Question

The following dual passages discuss the history and nature of early cinema.

Passage A
The conventional history of film often portrays the medium's first decade as a primitive, transitional era characterized by fumbling steps toward the classical narrative feature film. However, this inherently teleological approach fundamentally misrepresents the true nature and cultural function of early motion pictures. Before roughly 1907, cinema was fundamentally an exhibitionist medium—what scholars have aptly termed a "cinema of attractions." Its primary objective was almost never storytelling; rather, it was the presentation of visual shocks, novelties, and marvels. The camera directly confronted the audience, enthusiastically breaking the so-called "fourth wall" to display technological wonders, acrobatic feats, elaborate stage illusions, or exotic locales. When narratives did exist in these early reels, they were merely thin, disposable pretexts designed specifically to string together these moments of sheer spectacle. The relationship between the spectator and the screen was thus characterized by direct visual astonishment and physiological thrill rather than psychological immersion in a self-contained diegetic world. The subsequent historical shift toward the classical narrative style of the 1910s—with its invisible editing and character-driven plots—was not a natural, inevitable evolution of these early practices. Instead, it was a distinct rupture, a deliberate domestication of a wilder medium intended to court a more respectable, bourgeois audience by aligning film with the established traditions of the theatrical play and the novel. Critics who view early film solely through the lens of modern narrative conventions fail to appreciate the unique, visceral thrills it offered to its original patrons.

Passage B
Recent film scholarship has heavily popularized the concept of the "cinema of attractions," positing a strict, almost unbridgeable dichotomy between early film's emphasis on pure visual spectacle and the sophisticated narrative integration that dominated later eras. Yet, this rigid theoretical division significantly obscures the structural complexities and narrative ambitions of the very earliest motion pictures. Even the briefest, seemingly most spectacular actualities and trick films of the late 1890s possessed inherent, albeit rudimentary, narrative trajectories. The cinematic spectacle was rarely an isolated, plotless phenomenon; rather, it was typically woven into a nascent storytelling fabric from the outset. The famous visual shocks of the era—a locomotive rushing toward the camera, or a magician's sudden, smoke-filled transformation—functioned within a developing, coherent narrative logic that actively guided the viewer's attention from beginning to end. To claim that these early filmmakers were entirely indifferent to story is to ignore the historical evidence of their increasingly complex cinematic choices. Nevertheless, one must acknowledge that the dominant mode of engaging the spectator in these formative years relied overwhelmingly on overt visual stimulation and immediate sensory impact, differentiating it from the deep psychological character development and emotional absorption that would come to define the classical Hollywood era a decade later. Early filmmakers undoubtedly prioritized the immediate thrill of the moving image, even as they experimented with narrative frameworks.

Which one of the following expresses a view held by the authors of both passages?