This chapter reassesses the relationship between the Gothic and the cinematic experience within the silent cinema era. At its birth in 1895, the very medium of cinema itself was perceived as inherently Gothic. Maxim Gorky’s famous allusion to a ‘kingdom of shadows’ full of grey, silent figures that filled him with ‘breathless horror’ evoked the spectre of the uncanny that underpins the Gothic experience. Yet, this chapter demonstrates that if one examines the history of the Gothic in the silent era, the Gothic changes from being an intrinsic part of the cinema experience to becoming a series of narrative and stylistic elements that ultimately form part of a kind of proto-horror, a mise-en-scène in search of a genre. By focusing not upon story elements but rather upon the ongoing association between the Gothic and the cinematographic through the use of cinematic techniques to convey subjective states of being, this chapter examines how the Gothic potential of the cinematic experience that was fundamental to the era of cinema’s birth did not disappear but rather remained, and continues to remain, embedded within cinema itself.

The chapter’s first part describes the interrelated but also contrary development of literature and film in the early twentieth century. It places modernist experiments with literary form in relation to the new representational and narrative strategies of early film. The second part explains in depth which new forms of immediacy the movies offered and how important these immediacy effects were for the cultural impact and popularity of early film, especially the “cinema of attractions.” The chapter also discusses the popular perception of film as a particularly modern medium. It argues that the oscillation between self-reflexivity and immediacy was central to the cultural work performed by early cinema because it allowed early film to train viewers in new forms of attention required by the accelerated pace, fragmentation, and informational density of modern life, while also providing compensatory relief and entertainment. Provoking media awareness as well as experiences of immersion, the early cinema reminded its viewers that their perception of the world was mediated, while the thrill of its immediacy effects offered them moments of respite from such self-reflexive considerations.