Toward a feminist "Coney Island of the avant-garde": Janie Geiser recasts the cinema of attractions.

"The Spider's Wheels" offers a new twist on these intertwined histories, recasting the cinema of attractions for the twenty-first century by plumbing film's original penchant for spectacle, fusing it with found footage's skillful critique, and tapping into installation's kinesthetic aspect--its sensual effect on an ambulatory body, moving through the immediacy of a spatial here-and-now. Fueling all of this is an investigation of gender as it was constructed by Hollywood cinema in the mid-teens. As women continued to fight for suffrage, the film industry embarked on its first major campaign to solicit female patronage, through serials whose sensational action-adventure format showcased the heroic feats of the Progressive era's New Women, while relishing the spectacle of their distress. (7) Probing the films' political unconscious (bypassing scenes of lurid victimization and leaving diabolical villains behind), Geiser extracts a female archetype--an image of a woman engaged in struggle, crawling back and forth again and again--and, by recontextualizing it in space, adding riveting sound and providing a shocking but entertaining mode of presentation, creates a spectacular, feminist "Coney Island of the avant-garde," a phrase coined by film historian Tom Gunning. (8)

If experimental film has often functioned as a pedagogical intervention or mode of reception capable of interrogating the codes and conventions of Hollywood cinema as thoroughly as film theory or history, as Bart Testa suggests in Back and Forth: Early Film and the Avant-Garde (1994), then one of the most striking examples of this tendency is the recurring interest by members of the French, Russian, and American avant-gardes in cinema's facility at harnessing visibility or, as Fernand Leger put it in 1922, for "making images seen." (9) Films produced before 1906 exhibited this quality most intensely. Shocking, spectacular, and virtually without plot or characterization, short erotic and trick films of the early 1900s were demonstrations of cinematic techniques or recreations of current events and were designed to incite viewers' visual curiosity, and to provide pleasure through acts of display. Frequently displayed was the act of looking itself, as actors ruptured the film's illusion of continuity and stared out at spectators, acknowledging their presence. This non-narrative, exhibitionistic cinema of attractions, as Gunning called it, directly addressed and engaged its spectator.

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Attraction is a fairground and circus term for a surprising or illogical novelty act, and Gunning borrowed it from Soviet filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein, who argued in "Montage of Attractions" (1923) for a politically agitational form of theatre that would replace the melodramatic illusionism of the bourgeois stage with a method that subjected audience members to sensual and psychological impact, rather than encouraging them to identify with characters. Along with acrobatic clowns, a short film, and a tightrope act that disrupted the proscenium and extended over the heads of spectators, Eisenstein envisioned a salvo exploding beneath the seats, catapulting audience members into revolutionary consciousness. The spectator was the theatre's most important material, and attractions, he argued, worked by establishing interrelationships with other attractions, and with viewers whose intellectual process was a dialectical synthesis of the relationships between those attractions and their own perceptions. These ideas became the basis of his "dialectical approach to film form," which emphasized the collision of antithetical elements. As he wrote in his notes in the late 1920s for an unrealized film of Karl Marx's Capital (whose "formal side" was inspired by Ulysses [1922] and therefore dedicated to modernist James Joyce), Eisenstein's goal was instruction in Marx's method. He wanted to teach workers to "think dialectically" by drawing upon cinema's spectacular properties, and by creating novel attractions, like those found at the circus or fair. (10) If films could generate physical sensations with genuine political significance, then a truly critical cinema should seek to astonish.

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No wonder Gunning turned to Eisenstein for terminology: the word "attraction" perfectly embodies both the confrontational spirit and pleasurable appeal of early twentieth-century forms of popular entertainment, from circus to cinema, and highlights the direct mode of address they shared with Eisenstein's later avant-garde. Convinced of spectacle's radical potential for stimulating insight, and committed to the political efficacy of an aesthetics of shock, Eisenstein was "tapping into a source of energy" (11) that had always been part of film history, but that had been absorbed by narrative features since their rise to prominence in the mid-teens. A diverse group of filmmakers with different styles and agendas have joined Eisenstein in this discovery over the years: Buster Keaton, Salvador Dali and Luis Bunuel, Jack Smith, and most recently Geiser, have each realized that the cinema of attractions is still an "unexhausted resource" (12) capable of fueling spectacular forms of critique.

By embracing theatricality, harnessing visibility, and especially by utilizing strategies of direct address (from the startling moment when the Spider breaks the frame and meets our gaze, to that dangling house-screen's unforgettable slam), "The Spider's Wheels" refashions the cinema of attractions into a three-dimensional installation that cultivates an attitude of critical distance by employing techniques that leave us in awe. But instead of catapulting us into revolutionary consciousness through a salvo that literally hurls us out of our seats, Geiser creates a form of kinesthetic consciousness raising. She raises our consciousness as female spectators by reworking a number of strangely familiar images, and by subjecting us to a series of physical jolts that lead to surprising historical insights. And this, writes Caroline Walker Bynum, is the very stuff of wonder. "A historical phenomenon differently valenced and valued (and experienced) in different times and different places," (13) wonder nonetheless has a deep structure. Unpredictable and jarring, if not overwhelming, wonder may be difficult to recognize or understand. At once personally illuminating and culturally significant, the experience of wonder, as Bynum suggests, operates by "jolting us into an encounter with the past that is unexpected and strange." (14)

What better way to describe the effect of "The Spider's Wheels" could there possibly be than this, given the work's impact on the body and examination of film history? To answer this question one must first ask two more, both concerned with the issue of spectatorship. If, as Gunning points out, "every change in film history implies a change in its address to the spectator, and each period constructs its spectator in a new way," (15) then how are we addressed and constructed as spectators, or, more aptly, as visitors, in and through the genre of moving image installation, at the dawn of the twenty-first century? And what is the nature of the female visitor's experience as she moves from station to station in a cinematic diorama-installation that explores the representation of women in the American silent serials that once thrilled so many female fans?

Fifteen years ago, just as video installation was becoming less sculpturally oriented and more inclined to utilize large-scale projections, Margaret Morse outlined a preliminary poetics of the medium, noting that only by experiencing installations when they are installed do we get a sense of their atmosphere--that elusive mood or feeling generated by and palpable within the charged "space-in-between" each work's unique sculptural or projected components. (16) And yet, like other experiential arts only temporarily anchored in the present, video installation is a remarkably fugitive medium, and therefore its "potentialities are discovered at a very slow rate." (17) As a result, and even after what at the time of Morse's writing was a twenty-year history of widely varying works, we still lacked a critical vocabulary for "kinesthetic 'insights' at the level of the body ego and its orientation in space." (18) To flesh out the specificity of video installation, she concluded, "requires each experience and its interpretation." (19)