Contemporary theory in translation

»Now you see it, Now you don’t«: The temporality of the cinema of attractions

While previous generations of historians saw early cinema as a primitive, preparatory period for later film styles and practices, Tom Gunning and other contemporary scholars argue for a more complex approach. Gunning and André Gaudreault have introduced the term »cinema of attractions« as a new concept in understanding of the early film history. Film in its early days (before 1908 and the nickelodeon boom) was seen primarily as a technical novelty and not as a storytelling device. Its temporality also followed different paradigm from the one that dominates in the narrative form of classical cinema.

The audience in those days expected display of attractions, and the temporality was limited to the pure present tense of the attraction’s appearance. Cinema of attractions, while sometimes showing some narrative progress, is founded on the act of display as a temporal irruption rather then a temporal development. This temporal disjunction can be seen in Méliés’s films which are often a succession of magical appearances, transformations, nd disappearances, but also in the apotheosis endings of some more complex narrative films.

Tom Gunning