The film contains an early example – possibly cinema’s first – of a close-up shot.

Debate has raged over the cut-in to an approximation of the shoe store clerk’s view of his young female customer’s ankle as she tantalizingly raises her skirt.   In a famous article, Tom Gunning argues that the close-up is an ‘attraction rather than a narrative device because its function is to display a woman’s ankle’.   But film historian Charles Musser disputes Gunning’s assertion, claiming that it is an attraction integrated into a ‘quite complex narrative unfolding’ because it maintains the illusion of the fourth wall and creates different spaces of awareness between the flirting couple and the girl’s chaperone.  

The close-up offers us not only an example of the visual pleasure supplied by the ‘cinema of attractions’ but also an example of early cinema’s voyeuristic treatment of the female form.

In his book Before the Nickelodeon, Charles Musser argues that because of the spectator’s physical absence from the scene on the screen, the male viewer can take pleasure from what is normally forbidden without fear of the kind of reprisal suffered by the clerk.   The subjective nature of the shot is emphasized by the absence of any background.

(Sources: The Oxford History of World Cinema (p20) edited by Geoffrey Nowell-Smith. Publisher: Oxford University Press. 1997.

The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded by Wanda Strauven, p63, Amsterdam University Press.

Before the Nickelodeon by Charles Musser, University of California Press))

[MORE] [ADD]