How It Feels To Be Run Over Analysis

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Early cinema is described and remembered as the cinema of attraction. Writer and film historian Tom Gunning introduces the expression “cinema of attraction” in his essay A Cinema of Attraction: Early Film, Its Spectator, and the Avant Garde where he writes, “The cinema of attraction solicits a highly conscious awareness of the film image engaging the viewer’s curiosity”, meaning that, in early cinema, the visual image was more important than any narrative aspect. The earliest filmmakers were more interested in the act of looking and the ways people reacted to certain images with their paramount goal being to provoke certain emotions in audiences by showing them visually stimulating imagery. For example, in Cecil Hepworth’s How It Feels To Be Run Over, a horse and buggy charges directly towards the camera guy and ends up running him over. This was very exciting for people to see at the time because of how shocking the visuals were. In Edwin S. Porter’s renowned film, The Great Train Robbery, he was able to create a similar visual impulse by showing a scene where one of the robbers fires his gun point black at the spectators. This too was visually pleasing and created heightened emotions in spectators. Both…show more content…
The Lumiére Brothers were known for their actuality films and Méliés for his charming fantasy movies. Although actuality films dealt more with realism and fantasy films formalism, both still had a common basis which was that they were both still considered part of the cinema of attraction. Gunning compares both Méliés and the Lumiére brothers and says, “one can unite them in a conception that sees cinema less as a way of telling stories than as a way of presenting a series of views to the audience, fascinating because of their illusory power (whether the realistic illusion of motion offered to the first audiences by Lumiére, or the magical illusion concocted by

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