Garcha on Film-Spectator Relations

Film-Spectator Relations in Pre- and Post-Classical Cinema
By Harinder S. Garcha

In deciphering the trends in film from the pre-classical to the post-classical era, it is hard not to notice that continuing emphasis on sensation.  Tom Gunning, in his 1986 essay, "The Cinema of Attractions," describes how early films functioned to generate excitement in spectators.  The two filmmakers most cited for their work in this period are Melies, who produced trick films, and the Lumiere brothers, who produced documentary "actualities."  While the Melies films were essentially "filmed theater," the Lumiere brothers filmed scenes from reality and presented them in a larger-than-life setting.  It is said that when they exhibited their film of a train entering a station, people in the crowd actually ducked for cover, so great was the realism of the image. 

Central to pre-classical cinema is the privileging of display over storytelling.  According to Gunning, the importance of the moving image was highlighted in 1922 when Fernand Leger wrote that the potential of the new art (cinema) did not lie in imitating the acts of nature or in its resemblance to theatre. The real potential of cinema lay in its power of making images seen. Gunning writes “It is precisely this harnessing of visibility, this act of showing and exhibition, which I feel cinema before 1906 displays most intensely.”

Delving further into Gunning’s article, we as a class engaged in a discussion of the pre-classical cinema’s episodic nature as well as its tendency to engage in direct address with the viewer. These techniques could both be described as "excesses" in relation to the classical narrative cinema.

The post-classical cinema can also be seen as "excessive" in relation to classical cinema.  Post-classical films combine the spectacular sensations of the pre-classical film with the narrative structures of the classical film.  The result is movies that are satisfying on two levels: they both tell and story and jolt our senses.  The synthesis of narrative and spectacle can be seen in movies such as Star Wars.  The narrative invites viewers to identify with the characters of a film and be wowed by the scenes like the one in the opening credits which, according to Scott Bukatman, “…throws our learned sense of scale onto the scrap heap.”

The post-classical cinema seems to repeat the emphasis on thrills that is so evident in the pre-classical cinema.
Modern day car-chase sequences, for example, combines the thrills of an early twentieth century Coney Island amusement ride with the modern machinery and setting of a car.

Here our class moved into a discussion of the pre and post-classical movements in relation to the changes that were taking place in the world. Pre-classical cinema was dealing with issues thrown up by the industrial age and was trying to mature into an art in its own right. In the post-classical age, cinema is trying to deal with issues presented by technological innovation and globalization. The pervasiveness of VCRs, camera phones, laptops, DVD player and innumerable other electronic devices has resulted in an age where viewers have total flexibility in choosing what medium they wish to use and what content they wish to see. Although this has created mega-corporations such as Disney and Time-Warner that control most of the media played in society, on an individual level viewers have more choice that ever before of what media they want to expose themselves to. Viewers are surrounded by screens and in a way screens (read cinema) is taking control of and becoming reality. This has led to instability in cinematic representation and cinematic perception.

Bibliography

Altman, Rick. “Dickens, Griffith, and Film Theory Today.” South Atlantic Quarterly. 88.2. 1989. 321-359.

Hansen, Miriam. “Early Cinema, Late Cinema: Transformations of the Public Sphere.” Viewing Positions. Ed. Linda Williams. Rutgers, 1995. 134-152.

Gunning, Tom. “The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant-Garde.” Early Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative. Ed. Thomas Elsaesser. BFI, 1990. 56-62

Bukatman, Scot. “Zooming Out: The End of Offscreen Space.” The New American Cinema. Ed. Jon Lewis. Duke, 1998. 248-271.

Comments

[Lauran]

In his post entitled “Film-Spectator Relations in Pre- and Post-Classical Cinema,” Harinder S. Garcha clearly presents some of the main points in Tom Gunning’s article, The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant-Garde. Studies of film-spectator relations have focused on how a viewer exists in relation to the cinema. “Screen studies” has described an “ideal spectator” or a single viewpoint from which all viewers will experience a film based on the way the text or the apparatus positions them to the film. Other, more current theories believe that spectators’ relations to a film will vary based on their historical and cultural standpoints.

Using Gunning’s article, Garcha describes film-spectator theories of pre- and post- classical cinema. He begins by noting an early, basic belief that cinema had the potential to give images exposure. Garcha accurately contrasts pre-classical from classical cinema as the former privileges display over storytelling while directly addressing the viewer. He also explains that post-classical cinema is similar to pre-classical cinema in that it creates “spectacular sensations…[that] jolt our senses” while also following a narrative structure of classical cinema. Unlike the spectator of classical cinema, the spectator of pre- and post- classical cinema is not a static or passive voyeur but an unruly, interactive spectator.

Garcha does not specifically state that Gunning refers to the pre-classical period (cinema before 1906) as “the cinema of attractions.” The term attraction, taken from the work of Eisenstein, is used by Gunning because it implies an emphasis on exhibition (e.g. montage) rather than narrative absorption. This cinema of attractions is described as a fragmented, exhibitionist cinema that establishes direct contact with its viewers (i.e. acting is immediately directed towards the camera like in the variety show). In this way, it is a “cinema that displays its visibility” (p. 57). Gunning explains that the films of Lumière and Méliès are characteristic of this pre-classical period as they present a series of scenes to the viewers rather than creating a narrative. It is important to note the cinema of attractions does not disappear when cinema shifts in favor of the classical narrative; rather, it goes underground and resurfaces in post-classical cinema.

Additionally, Garcha does not expand his analysis of film-spectator relations to include the ideas of Miriam Hansen as presented in her piece, “Early Cinema, Late Cinema: Transformations of the Public Sphere.” Like Gunning, Hansen believes that viewer absorption, a hallmark of classical cinema, is no longer a part of spectator-film relations. She describes the spectator of classical cinema as “mummified” (p. 135) whereas modern day spectators must be understood in relation to their historical and cultural contexts. To attract a boarder audience and gain the attention of people on the periphery of the “public sphere” (p. 140), Hansen notes that pre- and post- classical cinema use multiple modes of address. Specifically, Hansen explains that it is today’s increased technological developments and focus on globalization that further separates classical cinema from the more modern “American model of mass culture” (p. 137).

In conclusion, both Gunning and Hansen’s work has demonstrated the varying views of the spectator’s relation to cinema over the course of film history. It seems from this review that, as Gunning concludes, “Every change in film history implies a change in its address to the spectator, and each period constructs its spectator in a new way” (Gunning, p. 61).

Works Cited

Hansen, Miriam. “Early Cinema, Late Cinema: Transformations of the Public Sphere.” Viewing Positions. Ed. Linda Williams. Rutgers, 1995. 134-152.

Gunning, Tom. “The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant-Garde.” Early Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative. Ed. Thomas Elsaesser. BFI, 1990. 56-62.