Week 4
- Adjedmaa Ali
- May 3, 2020
- 1 min read
This chapter was a complex reading. From my understanding, this chapter talked about early cinema analysis broke down into 3 assumptions. Evolutionary, cinematic, and narrative. Evolutionary assumptions makes sense as an initial response to the evolution of cinema, we learn from the mistakes and grow into new technologies. Cinema grows linearly into what it is today. This I understand. However, cinematic and narrative have more complex and complicated definitions. Cinematic assumptions from what I understand is that cinema had to grow into its "cinematic essence" . It had a technological connection to theater in its reproduction. I think this is shown a lot in early cinema. Over dramatized and other aspects of theater performance. I think over time cinema became its own genre. It had to grow from something and theater was probably the closest to early cinema. I feel like all 3 of these assumptions could be combined. There are aspects of each that are true.
We talked alot about this reading during the zoom session because almost everyone had a tough time with it. It is one of the hardest ones that we will do but it is also on of the most important. Tom Gunning, the author of the piece, basically revolutionized how we think about early cinema by discarding all three of the theoretical approaches that he defines early on in the essay and come up with a fourth option. That option is to not look at early cinema as a primitive first step towards contemporary cinema. Instead, he discards the idea of the linear or evolutionary development of cinema and decides to consider early cinema as a separate entity with its own…