Constructing the Spielberg-Lucas-Coppola Cinema of Effects

In his 1986 article, ‘The Cinema of Attraction[s]: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant-Garde’, Tom Gunning suggested that American cinema of the late 1970s and early 1980s had ‘reaffirmed its roots in stimulus and carnival rides, in what might be called the Spielberg-Lucas-Coppola cinema of effects’.1 This brief remark proposes a very real continuity between early cinema and Hollywood cinema of the time in which Gunning was writing: the cinematic desire to privilege spectacle over narrative. However, Gunning’s article is primarily concerned with film production and exhibition before 1906, and does not directly engage with either the cinema of the late 1970s and early 1980s generally, or the film-making practices of Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, and Francis Ford Coppola specifically, and the comparison risks eliding some crucial distinctions.