Cinema Of Attractions Research Articles

Far from paradise: The body, the apparatus and the image of contemporary virtual reality

The contemporary popularity of virtual reality devices such as the Oculus Rift has links not just with earlier eras of virtual reality technology, but with recurrent discourse surrounding the moving image and spectatorship. The articulation of the Oculus Rift in public through YouTube ‘reaction’ videos and media moments such as the Oculus Rift Time magazine cover of 2015 links contemporary virtual reality to early cinema discourses of credulous spectatorship, strenuous spectatorship and the cinema of attractions. Through these comparisons, this article argues that the ‘image’ of contemporary virtual reality technology is not that of a simulated exotic paradise enabled by the apparatus, but the apparatus itself, the body of its user and that body’s gender.

Film Writing Adapted for Game Narrative: Myth or Error?

Film Writing Adapted for Game Narrative: Myth or Error?

A imagem interessante: cinema e suspensão narrativa

Este artigo busca investigar a partir de que momento, por quais critérios e com que exatidão podemos afirmar que há “suspensão narrativa”, quais as qualidades das imagens que operam essa suspensão e quais as suas consequências na experiência do espectador. Para tanto, articularemos um panorama teórico sustentado por diversas noções – o “conceito estendido de moving-picture dance” (Carroll), a “fotogenia” (Epstein, Xavier), o “número musical” (Altman, Sutton), o “cinema de atrações” (Geaudreault, Borges), o “punctum” e o “terceiro sentido” (Barthes) e o “excesso” (Thompson) – e avançaremos que, ao rescindir com as motivações e com a lógica causal da trama, essa imagem “interessante por si própria” acaba por revelar uma “elasticidade” latente na própria narrativa cinematográfica.

Cat Videos and the Superflat Cinema of Attractions

Cat Videos and the Superflat Cinema of Attractions

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

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.

Islam, Consciousness and Early Cinema: Said Nursî and the Cinema of God

The early 20thcentury works of Kurdish Islamic thinker Said Nursî explore how cinema can provide access to the divine. Yet, considering the periods of Nursî’s life that were spent in prison, or in exile in remote locations, it is likely that the cinema he was discussing was, very specifically, the early silent cinema of attractions. Thus the distinctive format of this cinema can be uncovered in, and seen to structure, Nursî’s formulation of ‘God's cinema’. With this proposition in mind, this article indicates something of the potential that an engagement with Nursî’s cinematic writing offers for reconsidering topics already much discussed in film-philosophy, such as that of time in the works of Gilles Deleuze.

Dreams in Films and Films as Dreams: Surrealism and Popular American Cinema

Les films ayant recours à des séquences de rêves étaient particulièrement nombreux au cours de la période transitoire. Dès 1915, ces films connurent une baisse de régime considérable avant de redevenir plus nombreux à partir de la fin des années 1930, et ce, grâce à la popularisation de la psychanalyse. Dans le cinéma classique hollywoodien, les composantes du langage cinématographique furent mises en avant dans le but de rendre compte de l’étrangeté des rêves et leurs écarts par rapport à la « réalité » de la diégèse des films. Les surréalistes subvertissaient le style réaliste classique en faisant des rêves le modèle de leur « réalité », et cette subversion fut mise en pratique dans les quelques films qu’ils avaient réalisés. Surréalistes et classiques hollywoodiens s’approprièrent la psychanalyse freudienne dans leurs approches des rêves ; cependant ces appropriations divergeaient radicalement. Un examen des séquences oniriques dans des comédies musicales permettra d’éclairer le débat sur la distinction entre les rêves dans les films et les films oniriques.

