The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded (review)

Wanda Strauven, ed., The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2006. £39.50 (hbk), £24.95 (pbk).Paul WilliamsThe title of Wanda Strauven's collection refers to a 1986 article by Tom Gunning exploring early film style and its reception. When 'The Cinema of Attraction: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant-Garde' was collected in the volume Early Cinema: Space Frame Narrative (1990), its title acquired a qualifying letter: 'The Cinema of Attractions'. Gunning's piece has defined the study of cinematic form and exhibition practices from the mid-1890s to the mid-1910s; in The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded it is reprinted alongside other forays into this field of cinema studies from the mid-1980s which include autobiographical and introductory pieces and almost twenty essays by prominent film scholars re-evaluating the concept of the 'cinema of attractions' and its enduring utility for twenty-first-century film scholarship.The cinema of attractions presents its own 'constructedness' to the spectator, emphasising its status as a product of technological apparatus. Instead of letting audiences peep into a closed fictional world unfolding before their eyes, where characters act in ignorance of their spectators, in the cinema of attractions the people who find themselves in front of rolling cameras peep back, disrupting the walls of their diegetic world. Early cinema was one entertainment outlet among many as the historical period of modernity gathered pace towards the end of the nineteenth century. It slotted into a menu of popular attractions available to the inhabitants of North America and Western Europe, such as amusement park rides, optical toys, vaudeville theatre and exhibitions of new machinery. As espoused by Walter Benjamin among others, one of the constitutive elements of modernity is shock. Rapid technological and cultural shifts created an environment in which the citizens of the West were exposed to the shocks of the new: industrialisation, railways, urbanisation and electrification. They came to crave popular entertainments that reproduced these jolts, and early cinema exploited and pleasured the distraction of its audiences by providing the attractions of stop tricks, reverse motion and fast motion, to name but three.So why, in the rubric of this collection's title, has Gunning's article been Reloaded? Gunning's essay notes some kind of return to a cinema of attractions in 1970s and 1980s Hollywood: 'recent spectacle cinema has reaffirmed its roots in stimulus and carnival rides, in what might be called the Spielberg-Lucas-Coppola cinema of effects' (387). These three directors suggest the alternative titles Wanda Strauven could have selected for this volume. Why not The Cinema of Attractions Redux, which would give a flavour of the way this book republishes key 1980s scholarship into cinema (of attraction) studies, along with several essays revising and extending Gunning's original concept? Why not The Cinema of Attractions Remastered, suggesting that Gunning's study of early cinema has been repackaged in a manner befitting the digital age and the tastes (and nostalgia) of contemporary cinema audiences? The cover image of Trinity (Carrie-Ann Moss) poised in mid air supplements the clues recurring through the book: Reloaded has been chosen because it points to The Matrix trilogy (Andy and Larry Wachowski US/Australia 1999-2003), which provides several examples of a contemporary cinema of attractions for many of the writers here. Those moments in the first Matrix film when the narrative seems to be suspended (along with the main characters) in bullet time may constitute a return to the pleasures of early cinema's shock and spectacle. The film's technological transformation of one's 'natural' experience of space and time is paraded for the audience's amusement and acknowledgement. Fittingly, the bullet-time effect in The Matrix recalls the photographic experiments of Eadweard Muybridge in the 1880s, when a leaping figure was captured on six different cameras from six different angles simultaneously, as Eivind Rossaak explains in this collection (323). …