Introduction to William Rothman by Alan Cholodenko in the Special Section of Film-Philosophy on Stanley Cavell.

What my necessarily simple schematic of ‘ABCs’ means to propose isthat: 1. Animation is never not at stake in movies and cinema, both forms ofwhat I call live action film animation 2. The movie is never not at stake incinema, which is a form for me of the movie, and 3. The movie is never notat stake in the B movie, or to put it another and unorthodox way, the movieis never not B movie. And therefore, beginning as B movies, (...) movies animate cinema .To propose this, as it were, ‘B before B’ is to contend that the B movieis not simply the invention of the 1930s but rather synonymous with themovie ‘as such’, with for me what Tom Gunning famously canonised as ‘thecinema of attractions’, that first phase of the cinema from its advent toaround 1905-1910. The cinema of attractions was a ‘vulgar’, exhibitionist,assaultive, exploitative cinema, long before the term ‘exploitation cinema’arrived. Conceived ‘as a series of visual shocks’ directedat the viewer, such cinema showed scenes of sex, violence, mayhem, somepresenting actual harm to the subjects filmed, some virtually threatening thevery life of the viewer. Films like The Arrival of a Train, The RailroadSmash-Up, Electrocuting an Elephant, the John Irwin-May Rice Kiss, theSerpentine Dance4and Eugene Sandow flexing his muscles. They alsoincluded educational actuality films of natural curiosities, such as CharlesUrban’s Unseen World series beginning in 1903, which, Gunning tells us,‘presented magnified images of cheese mites, spiders and water fleas’, the sort of film that a reformist of cinema as late as1914 objected to as vulgar for showing ‘such slimy and unbeautifulabominations’ ,5which he claimed ‘repulsed spectators with morerefined sensibilities’. (shrink)