The Aesthetics of Spectacle in Early Modern Drama and Modern Cinema: Robert Greene’s Theatre of Attractions by Jenny Sager (review)

Reviewed by: The Aesthetics of Spectacle in Early Modern Drama and Modern Cinema: Robert Greene’s Theatre of Attractions by Jenny Sager Callan Davies The Aesthetics of Spectacle in Early Modern Drama and Modern Cinema: Robert Greene’s Theatre of Attractions. Jenny Sager. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Pp. x + 208. $90 (hardback), $73.12 (e-book). In one of his Lord Mayor’s Pageants, Thomas Heywood complains of the “throng” who “carry their eares in their eyes” (Londini Emporia, London 1633, B3v-B4r). His contempt for fans of spectacle is ironic, considering that he is one of early modern England’s most spectacular dramatists, sitting firmly alongside Robert Greene, the subject of Jenny Sager’s exciting monograph. Though a preference for the ear over the eye has characterized criticism, past and present, of early modern drama, recent studies have sought to balance the scales. The Aesthetics of Spectacle is part of a growing body of criticism—one that combines literary analysis with performance and film studies—that seeks to see again the value of early modern visual effects. In so doing, it brings into focus one of the most influential and critically overlooked Elizabethan dramatists. Twenty-first-century film critics are less scornful of those who “carry their eares in their eyes”; reviews of the recent blockbuster Gravity suggest that its powerful visual effects are artistic and intellectual achievements. Variety’s Justin C. Chang praised it for restoring “a sense of wonder, terror and possibility to the bigscreen [sic] that should inspire awe among critics and audiences worldwide” (28 August 2013). If the visual qualities of a 2013 film can be intellectually appreciated, then why not the dumb-shows, brazen heads, squibs, and hell-mouths that are so prominent in the popular entertainment of the 1590s and 1600s? Sager’s study, then, remedies the “taint of Puritanism and anti-theatricalism” in literary criticism by using “modern cinema” as a comparative medium with analogous visual effects (1). It associates early modern theatrical practices with the twentieth- and twenty-first-century commercial film industry (a methodology also seen, for instance, in Emma Smith’s “Genres: Cinematic and Early Modern” in Shakespeare Bulletin 32.1). In order to suggest the usefulness of cinematic analogy, The Aesthetics of Spectacle begins and ends each chapter with a short consideration of a visually spectacular film, from Jaws to The Godfather to George Méliès’s The man with the rubber head. It is not, however, a comparative study. These cinematic correspondences bookend what are largely historical readings of Greene’s plays and their affect, effects, contexts, and popularity. Yet, while the comparisons are slight, they underline Sager’s aim of applying to early modern plays the more generous and sensitive approach to visual effects seen in film studies. The chapter on Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay and Alphonsus King of Aragon uses Méliès’s metatheatrical special effects as a means of appreciating the value and influence of Greene’s drama; like early film’s “cinema of attractions,” Greene’s plays “prioritise the act of display not the need to tell a story; they prioritise mimesis over diegesis” (106). [End Page 771] Indeed, the comparisons with modern cinema are part of the monograph’s theoretical framework—a framework outlined in the introduction and the opening chapter, drawing on a number of modern and early modern influences, from the Aristotelian conception of wonder to Brechtian theory. If the range of reference in these establishing chapters seems broad, it represents Sager’s interest in using cinema as a conceptual analogy while maintaining, in reading the plays themselves, a considered historical analysis. While Friar Bacon and Alphonsus can be seen to contain the hallmarks of a “theatre of attractions,” they are also deeply concerned with idolatry, iconoclasm, and religious representation. The reading of Orlando Furioso explores the association between madness and creativity through a comparison with Rob Reiner’s 1990 film adaptation of Stephen King’s Misery. The chapter goes beyond theoretical discussion to argue concisely and persuasively for Greene’s interrogation in the play of intertextuality, classical imitation, and Marlovian drama. If one of the book’s aims is to establish “how spectacle, rather than being...

Audio-description reloaded: An analysis of visual scenes in 2012 and Hero

This article explores whether the so-called new “cinema of attractions”, with its supposed focus on visual effects to the detriment of storytelling, requires a specific approach to audio-description (AD). After some thoughts on film narrative in this type of cinema and the way in which it incorporates special effects, selected scenes with AD from two feature films, 2012 (directed by Emmerich) and Hero (directed by Zhang Yimou), are analysed. 2012 is a disaster movie aiming to thrill the audience with action. Hero is an equally visual movie but its imagery has an aesthetic purpose. The analysis investigates how space, time and action are treated in the films and the ADs, and how the information is presented in terms of focalization, timing and phrasing. The results suggest that effect-driven narratives require carefully timed and phrased ADs that devote much attention to the prosody of the AD script, its interaction with sounds and the use of metaphor.

