Cinema of Attraction

"What precisely is the cinema of attraction? First it is a cinema that bases itself on the quality that Leger celebrated: its ability to show something."

Early cinema is where to look at when we are talking about "The Cinema of Attraction"
This was a time in which film was still a mainly unexplored medium. Filmmakers would experiment in various ways that they could use this new media. Due to this, many films were based more around the methods and effects used to create the scenes, rather than a narrative story. Any story element to the films were often just used as an excuse to tie-in all the effects used in the movie.



The earliest example of this may be in the form of Magic Lantern shows, in which a lantern was used to project images, this technique originally started as still images but also progressed into transition between images too. Similar techniques continued into creating Shadow Performances in which humans and pieces of card were used to create shapes and scenes. Both of these at the time were essentially marketed for their incredible used of these effects. The audience would be going to see the spectacle of the event instead of for any gripping story.

This began to move out of theaters and into more public viewing with both the Stereoscopic Images and Camera Obscura. The Stereoscopic Images were often a handheld viewer that would combine 2 images to create a 3D image, a familiar modern example of this is the red & blue 3D glasses some movies used to create 3D. This is a very good example as there was often no narrative to these images whatsoever, viewers simply wanted to gaze into these devices just to experience the 3D technology. Camera Obscura was a pitch black box with one tiny opening which was used as a natural projector, it would project an image of the outside onto the black wall, though it would be upside down.

As time progressed, filmmakers began to understand more about how they can manipulate what we see. The eyes are easy to trick, blurring images we see together at around 25 images per second. Which was one of the first understandings of how to create life-like moving image.

People also like to be amazed, they would go to see the extraordinary. With filmmakers supplying footage from around the world and of intense events that the viewers could often not or would not want to expirience themselves.

Through all of this we can see Cinema of Attraction differs vastly from Narrative Cinema. The Cinema of Attraction aimed to show the audience amazing effects and scenes. While Narrative Cinema was meant to absorb the viewer and pull them into the story world.