André Gaudreault

With Philippe Marion, a professor at the Université catholique de Louvain, he is the author of numerous articles on what the two scholars call the “genealogy of media” and the “double birth of media". This work addresses narrative in early cinema and the institutionalisation of cinematic practices and led to the publication of a volume on cinema's recent transformations in the wake of the “digital revolution.” The End of Cinema? A Medium in Crisis in the Digital Age (2015 [2012]) examines cinema's many “deaths foretold” and interrogates the impact these periods of transition has had on cinema's very identity.

Since 2013 he has held the Canada Research Chair in Film and Media Studies. In 2016 he founded the Laboratoire CinéMédias. Currently, he is director of the Programme de recherche sur l’archéologie et la généalogie du montage/editing (PRAGM/e), which he co-founded in 2018.

In this respect, André Gaudreault's work underscores the importance of the intrication of cultural practices in cinema's genesis. In From Plato to Lumière (2009 [1988]) and Film and Attraction (2011 [2008]), Gaudreault also emphasised the role of a number of economic, technical and legal contingencies in the emergence and institutionalisation of cinematic practices. Known for the concepts “the cinema of attractions” and “kine-attractography” (“cinématographie-attraction”), André Gaudreault was also one of the first scholars to foreground the concepts “intermediality” and “cultural series.”

In 2006, on the occasion of the publication of the edited volume The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded, Gaudreault revisited this concept and expressed reservations concerning the teleological nature of the expression “the cinema of attractions.” Because the term “cinema” refers naturally to the institutional practices which took concrete form around 1915, he proposed instead to employ the neologism “kine-attractography,” (from the French expression “cinématographie-attraction,” used for the first time by G.-Michel Coissac in 1925 and adopted by Gaudreault in his writings in French).

Following his doctorate, he was named associate professor and later full professor at Université Laval, where he taught until 1991, when he became a full professor at the Université de Montréal. In 1992 he co-founded, with Germain Lacasse, the Groupe de recherche sur l’avènement et la formation des institutions cinématographique et scénique (GRAFICS) and then, in 1997, with three colleagues from the Université de Montréal, the Centre de Recherche sur l’Intermédialité/Centre for Research into Intermediality (CRI), which he headed until 2005. From 1999 to 2016 he was director of the journal Cinémas. In 2007, he co-founded, with Denis Héroux, the Observatoire du cinéma au Québec, a scholarly crossroads which encourages exchange and partnerships between cinema professionals in Quebec and film students. In 2012, he co-founded, with Gilles Mouëllic (Université Rennes 2) and Maria Tortajada (Université de Lausanne) the international research partnership TECHNÈS, of which he is also the director.

His work combines a historical and theoretical approach. This dual orientation is at the heart of his principal books, Du littéraire au filmique (1988; translated in 2009 as From Plato to Lumière: Narration and Monstration in Literature and Cinema); and Cinéma et attraction (2008; translated in 2011 as Film and Attraction: From Kinematography to Cinema). These volumes examine the earliest years of cinema from both a historiographical and a narratological perspective.

Gaudreault's work on early cinema has contributed to the rise of film studies since the 1980s. The famous article he co-wrote with Tom Gunning in 1989, “Le cinéma des premiers temps: un défi à l’histoire du cinéma” (translated in 2006 as [“Early Cinema as a Challenge for Film History”) which drew on a joint presentation at Cerisy in 1985, is a key text for the new history of cinema. In it the authors propose a new way of looking at early cinema, no longer on the basis of a teleological approach, founded on aesthetic and discursive criteria completely alien to the pre-1915 context, but rather on the basis of cinema's own language and modalities and the cultural context of the period. Not only did this approach contest the traditional history of cinema; it also implicitly called for a return to period sources and the need to pay particular attention to the context in which the films under study emerged. This article also contributed to popularise the important concept Gaudreault and Gunning developed, the “cinema of attractions” (which Gaudreault contrasts with “institutional cinema”). The cinema of attractions, also described as a “system of monstrative attractions,” stands apart from the later “system of narrative integration” primarily for the self-sufficient and autonomous nature of its shots.