Demolition d’un mur: The social construction of technology and early cinema projection systems

This article suggests that the widely adopted principles of the ‘Cinema of Attractions’ is a limited framework for studying the early period of the invention of moving pictures and proposes the use of ideas drawn from writers on the social construction of technology as the basis for a more useful and comprehensive methodology for analysis of the early period of invention. With examples drawn from both the technological artefacts of early cinema (the Maltese Cross intermittent mechanism, the Lumière Cinématographe) and from emerging cinematic practices (travelling exhibitors, optical projection systems), the alternative methodology described here is shown to be helpful in re-evaluating and restructuring the archaic inherited master narrative of the invention of moving pictures. The essay suggests that by looking at the material technology and practices of early cinema without prejudice or prior assumption, there is still much to be learned from surviving resources too long ignored; which in turn reveals a distinct need to restructure the habitual story of invention, which was formed in the 1920s and remains largely untested by modern scholarship.

Do Cats Know They Rule YouTube? Surveillance and the Pleasures of Cat Videos

Did you see the videos where the cat jumps in the box, attacks the printer or tries to leap from the snowy car? As the availability and popularity of watching videos on the Internet has risen rapidly in the last decade, so has the prevalence of cat videos. Although the cuteness of YouTube videos of cats might make them appear frivolous, in fact there is a significant irony at their heart: online cat videos enable corporate surveillance of viewers, yet viewers seem just as oblivious to this as the cats featured in the videos. Towards this end, I consider the distinguishing features of contemporary cat videos, focusing particularly on their narrative structure and mode of observation. I compare cat videos with the “Aesthetic of Astonishment” of early cinema and with dog videos, to explore the nexus of a spectatorship of thrills and feline performance. In particular, I highlight a unique characteristic of these videos: the cats’ unselfconsciousness. This, I argue, is rare in a consumer culture dominated by surveillance, where we are constantly aware of the potential for being watched. The unselfconsciousness of cats in online videos offers viewers two key pleasures: to imagine the possibility of freedom from surveillance, and to experience the power of administering surveillance as unproblematic. Ultimately, however, cat videos enable viewers to facilitate our own surveillance, and we do so with the gleeful abandon of a kitten jumping in a tissue box

Dance and the Theatricality of Berlin School Cinema

The Berlin School has been identified as a new cinema movement of realist-style observation, deliberate pacing, and reductive aesthetics. This essay proposes a new direction of inquiry. A comprehensive exploration of the dance scenes in a host of films opens up the Berlin School as a cinema of spectacle and theatricality that harks back to the aesthetics of the early “cinema of attractions.” Careful examinations of the complex dance scenes in Valeska Grisebach's Mein Stern (Be My Star) (2001) and Sehnsucht (Longing) (2006), Angela Schanelec's Plätze in Städten (Places in Cities) (1998) and Mein langsames Leben (Passing Summer) (2001), Maren Ade's Alle Anderen (Everybody Else) (2009), and Jan Krüger's Unterwegs (On the Road) (2004) introduce a new layer of engagement with the cinema of the Berlin School that stresses its important relationship to the theatrical and musical traditions of filmmaking and spectatorship.

The stereoscopic attraction

While the commonly received wisdom in scholarship of early stereoscopy asserts that it fell victim to photography’s success and eventually ‘died’ in the late 1930s, this article calls for a less determinist reading of stereoscopy’s place in media culture. Such a change requires the recognition that stereoscopy is a technique applicable across media, not a continually dying and reborn medium. Arguing that the stereograph laid some of the groundwork for the ‘cinema of attractions’ before it suffered from cinema’s capacity to supply precisely such spectacular modes of visual engagement on a grander sale, this article suggests that there is much to be taken from understanding early stereoscopy as a prototypical attraction. In the current context, in which not just three-dimensional (3D) cinema but also 3D television and 3D gaming all offer new forms of stereoscopic attraction, the content of early spectacular stereocards offers a wealth of source material with which to understand a newly resurgent form.

