The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded

What have Lumière in common with Wachowski? More than one hundred years separate these two pairs of brothers who astonished, quite similarly, the film spectator of their respective time with special effects of movement: a train rushing into the audience and a bullet flying in slow motion. Do they belong to the same family of “cinema of attractions”? Twenty years ago Tom Gunning introduced the phrase “cinema of attractions” to define the essence of the earliest films made between 1895 and 19...