Dream of a Rarebit Fiend and Cinema of Attraction

Much like that enjoyed by its fateful glutton in the opening scene, Dream of the Rarebit Fiend offers viewers a plentiful cornucopia, full of camera trickery and spectacular attraction. I enjoyed Porter's use of intoxicating visual effects, beginning once the fiend hits the street after his binge. The superimposition of an oscillating pendulum over dizzying handheld street footage provides an entertaining exhibition of a wino's futile grapple with steady footing. This shot had a visceral effect on me, its sloppy and desperate image a relatable state allegorical to drunkenness. However, Rarebit Fiend does not limit itself to displaying imagery that pertains to the physiology of inebriation, but provides a drinker's folly as a springboard for increasing spectacle.  After the initial discombobulating swirl scene, I no longer felt physically joined with the suffering of the fiend, but instead enjoyed the effects presented in the name of drunkenness. I liked the stop-motion entropy of the fiend's bedroom furniture as it flies out of frame. In a miniature re-creation of his bedroom (which I thought looked impressively similar) the fiends bed spirals chaotically with he use of strings. I found comic entertainment in the matting effect of little devils spurting from a rarebit dish and bludgeoning the fiend's bed-ridden head. However, the increasing formal nature of these effects caused me to lessen my identification with the fiend (unless you want to read them as hallucinations - though unless in a case of delirium tremens or a wormwood absinthe, I wouldn't associate visual hallucinations with the psychological effects of alcohol :D). Instead, I felt like a spectator, deriving pleasure from the spectacle of the fiend's suffering, and unconcerned as to whether a drunk would actually experience the effects shown on screen. I really enjoyed the matting of the fiend in bed, the upper third of the screen, over a pan across a cityscape, the lower two-thirds. This effect seemed the least physiological of all, but the most fantastical.
 


As Gunning identifies as a practice for early films in The Cinema of Attraction, the loose plotline, I feel, is but a frame or underscore onto which the film’s technical wizardry is projected. This is similar to the ‘narratives’ in Méliès films, which he describes as a “pretext” for cinematic tricks and dazzle. During the pendulum statue shot Rarebit Fiend, I felt a visceral response and sympathy to the fiend character – a reaction much sought by Eisenstein – the “psychological impact” of cinema. However, as Gunning relates, the formalist, FX-driven nature of the film – as well as its thin narrative – provided me with entertainment but in so doing prevented me from being consumed into the reality of the film itself – "exhibitionist confrontation rather than diegetic absorption," as he puts it.