Eileen GSell

On Gunning�s “An Aesthetics of Astonishment”

Unabashedly wary of what he deems certain historians’ surprisingly ahistorical rendition of cinema’s first audiences, Gunning takes pains to detail just how myopic (if “subtly so”) certain contemporary theorizations of spectatorship prove to be. The “terrorized” spectator so often mythologized by certain film traditions is not the naïve, unfettered viewer as many claim. Instead, Gunning insists, early audiences actively participated in their own suspension of belief, as part of a longstanding era in which the photographic or filmic apparatus itself stuns as much as, if not more than, the unbelievable nature of illusion. The first modes of exhibition emphasized the technological accomplishment of moving pictures, as well as the film’s place within an aesthetic tradition of illusions that included trompe l’oeil, “freak shows,” and a general obsession with the unnatural. Early Lumiere films were initially presented as frozen images so as to draw attention to the movement of the projector, precluding any experience of the film as reality. Presented as a succession of attractions, the earliest movies were often shown alongside live performances, musical numbers, and any number of other acts, within a “smorgasboard of sensual thrills,” a discontinuous series of diversions. The resultant disbelief of the audience was then an act of will, not earnest, passive credulity (what we often relate to “getting lost” in cinema’s narrative strains, which back then barely existed).

Though far from quaintly gullible, early film viewers were likely more vulnerable to the addictive qualities of aesthetic attractions than they themselves realized. “Pleasure is the issue here,” Gunning asserts, “even if pleasure of a particularly complicated sort.” While the allure of cheap thrills goes all the way back to Augustine’s fifth century curiositas, within modernity the enormous popularity of these spectacles results from an all-encompassing feeling of lack. “Attractions are a response to an experience of alienation,” the loss of fulfilling experience, the constant onslaught of distraction. Bringing in Gorky, Kracauer, Benjamin, and good old Shivelbusch, Gunning describes earliest film viewers as people who needed the shock of cinema, not only for scopic pleasure, but to make sense of a world in which spatial and temporal relations were radically transforming.

Even as I accept this premise, I somewhat question whether such a dynamic has survived in similar forms today. If it does, this would seem to suggest that even when enjoying the most narrative movies, we do so discontinuously, allowing ourselves to become absorbed only intermittently. In Bergsonian terms, we operate even closer to the tip of the cone, so removed from “pure memory” that ideas of a Metzian “inner credulous viewer” seem almost risible. How might our responses to the films on Monday support such a theory? How might they refute it?