William Clark, Lucas Verga, Zara Golden
One of the most pervasive motifs in the lineage of cinema scholarship, the “industrial” mode of cinematic production, the need to set the material stakes of cinema’s technological components, creates a nearly illegible gap between the lines tracing film from art and back around again. Though narrative cinema, from the days of the backstage musical to the systematic recreation of the mockumentary, from “Man with a Movie Camera” to modern simulations of surveillance networks, has always been a rich field of dissemination for the question concerning technology. The Cinema of Attractions, at once a historically circumscribed modality of spectatorship and the primal scene of terrified or monstrous monstrated spectacle, in this time and for all time, has thus been displaced into multiple screens within screens and films within films. Our exhibition looks at a wide variety of scenes in which the narrative or feature film implants an attraction en abyme in order to converse with Gunning’s theory of primitive cinema: the new, raw technology that disturbingly unveils its force – erotic, spectacular, violent, causing the viewer to gag. Continue reading
The Cinema of Attractions 