Attention – Problem or Solution?

Some of the most persistent debates among scholars arising from twentyfirst century crises of cinema have centered on spectatorship and narrative, figured as a deficit of attention and the decay of storytelling. Filmmaking, according to this argument, is threatened by the impatient, hyperactive spectator and trapped by the contradiction between ‘game logic’ and ‘narrative logic’. Of course, these symptoms of decline can be turned around and advertised as signs of continuity, transformation, and renewal: as to the active-interactive spectator, his or her heightened involvement in the story or immersion in the spectacle has been the goal of the popular arts for centuries.

In what follows, I shall take a different line of defence: from the onset, narrative cinema has incorporated forms of active spectatorship, since the audience rarely if ever experiences a film as wholly external to itself and its world. Cinema offers modes of engagement with the world, of which it has become a part—based as it is on an ontological principle of interaction between cinema, spectator, and the world. To substantiate this claim, I shall argue that it is possible to map a certain configuration of variables around spectatorship and narrative and to trace their presence in such a configuration throughout the history of cinema, thus hoping to provide a possible ‘archaeology’ for both the impatient viewer and the interactive user. It means shifting the ground and focus of traditional film theories while extending the various conceptual frameworks deployed by the studies of spectatorship in cultural studies. Such a shift is best implemented by a ‘return’ to early cinema: reviewing—and, if necessary, revising—our interpretations of cinema's initial modes of engagement and immersion. If successful, it should permit a fresh approach to the issue whether there is a future for cinema after narrative, thereby also illuminating another perennial question: why and how did cinema turn to narrative in the first place?

An obvious starting point for such an archaeology would be to re-examine the evidence we have of how spectators construed or experienced cinema around 1900—how they made sense of the different kinds of movement and of the new kinds of surface agitation within the fabric of the everyday.