Twenty years ago, noted film scholars Tom Gunning and Andre Gaudreault introduced the phrase "cinema of attractions" to describe the essential qualities of films made in the medium's earliest days, those produced between 1895 and 1906. Now, The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded critically examines the term and its subsequent wide-ranging use in film studies.
The collection opens with a history of the term, tracing the collaboration between Gaudreault and Gunning, the genesis of the term in their attempts to explain the spectacular effects of motion that lay at the heart of early...