Alan Cholodenko - (The) Death (of) the Animator, or: the Felicity of Felix, Part I
Posted on July 11th, 2009The Kingdom of Shadows1
The night of the 4th of July 1896 was a special night for cinema. It was the night that Maxim Gorky attended the screening of the Lumière brothers projections at the Nizhny-Novgorod fair in Russia and wrote the first significant review of cinema, a review that for me as for Tom Gunning offers us the first substantial account of the experience of cinema, a rich, indeed paradigmatic, guide to cinema and its abiding senses, sensations. For me, and it appears Gunning, Gorky’s extraordinary ‘first sight’ of cinema defines the very experience of cinema spectatorship (and also too cinema analysis, film theory).
When I say Gunning and I, I reference his canonical article ‘An Aesthetic of Astonishment: Early Film and the (In)credulous Spectator’ (Gunning 1989) and my article ‘The Crypt, the Haunted House, of Cinema’ (Cholodenko 2004). My article extends, qualifies and recasts Gunning’s formulation in ‘An Aesthetic of Astonishment’ of his notion of the cinema of attractions, also by rereading Gorky’s review. It is crucial to understand at the outset that Gunning’s re-modelling of early cinema as his cinema of attractions has become the orthodoxy in Film Studies.
Although I have precious little space to take up not only Gunning’s but my article here, let me make it clear that I am nevertheless in this new paper adding to and enlarging upon the work I did in my article on his. So while I do rehearse points I made there, I am also animating what I take to be pivotal new ideas from a return engagement with his and my text. It is an engagement allowing me to propose (in section I) that Gunning confirms my still apparently radical notion for animation studies, articulated in so many publications, that not only is animation a form of film, all film, including cinema by definition, is a form of animation. Moreover, it allows me to argue not only the singular importance of animation to cinema and to film but (in section II) the singular importance of death to animation, hence to cinema and to film.
