Film and Attraction: from Kinematography to Cinema

Extract

Looking back to the development of moving image technology in the 1890s and then separately to the emergence of the institutional medium of cinema in the 1910s (two radically distinct developments in this account), André Gaudreault's recent work of revisionist historiography, Film and Attraction: from Kinematography to Cinema, sketches a new horizon, or in fact multiple overlapping horizons, through which to understand this period of media history – a perspective as vitally relevant for the past as it is for the present situation of both cinema and cinema studies.

Film and Attraction is preceded by the publication in translation of Gaudreault's From Plato to Lumière: Narration and Monstration in Literature and Cinema in 2009.¹ Whereas the research for the earlier book was begun in the 1970s, and it was published in French in 1988, Gaudreault began the present volume in the late 1990s and first published it in French in 2008. From a disciplinary perspective, these dates are significant for the periods they encompass. The earlier work was formulated before and directly after the landmark Brighton FIAF (International Federation of Film Archives) conference in 1978. Following the flourishing of film theory during the 1970s, the Brighton conference led to a reinvestigation of what has come to be known as early cinema, of which Gaudreault has been at the forefront, even if he has reservations about the concept of early cinema itself. Film and Attraction picks up on this research agenda in the 1990s, after film history became ensconced in academia and to some extent displaced the institutional dominance of film theory. The strength of Gaudreault's scholarship, though, has been to fuse the two, bringing the insights of theory to history and vice versa – something evident throughout Film and Attraction.