Why the "Arrival" myth is really about us...

               I'm familiar with the old myth about audiences fleeing in terror from the Lumière brothers' Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station, which is now generally believed to be nonsense. Gunning's writings have motivated me revisit the story; on reflection, I realize that the myth is not actually about how people viewed films in 1895 but rather about how we, who created the myth, view films today.

               I've talked with a handful of young people who cannot or will not watch silent films (and have even heard of people who will not watch films in black and white). Their assumption seems to be that early films are primitive versions of modern films which try but ultimately are unable to achieve what cinema does today. However, it is clear that early films have a different approach to cinema altogether. This is backed up by the recent production and critical acclaim of The Artist, a silent film made in 2011; clearly this style is employed not for practical reasons (i.e. lacking the technology to record a film with sound) but for artistic ones. Gunning refers to early cinema's approach to the visual as a "cinema of attractions" in which it is the spectacle of the film itself, rather than the narrative, which is the main focus of the audience. Other readings for this class point out that popular film today reinforces the illusion of voyeurism; the screen and the cinematic techniques are meant to be invisible so that audiences can focus purely on the plot. This is perhaps why our invention of the Arrival of a Train myth really reflects our "pigheaded" inability to see the screen; our insistence that we ignore the illusion and see only the content is like Mrs. Sieppe assertion that she cannot enjoy a film that she knows to be "only a trick". Thus, when we modern audiences balk at silent films or black-and-white films or special effects that are not "realistic", it reflects not our sophistication but ultimately our naivety. Gunning goes on to explain how we retrospectively write a history of film marked by the development of editing; however, we must remember that early montage (like Eisenstein's) was used artistically, not to reinforce the illusion of the coherent diegetic space. Gunning explains: "Early films are enframed rather than emplotted" (101).

              Because of this, early cinema draws more from vaudeville and magic shows than from theater. Fisher and Beckman both discuss the role of the vanishing woman in this kind of discourse, in which a body is presented as a problem that is made to disappear. We might recall Keeling pointing out that the etymology of the word problem means something that "sticks out" or is "thrust forward", therefore it is quite fitting that problems are dealt with as images that are erased. The "dematerializing" of the female, or the changing of her body into a spirit, especially deals with male concerns and fears about female corporality, particularly with regard to the "dangerous" sexuality of women. I wonder how this compares and contrasts to the techniques employed in modern film, specifically the eroticization and objectification of the female body.