The Cinema and the Origins of Literary Modernism by Andrew Shail (review)

Reviewed by: The Cinema and the Origins of Literary Modernism by Andrew Shail Jesse Schotter (bio) THE CINEMA AND THE ORIGINS OF LITERARY MODERNISM, by Andrew Shail. New York: Routledge Publishers, 2012. 253 pp. $125.00. There has always been something distinctively “cinematic” about modernist fiction, but what exactly that something is has proven, more often than not, elusive. Despite strong recent works on cinema and modernism by Laura Marcus, David Trotter, and others, too many studies still rely on attempts to draw inexact connections between literary and filmic techniques, finding examples of “montage” or “close-ups” in fiction, for example.1 Andrew Shail largely avoids this trap in his fascinating new study of film and high modernism, which brings a refreshing precision and an innovative focus to the juxtaposition of the cinema and the novel. Shail remains committed to cinema’s primary role in encouraging innovation in the modern novel, as opposed simply to being one manifestation of larger cultural shifts in understandings of time, space, and media. But his focus is on the larger institutions of cinema rather than on individual films. Shail uses the term “cinema’s image-regime” (34) to focus on larger trends in film content, production, distribution, and reception, particularly in the early 1910s. In so doing, he is not as concerned with individual moments of influence, with specific allusions on the part of the modernists to cinema. Rather, he takes for granted that, given the dominance of film as a cultural force in the teens and twenties, modernist writers would inevitably have been reacting to it. As he states, the book “tackles cinema as a popular experience rather than as a stylistic toolkit to be sampled and emulated” (3). Shail thus strives to show how “cinema exercised an extensive unconscious influence on modernist writing” (36), and, given the difficulty of that task, the connections between film and writing can occasionally get a bit lost. Shail’s comprehensive engagement with other critics and theorists also at times threatens to eclipse his own original approaches and arguments, but throughout, his ambitions, historical depth, and innovative readings of James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Joseph Conrad make The Cinema and the Origins of Literary Modernism a vital contribution to the study of film and modernism. Shail’s study is particularly useful in moving the moment of cinema’s influence back from the 1920s to the 1910s. While most previous works have looked at the mid-to-late twenties, which saw the founding of the journal Close-Up and Woolf’s publication of her essay “The Cinema,”2 Shail concentrates on the transformation of film technique [End Page 1132] and exhibition from 1908-1911. Building from Tom Gunning’s work on the “cinema of attractions,” Shail reminds readers of how that period saw the development of the stylistic hallmarks of classical cinema—cross-cutting, match cuts, eyeline matches, and the like—that formed the “cinema of narrative integration” (41).3 But he also points to the way film first emerged as a distinct medium during the period. Before this, film was still often seen as a part of penny arcades or music-hall performances, with movies being presented alongside live theater or lectures. Only from 1908 to 1911 did the film-only exhibition become the dominant mode in which the public viewed them. For Shail, this shift to the “cinema of narrative integration” instigated the later stylistic innovations of high modernism, as he traces in his most compelling and convincing chapter on Joyce and Woolf. He argues, fundamentally, that cinema and high modernism should be characterized not by fragmentation but by continuity. Thus in making the often-discussed comparison between “Wandering Rocks” and film techniques, Shail asserts that the real link between the two is cross-cutting rather than montage. Montage—a concept that postdates Ulysses—emphasizes conflict or disruption, while cross-cutting involves the establishment of temporal continuity across space. As Shail writes, D. W. Griffith’s cross-cutting is “a structure of alternation between multiple simultaneous streams of actions, in which time always passes in stream A while the narrative is showing stream B” (108). Unlike previous works by Edwin Porter, in which the narrative jumps...

