“The affinity of film for haphazard contingencies is most strikingly demonstrated by its unwavering susceptibility to the ‘street’ (…), a region where the accidental prevails over the providential, and happenings in the nature of unexpected incidents are all but the rule”, says Siegfried Kracauer in his Theory of Film (1960). To support his argument, he quotes Eisenstein, who in 1944 praised the films of D. W. Griffith, and specifically Intolerance, for their street shots. In the latter film, which he had seen 20 years previously, one figure had remained alive in his memory. It was a chance – but unforgettable – passer-by, who “is visible in the shot only for a flashing glimpse” (and interrupts the most poignant moments of a love scene). Thus we can use Eisenstein as a theoretical foundation not only of a “Cinema of Attractions”, as Tom Gunning has done, but also of a “Cinema of Distractions”, yet another – very attractive and very centrifugal – counterforce to narrative cinema with its closed diegesis.
We are familiar with the experience: in exterior shots, stray dogs walk across the fictional action taking place; passers-by turn briefly to look, or stand still to watch the filming; and we watch them, fascinated or entertained, distracted from the plot of the film. The dogs (which, for their part, are not distracted and continue on their way, or sometimes join in the action, perhaps running along with the actors in a chase scene) and passers-by are symptomatic of a characteristic quality of the space in these films. The filming of non-fiction reality and of staged pseudo-reality are not opposites here, not mutually exclusive: they form a continuum. The film’s action is set in the reality of the street, resulting in a speck of fiction at the centre of a film image that contains a considerable amount of non-fiction at its borders and in the background. The speck dilates and grows, but it does not reach the border of the film frame until 1920. This was often felt to be a proof of the intrinsic weakness, naivety and lack of control of Early Cinema. Yet aficionados of the “Cinema of Distractions” admire it for precisely these open, complex spaces, where a viewer’s perception, roaming as free as those stray dogs, will be rewarded with unexpected occurrences and surprise encounters and will get a great deal more to see than just the main action. The Cinema of Distractions does not impose a totalitarian diegetical effect – one sometimes just gets fed up with it and its miserly economy of means – and instead generously bestows on us entertainment, beauty or humour and unmediated moments of a “feeling of real presence” (Balázs). The barriers of time dissolve and for a few seconds we do not feel like the excluded strangers we actually are in front of films of a hundred years ago.
I’ll say nothing about the films in the programme – that would spoil the surprise.
The eponymous pun and the theory of a “Cinema of Distractions”was first proposed by Luke McKernan, in his Bioscope-Blog entry of 14 November 2008 entitled “Early Film Dogs”.

Mariann Lewinsky