Aesthetic Of Astonishment: Film Analysis

In the article “Aesthetic of Astonishment: Early Film and the (In)Credulous Spectator”, Tom Gunning argues that the first people who watched Lumiere’s Arrival of a Train at the Station were not in shock because they believed that the train was real, they were astonished by the illusion they witnessed before them on the screen. In contrary to the myth that people feared that they were going to be killed by a train, Gunning stresses that the Audiences’ astonishment was derived “from a magical metamorphosis”(Gunning, 119). This metamorphosis is essentially cinema itself and the illusions it produces on screen. Gunning calls cinema a “magic theatre”(Gunning,117) where filmmakers strived to make the impossible, appear believable through visual representations. …show more content…
A myth of director as a magician with complete control is created with this film and Méliès demonstrates the power of this myth. There is no insertion of the responsibility and cultural side effects of having such control and power over an illusion. The conjuror in this film turns a fan into women for the spectacle of the King to look at, and then he continues to alter the womens clothing to please the King in the film. But, in reality it is Méliès who assumes the role of the conjuror by turning the fan into a spectacle of women for the audiences scopophilic pleasure. As Gunning explains that early cinema “delivers a generally brief dose of visual pleasure”(121). Which means that in the case of Méliès’s film the transformation of the fan into women serves as the visual pleasure and this concept was therefore born in the minds of the audience that cinema could be used for acting out male fantasies as such. His film is displaying the overwhelming control that men possess in the not only artistic industry, but the …show more content…
Although, her ideas apply specifically to narrative cinema, it was narrative cinema that directly followed in the footsteps of Méliès’ The Wonderful Living Fan(Méliès, 1904) and therefore adapted his same approach to Narrative cinema. Much like Méliès’s main character in the film, the conjuror, Mulvey explains how the male protagonist in Narrative films “is free to command the stage, a stage of spatial illusion in which he articulates the look and creates the action” (204). The protagonist is essentially an adoption of the conjuror, as they both do the same thing, which is control the scene. This quote points at the idea of how men are typically shown as the ones doing the action in cinema, while women are passive and only appear for the sake of men’s visual pleasure. In The Wonderful Living Fan(Méliès, 1904), this is particularly true. But, I also want to stress that it is not the character I am talking about, it is the director, since it is he who is in charge of the protagonist and typically the creator of the character. The finale of the film, is the objectification and ultimate illumination of the male fantasy of having complete control and dominance over all