Life driven by death: animation aesthetics and the comic uncanny

Many approaches to animation underscore a double relationship to life and movement, a relationship that, according to the seminal book Disney Animation: the Illusion of Life, should be expressed in realistic motion, linear narrative and empathetic characterization. Implicit in this formulation is a kind of death behind the illusion, one that is often theorized as a moment of stasis, the fundamental condition for animation's life. This essay argues against the conflation of life and movement, identifying a death-driven, immortal life beyond finitude, one that has a particular legacy in the history of cinema. Less a definition of animation as such than one of its particular aesthetic modalities, this death-driven animation has usually been noticed only in the paradigmatic genres of expressionism and horror, its calling card the anxiety suggested by Freud's uncanny. Here, I construct a comic current of the uncanny, found most visibly and affectively in the cinema of attractions, cartoons of the 1920s and 1930s as well as contemporary horror comedies. Against ironic readings of this comic uncanny, one insistent on the gap between the film's uncanny events and a cognitively distant audience, I argue that there is a humour in horror that overcomes this gap through an alliance of kinaesthetic movement on screen with the spectator's corporeal sensation. Such uncanny movement, both seen and sensed, is figured in the grotesque violence of ghosts, partial objects and undead creatures, their exaggeration and over-driven motion provoking less fear or ironic pleasure than a perverse enjoyment that animates along with these figures’ plasmatic movements and transformations.

Getting the last laugh: Opera legacy, comedy and camp as attraction in the late years of Taiyupian

ABSTRACTThis article looks at the re-emergence of a cinema of attraction in the last years of taiyupian, a Hoklo topolect cinema created in Taiwan. Why were these years the ‘last’, and who was watching? This article makes use of newspaper articles, advertisements, and the numbers, but focuses on questions of style. The 1969 film Zhang Di Seeks A-Zu, featuring pop singer Zhang Di and opera star Yang Lihua, well articulates the comedic and camp aesthetics of this period, as well as the renewed importance of opera culture across different media. These aesthetics gesture towards a particular audience and viewing culture, while offering alternative values to classical realist cinema.

