The Cinema Of Attractions: Film Analysis

The invention of photography has direct correlations to the notions of documentary. Historically, a photograph represented the means to preserve a snapshot of the world as accurately as possible. This suggests something in opposition to art, the photographer is not portraying his or her vision of the world, in so far as expressionist painters of the time would be. Instead, they are merely capturing and collating information, as a historian would. Slowly it can be seen that these notions began to fade; abolished were ideas that the medium was purely preservative, instead — and with greater use of manipulation — artists began to realise that photography was a valid form of art for portraying personal expression and to exhibit aesthetic qualities. …show more content…
While we have already seen that photography carries a connotation of realism, film is not burdened with the same notions. A documentary film is labeled as such, to distinguish from the cannon of narrative and pictorial fiction. In the early decades of cinema, a period which media theorist Thomas Gunning terms ‘The Cinema of Attractions’, audiences were amazed by projections of films that were illusionistic in quality. These early films based themselves on an “ability to show something” that astounded audiences.6 Perhaps these early forms of cinema taught viewers a lesson about the medium: that it was not to be trusted. The “Cinema of Attractions” did not gain its reputation from being ‘windows onto the world’ as photographs were seen, instead it become popular at fairgrounds, alongside conjurers and magicians, as a form of spectacle. At its heart; not reality. Even when watching what is seemingly a very naturalistic video, such as a nature documentary, there is a sense that what we are seeing is constructed, from the tightly controlled edit points to the sharply focused macro animal shots. Gregory Currie argues that a process of subconscious remediation occurs in film, between reality and illusion, the outcome of which is an understanding that the images on screen are captured and manipulated.7 Braking a film up into still images and examining a single shot “blurs the boundar[ies]” to the extent where the illusionistic element is lost and the image becomes like a photograph, embodying the ‘window on the world’ ideology.8 Outside of cinema, art films provide another complication. The art-films of Australian artist Shaun Gladwell demonstrate a middle ground, where illusion is harder to distinguish from reality. His Australian Pavilion at the 53rd Venice Biennale, titled