Within film studies, the analysis of early cinema has witnessed the most fervent and consequential efforts in historiographic reflection and revision for the discipline as a whole. Insofar as the earliest moving pictures embody a mode of filmic production quite unlike later, dominant Hollywood storytelling, their study enables scholars to understand history as a set of options – roads taken but also the ones that petered out. And the implications of early cinema's differences – was this filmic language geared to pleasures other than narrative? – are not only stylistic or formal but broadly cultural: what does it say about turn-of-the-century popular entertainment that the quick yet clearly captivating demonstrative views of early films came to occupy so prominent a place?

Within early cinema study, Montréal scholar André Gaudreault has long been one of the most productive researchers and his insights have been quite foundational indeed. At first, it might seem paradoxical, then, to find Gaudreault in the short and pithy Film and Attraction declaring emphatically that “early cinema” is a misnomer that inevitably misconstrues its imputed object of study. But the sense of irony quickly dissipates when Gaudreault carefully and convincingly shows how that object is best understood when reconceptualized from the ground up. Hence (and henceforth), better to realize that a recognized art of “cinema” did not really emerge until later (not before 1907 or so) and search for alternative ways of naming and thereby understanding early production.

As Gaudreault explains, early films exhibited little pretension to effective storytelling, and their fabricators rarely saw themselves as authorial in any sense (commonly, they regarded themselves as mere manufacturers of salable footage). To treat, as so many scholars seem to do, the earliest films as the bad object that the art of cinema had to reject in order to emerge is, in Gaudreault's condemnation, to engage in teleological fallacy – early film as a first phase in cinema's growth rather than as a popular form of culture in its own right.

As Gaudreault clarifies, a number of things happened around 1907–8 to make it possible henceforth to say that “cinema” existed. For instance, around this moment influential journals specifically devoted to cinema began to appear, such as Moving Picture World (until then, film had been most addressed in theatre or drama journals or in popular-science publications). And, even more important, many manufacturers started consistently to rent out, rather than sell outright, their films: consequently, exhibitors no longer could modify the films they received (for example, by reediting), thereby making it increasingly tempting to think of the maker of the film as its full and original “author,” rather than just its initial fabricator. From that moment on, it was easy to conceive of film as a “feature” that could engage in complex modes of storytelling.

Until then, film was something else altogether and, as such, it took up an essential place in the popular culture of the day. Admitting the awkwardness of his neologism, Gaudreault proposes to term the earliest productions “kine-attractography,” extending an argument that he and fellow scholar Tom Gunning pioneered: that the earliest moving pictures were not about storytelling but about offering views that captivated in and of themselves for their momentary delights, in ways complementary to other entertainment “attractions” of the day (at, for example, fairgrounds, where many moving pictures were in fact first exhibited). For Gaudreault, filmic attractions merit historical study not in terms of the cinema successive to them but in relation to the popular visual entertainments simultaneous with them. This is the research program his book calls for.

At a little more than a hundred pages of text, Film and Attraction can in fact serve at most as a call for a new historiography rather as its fully fledged demonstration. (Thus one footnote (13, at 167) suggests that it might be productive to know more about the Vitagraph production company, quite active in the important years of 1907–8, in helping foster a fully fledged art of cinema. But the footnote also admits that research here is just beginning.)

In an interview offered as an appendix to his book, Gaudreault enthuses about all the people working productively on early film and on its ties to other attractions of the day. His own little volume offers theoretical unity to these diverse empirical research projects and clarifies their larger cultural stakes. Film and Attraction easily stands as one of the texts that even at a relatively late date is foundational for the ever-developing discipline of film study.