<디 워>, 매혹의 영화

<디 워>는 실패한 블록버스터인가? 내용과 형식에 있어서 이 영화의 가치에 대해 재고의 여지는 남아 있지 않은가? 이 연구는 이러한 의문에 대한 답을 제공하는 것을 목적으로 한다. 2007년 심형래 감독의 <디 워>는 영화 자체에 대한 평가보다는 영화를 둘러싼 민족주의 담론으로 평단과 관객의 이목을 집중시켰으나, 이야기와 형식 모두에서 분명 기존의 한국형 블록버스터와 차이를 보이면서 850만이라는 투입 대비 다소 실망스러운 박스오피스 성공과 민족주의에 경도된 일부 관객들의 열광적인 지지, 그리고 영화의 예술성과 완성도에 대한 평단의 비판적 시각이라고 하는 부조화스러우면서도 이해하기 어려운 결과를 낳았다. 결국 <디 워>는 문화적으로 논쟁거리를 제공했을 뿐 산업계와 비평계에서는 별다른 주목을 받지 못한 영화로 남겨졌다. 그러나 한 가지 흥미로운 점은 <디 워>를 지지하는 관객들과 비판적인 시각을 견지한 평론가들 사이에 한 가지 공통된 시각이 있다는 점이다. 그것은 <디 워>의 스펙터클이 한국 관객의 기대 이상으로, 그리고 스토리 전개와 불균형을 이룰 정도로 불거졌다는 것을 양자 모두 인정하고 있다는 것이다. 내러티브를 압도하는 <디 워>의 스펙터클은 일면 팬들을 열광시키는 동시에 평론가들로 하여금 이 영화를 외면하게 만드는 원인을 제공하기도 한 것이다. 이러한 맥락에서, 이 연구는 <디 워>의 예술적/이론적/비평적 가치에 논쟁을 불러일으킨 이러한 측면, 즉 '내러티브를 압도하는 스펙터클' 내지는 '스펙터클을 보여주기 위한 구실로서 존재하는 내러티브'라는 영화의 미학적 특성을 살펴보고 이를 통해 작품성의 측면에서 실패작으로 치부되어 온 <디 워>에 일말의 비평적 가치를 제고하는 데에 그 목적이 있다. 또한 <디 워>는 "기존의 영화비평 방식을 통해 접근해갈 수 없는 새로운 범주에 속하는 영상물"임을 제시하고 결과적으로 새로운 개념적 틀을 통해 비평적 평가를 받을 수 있는 기회를 제공하는 데에 이 연구의 의의가 있다 하겠다. <디 워>의 서사미학을 밝히기 위해 스펙터클 중심적인 서사성(narrativity)의 미학, 내지는 내러티브보다 스펙터클을 더 중시하는 제작 양식을 일컫는 앙드레 고드로(Andre Gaudreault)의 '기교성(trickality)'이라는 개념과 이러한 미학이 지배하는 영화를 가리키는 톰 거닝(Tom Gunning)의 '매혹의 영화(the cinema of attractions)'라는 개념을 살펴볼 것이다. Is <D-War> a failed blockbuster film? Is there no room for reconsideration of the value of the film in terms of its contents and forms? The purpose of this study is to answer these questions. In 2007, SHIM Hyung-rae's <D-War> was in the limelight due to the nationalist discourse around the film rather than evaluation of the film itself. In terms of its narrative and formal properties, the film showed the difference from the Korean nationalist blockbuster films. It led to the disaccord and hard-to-understand results of having somewhat disappointed box-office success of 8,500,000 audiences in comparison to the input, of receiving well by a generous part of the audiences absorbed by nationalism, and of getting the critics' cynic criticism of the film's cinematic value. Eventually <D-War> only provided the cultural battlefield of nationalism, was left as an unnoticed film in the realm of industry and criticism. However, it was interesting that there was a common ground between the film's supporters and the cynic critics. Both sides were being acknowledged that the spectacle of <D-War> was way out of proportion to the degree that the spectacle was unbalanced with the story unfolding, achieved more than expected. Its spectacle overwhelming the narrative enfever a few audiences, and at the same time, it provided some reasons making critics face away from the film. In this context, the purpose of this study is to examine <D-War>'s aesthetics that 'the spectacle dominating narrative' or 'the narrative as a pretext for showing spectacle,' leading to discussion of artistic/theoretical/critical value and to find out cinematic value of the film being regarded as a failure. In addition, this study is significant in that it suggests that <D-War> is a new kind of moving image that it cannot be analyzed with existed critical methods of narrative film criticism; as a result, this study provides the chance to be evaluated through a new conceptual frame of the film. In order to grasp the narratological aesthetics, this study focuses on the concept of trickality that Andre Gaudreault suggests, and Tom Gunning's 'the cinema of attractions,' referring to the spectacle-oriented narrativity or the mode of production displaying the spectacle more than the narrative.

Playing with Memories: Essays on Guy Maddin (review)

