Attention, Music, Dance: Embodying the “Cinema of Attractions”

Davinia Caddy

doi:10.54103/sss15963

Abstract

In this essay I take up the question of whether the “cinema of attractions,” as identified and analyzed by film scholars Tom Gunning and André Gaudreault, might be a useful tool for critical analysis not only of early silent film, its exhibitionist aesthetics, and approach to spectatorship, but of theatrical dance from the period. Certainly, as for its general historical currency, the “cinema of attractions” is thought to encode the culture of modernity from which it arose: the visual spectacle, sensory fascination, bodily engagement, mechanical rhythm, violent juxtapositions, and new experiences of time and space available within the modern urban environment. Moreover, that cinema relied in no small part on dance itself: as a performing art, dance was central to the “attractions” industry, prime raw material starring The Body in Motion, a favorite fascination of contemporary art and popular entertainment. My aim is to push the analogy further, suggesting how cinema and theatrical dance might cue a similar mode of attention: that is, despite the former’s reliance on the camera, its reproductive aesthetic and industrial mechanicity, and the latter’s live theatrical aspect. Indeed, in the latter, I argue, music can be analogized to the camera itself, helping determine and sustain a particular attention economy, while pointing to itself—just as filmed objects stare at the camera—as artifice or contrivance.

Highlights

As one of the most popular performing arts of the period, dance was central to the “attractions” industry, prime raw material that starred The Body in Motion, a favorite fascination of contemporary cinema.[10]
21 Fuller, quoted in “Lois [sic] Fuller in a Church,” n.d.; clipping, Houghton Library, Harvard University, Theatre Collection Clippings 1. She continued: “No one can tell you what Beethoven thought when he wrote the Moonlight Sonata; no one knows Chopin’s point of view in his nocturnes, but to each music lover there is in them a story, the story of his own experience and his own explorations into the field of art
What’s more, in its ability to circumvent a developmental trajectory, Le Sacre is marked by the same kind of formal non-continuity, dynamism, and flux that characterizes the “cinema of attractions.”

Summary

19 There are two notable exceptions

Tom Gunning, “Light, Motion, Cinema!: The Heritage of Loïe Fuller and Germaine Dulac,” Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media 46, no. 1 (2005): 106–29; and Felicia McCarren, Dancing Machines: Choreographies of the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), esp. 43–64. See Stéphane Mallarmé, “Considérations sur l’art du ballet et la Loïe Fuller,” National Observer, May 13, 1893 and Paul Valéry, “Philosophie de la danse” (1936), reprinted in Oeuvres, vol 1, ed. 21 Fuller, quoted in “Lois [sic] Fuller in a Church,” n.d.; clipping, Houghton Library, Harvard University, Theatre Collection Clippings 1. She continued: “No one can tell you what Beethoven thought when he wrote the Moonlight Sonata; no one knows Chopin’s point of view in his nocturnes, but to each music lover there is in them a story, the story of his own experience and his own explorations into the field of art. Ernest Gillet’s Loin du bal was chosen by theater director Rudolph Aronson not for its expressive potential or pictorial associations; rather, the tune, played initially by a single violin in a darkened theater, was immediately recognizable, identifiable, “hummable”—“a perennial drawing-room

22 See my chapter “Making Moves in Reception Studies

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