A Hundred Years Later, And Cinema Has Gone Full-Circle

The very first films started popping up in the late nineteenth century. They are not really what we would recognise as films nowadays, instead of narratives and characters the earliest films were just a minute or so long, and showed something of interest. This could be a shot of a boat leaving a harbour, a procession of ostriches, some teenage girls having a pillow fight, a wall demolished then reversed; there is not really a unifying theme other than something that an audience used to static backgrounds and relatively thin stage of the theatre found appealing. Hence, it has become known as the 'cinema of attractions'.

There are a few notable examples that I'd like to draw on. One of the earliest was 'Repas de Bebe', which showed a baby eating something. However, it was not the baby that grabbed the attention of the audience, but the moving foliage in the background. This was a realism unlike anything they'd seen produced artificially before, and it was fascinating.

The next video is one of a train pulling into a station. Now this is a myth, and did not actually happen, but the story goes that the first audience that watched this film were scared that the train would come through the screen and into the auditorium. They were not that easily duped, but it neatly summaries my point: audiences found shots that contain great depth and movement towards the camera very striking.

Do the above things remind you of anything? A certain megabudget sci-fi spectacular? Yes - Avatar embodies both of these things, and uses them as its primary selling point. The story is crappy; I'm pretty sure the producers knew that. However: CGI! $250m dollars worth! The dialogue might be hammy and the characters thinly conceived, but goddamnit look at those backgrounds! Who cares what those blue dudes are doing - imma look at that floating rock! With a waterfall!

You get the picture.

It's not just the backgrounds that ape the 'cinema of attractions' style appeal. The feeling of something coming towards you, as with the train before, sounds an awful lot like 3D, the other selling point of Avatar. Those people that did not flinch, but might have, have clear parallels with modern audiences who flap their hands in front of their faces or duck when the 3D effect whizzes something uncomfortably close. There has been 3D before, and there has been complex CGI before, but Avatar is the first time when both are united to fill theatres like never before.

There have not been a huge number that have tried to follow in Avatar's footsteps - Transformers 3 is probably the only one that relies solely on 3D and CGI - but Avatar is the biggest grossing film of all time by a long way and so cannot be ignored. Our watching habits are reverting back to how they were before cinemas were even a thing; and when spectacle took precedence over narrative. Narrative films were barely even possible back then, so in this day and age when anyone can shoot a film better than the Lumiere brothers, why are we reverting back to the superficial?



N.B. Yeah, I know, Avatar came out two years ago, but I've only just learned about the cinema of attractions, so excuse my tardiness.

EDIT: minutes after posting this I discover that some French filmmakers have made a genuine black-and-white silent film. It's not quite the same as what I'm getting at in this piece, but weird coincidence or what.