ABSTRACT
Die Grosse Attraktion (Max Reichmann, 1931), Nie yuan (Keqing Chen & Kuang-chi Tu, 1952), Novyy attraktsion (Boris Dolin, 1957), L'Attrazione (Mario Gariazzo, 1987), Fatal Attraction (Adrian Lyne, 1987), Atração Sa- tânica (Fauzi Mansur, 1990), Attrazione pericolosa (Bruno Mattei, 1993), Family Attraction (Brian Hecker, 1998), The Last Big Attraction (Hopwood DePree, 1999), The Rules of Attraction (Roger Avary, 2002), Animal Attraction (Keith Hooker, 2004), Futile Attraction (Mark Prebble, 2004), Laws of Attraction (Peter Howitt, 2004). This is just a selection of movie titles that over the last seventy-five years have ensured the film spectator diegetic attractions; from shorts to feature length films; from comedy to romance, from drama and thriller to low-budget horror; from the USA to the USSR, from Hong Kong to Brazil. None of these films - not even the most popular one, Fatal Attraction - is discussed in the present anthology. What is studied, however, is the attractiveness of the notion “attraction,” its use and usefulness, within the field of cinema studies and beyond. This anthology specifically reflects on the term as employed in the phrase “cinema of attractions,” coined in the mid-1980s by Tom Gunning and André Gaudreault in relation to early cinema and proven to be adequate, or at least “attractive,” for the definition of contemporary special effect cinema as well. The Matrix (Andy and Larry Wachowski, 1999), for instance, can be conceived of as a reloaded form of cinema of attractions in that it is “dedicated to presenting discontinuous visual attractions, moments of spectacle rather than narrative.” 1 Now, twenty years after the “birth” of the “cinema of attractions” (and, as I will discuss below, ten years after the “rebirth” of the “cinématographie-attraction”), it is the perfect time to look back upon the debate and question the relevance of the concept for the future.
