Cinemas of Attraction: The Pendular Swing of TikTok and Early Cinema

This paper links early cinema shorts with the discrete video content of Instagram and TikTok through an emphasis on physicality and materiality, intersecting Eisensteinian film theory with a phenomenological view of the sensorial image plane. The attraction, considered by Eisenstein as the molecular unit of the theatre (and film by extension), is revisited using the current metaphor of the stream (compared with the turn-of-the-century program), and examined as an element of physicality rather than a solely affective driver, leading toward theorization of erstwhile and contemporary loose cinemas of the body and material world. Further, the paper challenges the primacy of vision ascribed to the spectatorial era of early cinema, interrogating Tom Gunning’s classic theorization of the Cinema of Attractions in light of the emphatic physicality of both early cinema and present-day social media platforms.