Picture a movie theater. Not a modern one—popcorn, Marvel trailers—but a 1897 Paris hall. On screen: 50 seconds of a train pulling into a station. Front-row patrons leap up and bolt for the exit. The Lumière brothers aren’t telling a story. They’re showing a miracle. The moving image itself is the miracle. The audience didn’t come for plot. They came to see light come alive.
This era—from 1895 to roughly 1906—film scholar Tom Gunning of the University of Illinois dubbed in 1986 the «Cinema of Attractions». His core idea: early cinema was fundamentally different from today’s not just technically, but philosophically. It didn’t aim to tell a story. It aimed to show itself off—its power to amaze, shock, trigger a physical reaction.
The star of this age was Georges Méliès, a former illusionist and owner of the Théâtre Robert-Houdin. When he saw the Lumière film, his first thought wasn’t “what a story!” but “what a trick!” So he set about making tricks: substitutions, overlays, stop-motion. In 15 years, he made over 500 films—each one to 30 minutes long. None told a story in the modern sense. All were a parade of the impossible.
His masterpiece—«A Trip to the Moon» (1902): 14 minutes of visual marvels. A rocket in the Moon’s eye. Underground monsters. Star-women. Gunning noted: Méliès wasn’t “narrating”—he was training the gaze. Every frame was an attraction, like a circus act. The audience clapped, laughed, gasped—and moved on to the next act.
The irony: Méliès died in poverty, forgotten. His films were dismissed as “childish,” “primitive.” Only in the 1920s, when avant-gardists (Duchamp, Dalí, Buñuel) rediscovered him, did it become clear: Méliès hadn’t just invented special effects. He’d invented cinema as a visual experience, not a recorded play.
After 1906, cinema began to “grow up”—that is, to learn to tell stories. Griffith, Pudovkin, Eisenstein turned editing from a trick tool into a narrative one. The shot stopped being a self-sufficient miracle and became a word in a sentence. Special effects retreated to the margins—as ornament, not essence.
Gunning called this shift «narrative integration»: cinema started hiding its technique for the sake of story. The camera no longer addressed the viewer directly—it hid behind the fourth wall. Attraction gave way to narrative.
And now—the paradox. We’re back in 1897.
TikTok, YouTube Shorts, Instagram Reels: it’s the Cinema of Attractions, transplanted to a smartphone. Fifteen-second videos don’t tell stories—they demonstrate a trick: a dance, a visual illusion, a jarring edit. The viewer doesn’t immerse in a fictional world. The viewer reacts—likes, swipes, moves on to the next attraction. Exactly like the 1900 audience clapping and turning to the next act in the program.
And generative video (Sora, Runway, Kling) is Méliès on steroids: effects without a crew, tricks without physical limits. The viewer watches not for the story, but to ask: “Is this real or AI?”—the very same question audiences asked after the first «A Trip to the Moon».
The Cinema of Attractions is a reminder that «primitive» doesn’t mean «wrong». Méliès wasn’t less talented than Griffith. He worked in a different paradigm: not “tell a story,” but “show the impossible.” That paradigm didn’t die—it lay dormant for a century and returned in a form no one predicted.
The irony is that the modern viewer who shakes their head at “meaningless TikTok content” is essentially repeating the mistake of 1920s film scholars who dismissed Méliès as “primitive.” Not primitive—just different. Not the absence of story, but the presence of attraction. Cinema has become a circus again. And that’s okay.