As the evolution of film has progressed, the catalogue of cinematic formal elements has grown, enabling filmmakers to, at their discretion, make more complex films. Even restricted to the confines of what Tom Gunning calls "cinema of attractions," the dominant paradigm before 1908, this is evident.
Gunning worries that adopting an evolutionary view of cinema will categorize pre-WWI film and cinema of attractions, as he puts it, "as [a] primitive [] early stage in which later potentials are sketched out but imperfectly realized" However, Gunning's definition of cinema of attractions frees it from this imperfect characterization: By its reference to the curiosity-arousing devices of the fairground, the term denoted early cinema's fascination with novelty and its foregrounding of the new act of display. Viewed from this perspective, early cinema did not simply seek to neutrally record previously existing acts or events. Rather, even the seemingly stylistically neutral film consisting of a single shot without camera tricks involved a cinematic gesture of presenting for view, of displaying. .
On this view, the early films of cinema's pioneers would not have been improved by the advanced technology of later generations, for their displays did not call for it. Further they cannot be seen as solely preparatory, for, like later narrative films, they presented a subject for view in a uniquely cinematic way. The early films of Edison and Dickson were simple, short glimpses of "well-known sports figures, excerpts from noted vaudeville acts, or performances by dancers or acrobats" (Thompson & Bordwell 7). While it is true that primitive technology did limit these small-scale productions, which, according to Thompson and Bordwell, "lasted only twenty seconds or so – the longest run of film that the Kinetoscope could hold," advanced technology would not necessarily have improved them, for their simplistic nature did not call for it.