André Gaudreault's earliest research was part of a process of “rediscovering” early cinema by the founders of the “new history.” It resulted in part from his participation in the now legendary 34th FIAF Congress in Brighton in 1978, where hundreds of hitherto practically unknown animated pictures made between 1900 and 1906 were shown. Gaudreault was one of the founders of Domitor (the International Society for the Study of Early Cinema), for which he served as the first elected president from 1987 to 1995.

After obtaining a bachelor's degree in 1975 at Université Laval in Quebec City, he continued his studies at Université Sorbonne-Nouvelle, where he did doctoral work under Michel Marie [fr] and Michel Colin, obtaining his Ph.D. in 1983 with a dissertation entitled “Récit scriptural, récit théâtral, récit filmique: prolégomènes à une théorie narratologique du cinéma". During his studies, he became familiar with the work of Gérard Genette on narratology and with that of Christian Metz on film semiotics. These two thinkers have exercised a great influence on his work.

His scholarly work forms part of what is known as the “new film history.” This new approach, which coincided with the emergence of cinema studies in North American universities, was the fruit of young film historians working in the late 1970s. These “new historians” rejected teleological and linear approaches, along with the “great man theory,” which had characterised film history before then. They were driven above all by a concern for scholarly accuracy rather than by cinephilia and based their work on close analysis of period sources (both films and non-film objects) and archival work.

André Gaudreault OC FRSC (born 23 April 1952) is a Canadian film historian and theorist who holds the Canada Research Chair in Film and Media Studies.

André Gaudreault has devoted a large part of his career to studying the history of editing practices. After having analysed the development of crosscutting in early cinema, he turned to the stop-camera technique in the work of Méliès, and more precisely to the different forms of abutting and découpage in Lumière pictures. On the basis of the close analysis of animated pictures from before 1905, long described by film historians (in particular Georges Sadoul and Jean Mitry, but not only them) as tableaux without cuts, Gaudreault demonstrated that early cinema frequently resorted to editing, but often with non-narrative ends. These traces of editing were the work of the camera operator during the capturing of the event, or of the manufacturer when the film was being prepared in the laboratory, or of the exhibitor, who could cut the film at will. In cinema's early years, editing techniques were often inherited from other contemporary cultural practices, in particular photography, prestidigitation and the magic lantern. André Gaudreault's work has underscored the fact that these practices privilege, in the first place, a kind of presentation described as ministrative, in keeping with the logic of a theatrical attraction or a one-act play. Gradually, editing practices came to fulfill a narrative function. This was the case, for example, with crosscutting, which fragments into several different narrative segments the unity of time, space and action found in the theatrical model of the one-act tableau

He is or has been a member of various scholarly journal committees, including: Les Cahiers de la Cinémathèque (Perpignan, France); Sociétés & Représentations (Université Panthéon-Sorbonne, France); Film History (American Museum of the Moving Image, New York); Archivos de la Filmoteca (Valencia, Spain); Early Popular Visual Culture (formerly Living Pictures: The Journal of the Popular and Projected Image, Abingdon, England); Cinema & Cie (Università degli Studi di Udine, Italy); Recherches en communication (Université catholique de Louvain, Belgium); and 1895, Revue de l’Association française de recherche sur l’histoire du cinéma (Paris, France).

The cinema of attractions is a thesis formulated by André Gaudreault and Tom Gunning to describe the style of early kinematography. Pictures by Edison, Lumière, Méliès and Urban, and comic scenes by Segundo de Chomón, Émile Cohl, Alice Guy and R.W. Paul, took forms proper to early cinema: the frontality of the mise en scène; the brief, unipunctual nature of the picture, sometimes conceived as a one-act tableau without visible cuts; numerous glances at the camera; the ostentatious nature of comic or fairy-play effects; and an aesthetic of shock, the marvellous or surprise. Gaudreault and Gunning made a distinction between films in which “monstrative attractions” predominated, particularly in pictures made from 1895 to 1905, and those in which a mode of “narrative integration” predominated, particularly in later films. Filmic practices relying more on “monstration” and those in which “narration” dominated were not mutually exclusive.