Reviewed by: Playing with Memories: Essays on Guy Maddin Kay Armatage (bio) David Church, editor. Playing with Memories: Essays on Guy Maddin. University of Manitoba Press. 2009. xiii, 280. $29.95 Guy Maddin is one of the most loquacious of Canadian film-makers. His conversation is garrulous, effusively personal and autobiographical, and deliriously confessional. He responds enthusiastically and ingenuously to questions about anything anyone dares to ask, spontaneously and richly connecting the characters and narratives of his films to his own experience and family history. As an illustration of this continuing engagement with self-revelation, take the self-generated title of his series of lectures and performances at Innis College, University of Toronto, in 2010: ‘I’m Going to Pull Down My Pants: Confession & the Cinema of Uninhibition.’ Already two books of interviews are in print, as well as countless one-off interviews in cinema journals and film magazines. [End Page 758] Maddin is also wonderfully generous with the dissemination of his own work, including scripts and documentation of his films, as well as publication of his private journals. As a result, the critical discourse surrounding his work is deeply larded with quotations from Maddin, as well as from his former mentor and close collaborator, screenwriter George Toles. It is no wonder that Maddin’s witty reflections on film history, the future of the forgotten and the unknown, the allegorical complexion of autobiography, the welcome anaesthetic of amnesia, and the truth of melodrama (among many other poetic and often haunting statements) productively activate a critical context for his work. In addition, perhaps not so productively, his statements of his own intentions are routinely ladled into analyses of the films. From my training in film theory, I approach with cynicism a book that takes as its subtitle ‘Essays on Guy Maddin,’ for I see this as indication of a determining biographical paradigm centering on the person of the film-maker rather than his work. The introduction to Playing with Memories, by editor David Church, sets out the biographical details accordingly. Yet the welcome surprise of these essays is that, while almost all of them include citations of Maddin in their footnotes, they come at the films from divergent angles. There are a few commonalities of course, consistent with the current trends of contemporary film scholarship. A common thread is the reinvigoration of thinkers from the past. Walter Benjamin is a perennial, a master of many moves; Freud in the context of Maddin is a must (while Lacan is outré these days); E.H. Gombrich is a breath of fresh air, not seen in a long time; Tom Gunning’s ‘cinema of attractions’ seems a bit tired, too familiar to be productive; and then along comes Nietzsche dancing with Freud’s ‘uncanny’ and we are back on Broadway. In addition to the differences among their theoretical references, the essays take effectively opposing positions on key critical issues. Are the films postmodern or nostalgic? Are they camp or kitsch, melodramas or fairy tales? Do they evoke the bergfilme (German mountain film) or the baroque Trauerspiel (‘sorrow play’)? Should they be read as deixis (the orientational features of language)? Are they avant-garde or mainstream? Do their tattered surfaces revivify the lost past of cinema, or do they suggest the impossibility of retrieving the past? Do they trace the 1970s model of Canadian cinema as featuring ineffectual and repressed characters, or do they carve out a post-national space that queers the connections between nation, family, sexuality, and gender? While contrarian views abound in this collection, most of the essays include close analysis of the films and argue their points pretty convincingly. About half the essays have been published elsewhere in the past – for example, those by Geoff Pevere, Steven Shapiro, William Beard, and Will [End Page 759] Straw – but their inclusion in the anthology is worthwhile as they are often cited in later articles. In sum, this book will be an effective teaching aide, and it is a pretty enjoyable read for those of us who love Guy Maddin. And really, who doesn’t? Kay Armatage Cinema Studies, University of Toronto Copyright © 2012 University of Toronto Press Incorporated

O cinema sensível: sensorialidades em pré e pós-cinemas

From the analysis of communicational spaces that demand and produce more sensory stimuli, this article proposes the idea of a new cinema that makes use of different digital technologies, which is full of new materialities, conceptually approaching the early cinemas or cinema of attractions. The cinema of attractions format was characterized by the absence of a linear narrative and a cause and effect logic, and the effective appeal of participation and involvement of the audience. As well as in new cinema, the audience’s senses were synaesthetically summoned in cinema of attractions, offering new experiences of perception and consciousness of reality.Key words: digital cinema, cinema of attractions, sensorialities.

The Sunshine soundtrack as aural attraction

The relationship between image track and soundtrack within film has generally privileged the moving image. Early cinema and contemporary special effects cinema have both been described as a ‘cinema of attractions’ due to the emphasis upon special effects and computer-generated imagery. Within science fiction the importance of image has been emphasised as a way of conveying alien environments and new technology. Drawing on the work of writers on sound such as Chion and Sonnenschein, on Mikhail Bakhtin's notion of the chronotope and the idea of the sublime, this paper explores the ways in which soundtrack fulfils the role of ‘aural attraction’ as an alternative way of understanding the function of sound within science fiction film. Sunshine is a British science fiction film which charts the journey of a crew travelling into the sun in order to save the earth. The soundtrack is a collaboration between Underworld and John Murphy and it draws upon ambient and dance music in order to convey the atmosphere of fear, hope and the sublime when facing the sun. In evoking the space mission the soundtrack blends sound effects and musical score to provide an evocative aural composition which accentuates, extends and replaces the visual image within the film.