Heads or Tails: The Emergence of a New Cultural Series, from the Phenakisticope to the Cinematograph

Abstract

This article is part of a larger research project on the different forms attraction has taken in the cultural series animated pictures. 2 Here we will focus our attention on the first signs of the paradigm which we propose to call cinématographie-attraction, a paradigm in which the question of thresholds seems to us to be essential.3 Moving picture programs juxtaposed, one after the other, a long string of often disparate views. Viewers of the period, for that very reason, were called upon to enter into a dozen sometimes completely heterogeneous worlds, one after the other, at the same screening.4 The cinématographie-attraction experience was essentially an experience of discontinuity. Full of interruptions and sudden starts, this experience was a chain of shocks, a series of thresholds. The concept of the threshold will be particularly useful here, because it allows us to problematise the various kinds of discontinuity which punctuate the cultural series animated pictures. This punctuation took the form of one of two primary structuring principles running through this series and modulating its development: attraction and narration.5 Our discussion will begin at its emergence with optical toys such as the phenakisticope, the zoetrope, and the praxinoscope. We will attempt to demonstrate the ways in which it might be useful to address the question of cinématographie-attraction by resituating it before the fetish date of 28 December 1895, when tradition tells us it was born. We will be careful to keep in mind that the