| Summary: | In a 12-second clip featuring trapeze performer Luis Martinetti, shot for Edison’s Kinetoscope, the film spectator of 1894 was treated to an astonishing spectacle that bore all the hallmarks of what Tom Gunning would later identify as a “cinema of attraction”. Dressed in a tiger print body suit, Martinetti subjected his body to a series of amazing contortions and manipulations, and in doing so presented audiences with what is perhaps the first example of a corporeal cinema. While the specific appeal of this film was undoubtedly related to Martinetti’s reputation as a performer who pushed his body to an extreme limit, a fascination with bodies—both human and nonhuman, at rest, in motion, in pain, near death—has been a preoccupation of filmmakers ever since (think back to the slaughter of an ox in Sergei Eisenstein’s Strike (1924); the slicing of an eye in Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí’s Un chien andalou (1929); the 1920s films of Lon Chaney; the animation of Chuck Jones). In recent years this interest in the body—as both site of violence and a sight to behold—has intensified and is mirrored by a growth in the scholarly work devoted to all matters corporeal.
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