For this, my first post, I have chosen Tom Gunning's An Aesthetic of Astonishment: Early Film and the (In)Credulous Spectator to remark upon. I found the reading to be amongst the more interesting of the selection we had to choose from, as its subject matter was not as esoteric as others and it established a very readable recount of cinema's initial reception.
It is a fascinating idea that only a little more than 100 years ago, people walked out of the world's first cinemas, bleary eyed, bemused or bewildered by what they had just witnessed. I was immediately struck by Gunning's retelling of an audience reaction to the Lumiere Brothers' Arrival of a Train at the Station as it reminded me of a similar story I have heard concerning audiences being so fixated on the film projector in action that many first-time filmgoers missed the projection itself. Whilst both stories are likely exaggerations, if not fabrications, it is certainly intriguing to imagine how audiences 100 years ago compare to those of today - how a lack of 'cinema literacy' as it were might have shaped their experience of the moving image.
To this end, I found Maxim Gorky's recount of an early Lumiere screening at the Nizhny-Novgorod Fair, 1896, to be extremely insightful and a little unexpected. Gorky writes that 'before you a life is surging, a life deprived of words and shorn of the living spectrum of colours -- the grey, the soundless, the bleak and dismal life.' Personally, I had a now obviously romanticised notion of how early film audiences reacted to the cinema - it ranged from their fits of terror at an oncoming train to their utter astonishment and wonder at the magical motion of a picture. I did not, however, imagine a reaction like that of Gorky's, who thought of film as a sort of representational half-life - 'not life, but its shadows'. Whilst a rather depressing viewpoint, Gorky provides a very interesting way to view cinematic progression across the proceeding 114 years. He speaks of a lifeless cinema, and yet aspects of the moving image he cites (black and white, mute, grainy) are all things of the past - gradually shed like a sort of archaic chrysalis - arguably closing the gap between man and movie.
