of this information gotten into Sight
and Sound? They've degenerated into just another Hollywood
marketing vehicle.

> ((I'm writing, toward the end of the year, a chapter on
>  perception in cinema and basing it around early cinema
> and fin-de-siecle photography, but that's another story))

   Great! You sound a hell of a lot more knowlegeable than
the people who are getting published in Sight and Sound,
Film Comment or Film Quarterly!

> All this doesn't take away the magic of cinema, nor the
> specificity of a particular format. I'm not sold on the
> one-format-is-better-than-another- argument anyway. One
> can still be nostalgic for 35mm, 16mm, Sensurround, Todd
AO, Panavision, 3D, or any other format; I would just argue
> that surely it's the stories we're telling that are more
> important than the quality of the voice.
> 
> Cinema IS designed to sweep us off our feet, but at what
> cost? If we are swept off our feet by the beauty of a
> perfectly pristine 35mm or 70mm print of _Triumph of the
> Will_, or the 'aura' of seeing an original print of _Birth
of a Nation_, we COULD be blinded to the nature of the films'
representation. The message here has little to
> do with the specificity of the medium. It might have worked
a few years ago, when the cinematic experience was the most
novel, but in these days of deconstruction of media, the
loudest, clearest, most detailed bang doesn't >always cut
it.

   Good point!

> Film theory generally tends to ask: What do films 
> represent? There are some(of which I am one) who ask:
> How does film affect our perception? There are a few who
like to look at specificity, but they have now got to deal
>with films viewed in different ways.

   Right.

> The word 'film' (to an 18yr old especially) no longer
> means a trip to the cinema, eating popcorn and watching
a 35mm print. It means this and more: it means watching
videos at home with your mates; broadcast films on television;
rewinding the good/gory/sexy bits; and quite a >lot more
besides.

   Right.

> A good book to start for this is: John Ellis, Visible
> Fictions, London, Routledge, 1990 (?)

   Thanks.
> 
> I find myself *occasionally* teaching about the specificity
and 'magic' of watching cinema. But I find myself almost
always teaching about the way cinema speaks to us and tells
its stories. How these stories are told; how they are received;
how they are interpreted; and how they are part of a broad
culture including television, advertising, and now the web;
these are the real questions >of cinema's specificity, as
I see it.

   Oh.

> Ian Christie's Inside the Film Factory is a good book
> for stuff on Soviet Montage, especially Eisenstein's (and
> others') 'paper films'. Other books I'd recommend before
Noel Carroll (although he may appear in a few anthologies)
are : MAST, COHEN, BRAUDY eds. Film Theory and Criticism
(now in its 5th edition!), OUP, 1974 (1999). 

   Thanks!

> and on early film society: CHARNEY, SCHWARTZ eds. Cinema
>and the Invention of Modern Life, Berkeley, UOC, 1995

   That one I do have access to here.

> also, Gerald Mast has just published another 
> anthology called Introduction to Film Theory (I think),
> but I haven't got it yet.

   If you mean Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings,
I read that when it first came out.

> I'll shut up now.

   Please don't! :)

   You should be writing magazine articles and books. You
strike me as a lot better writer than most of the ones that
are getting published currently.

   I was going to unsubscribe from the list this morning,
but I'll stay on to see what else you might have to say.
You seem to be the most intelligent, serious and articulate
person on
the list so far.

   Thanks again for the great post! :)

   Bill Flavell


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