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Record W2140087682 · doi:10.7202/045145ar

The Old Dark House and the Space of Attraction1

2011· article· en· W2140087682 on OpenAlexvenueno aff
Robert Spadoni

Bibliographic record

VenueCinémas Revue d études cinématographiques · 2011
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldEconomics, Econometrics and Finance
TopicCinema and Media Studies
Canadian institutionsnot available
Fundersnot available
KeywordsNarrativeMovie theaterThunderWhaleArtVisual artsAestheticsLiteratureArt history

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Writers have invoked the concept of the “cinema of attractions,” from early cinema studies, to claim that horror films sacrifice narrative integrity to deliver sudden frights and spectacular shocks. An examination of the history of the concept of the attraction, however, finds it heavily theorized by Sergei Eisenstein as something that can bind films together in powerful ways. In one horror film, The Old Dark House (1932), slamming doors, quaking thunder, shattering glass and a rampaging mute butler, while scary, also figure in James Whale’s scheme to criss-cross his film with motifs and other repetitions and produce a work that gains with every viewing. Even with its thin narrative, stock characters and, already in 1932, very familiar story about characters trapped in an old dark house, the film hangs together in intricate ways. Most elaborately, Whale embeds attractions in a grid that overlays the tiered spaces of the setting. Characters move up and down the creaky staircases and along the suspended hallways, chasing each other, scuffling, and withholding and disclosing secrets. Scenographic and narrative space mesh into a tight unity lit up by a constellation of “fun house” jolts. Props, including lamps and knives, circulate through these spaces as well, tracing patterns that startle viewers while simultaneously rendering the film rigorously and beautifully coherent.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.001
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Theoretical or conceptual · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.834
Threshold uncertainty score0.508

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0010.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0000.001
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.045
GPT teacher head0.216
Teacher spread0.171 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designTheoretical or conceptual
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

Quick stats

Citations2
Published2011
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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