[1] Historians once treated the earliest years of cinema, roughly 1895 to 1906, as a rude apprenticeship—a period in which filmmakers, not yet having discovered how to tell stories, produced little more than crude precursors to the narrative films that followed. [2] This developmental account, in which each innovation is valued for anticipating later storytelling technique, has since been sharply revised. [3] The film theorist Tom Gunning proposed that early cinema is better understood not as a failed or embryonic narrative form but as a distinct mode he termed the “cinema of attractions.” [4] On this view, the early film solicited its audience less by unfolding a story than by displaying something startling or novel directly to the viewer—a dancer, a magic trick, a moving locomotive—and often acknowledged the spectator openly, as a fairground exhibit might.
[5] The revision matters for more than chronology. [6] To read a 1900 film as a botched attempt at narrative is to judge it by criteria its makers did not share and to overlook what it was actually designed to do. [7] Gunning's reframing recovers the aesthetic logic of exhibition and spectacle that governed these films, and suggests that the impulse toward direct display did not vanish once narrative cinema matured but persisted, resurfacing in the musical number, the special-effects sequence, and other moments when a film pauses its story to show the audience something remarkable. [8] What had looked like a mere prelude thus becomes a tradition in its own right, one whose continuities with later cinema run alongside, rather than merely toward, the art of narrative.
