Dulac and Gaudreault

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