The aesthetics of astonishment and contemplation in the early British scenic film

Abstract

The field of early cinema has been strongly influenced by Tom Gunning and André Gaudreault’s ‘cinema of attractions’ model, where films produced before approximately 1906 were valued primarily because of their ability to put a view on display rather than as a vehicle for storytelling. This model of spectatorship, established by both the gaze of the spectator and the recurring look of the subjects on screen, engendered a kind of exhibitionism that was in stark contrast to both the voyeuristic drive embedded in institutional modes of narrative absorption, and earlier models of aesthetic experience, which were characterized as contemplative, because the curiosity derived from each attraction remained only momentarily and usually was induced by a visual shock. This paper will interrogate the distinction made by the second set of criteria by analyzing how many early ‘scenics’ produced in Great Britain constructed a dialectic between a state of detached contemplation and visceral immersion. It will do so by drawing on questions about the role of proximity, distance and point of view invoked by the model of spectatorship described as part of the formulation for the Romantic sublime. This early conceptualization of the relationship between subject and spectacle becomes a framework that could allow both historians and theorists to better understand the link between shock and contemplation in the realm of early film aesthetics and more broadly in the domain of landscape aesthetics.

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