[7] In 2007, he co-founded, with Denis Héroux, the Observatoire du cinéma au Québec, a scholarly crossroads which encourages exchange and partnerships between cinema professionals in Quebec and film students.
In From Plato to Lumière (2009 [1988]) and Film and Attraction (2011 [2008]), Gaudreault also emphasised the role of a number of economic, technical and legal contingencies in the emergence and institutionalisation of cinematic practices.
Not only did this approach contest the traditional history of cinema; it also implicitly called for a return to period sources and the need to pay particular attention to the context in which the films under study emerged.
These articles address topics such as historiography and periodisation;[39] the emergence of editing techniques;[40] trick effects and mise en scène (in the work of Georges Mélies in particular[41]); film exhibition and the film lecturer;[42] mise en scène and acting in animated pictures;[43] sales catalogues and promotional documents;[44] optical toys;[45] etc.
[46][47] After having analysed the development of crosscutting in early cinema, he turned to the stop-camera technique in the work of Méliès, and more precisely to the different forms of abutting and découpage in Lumière pictures.
[48] On the basis of the close analysis of animated pictures from before 1905, long described by film historians (in particular Georges Sadoul and Jean Mitry, but not only them[49]) as tableaux without cuts, Gaudreault demonstrated that early cinema frequently resorted to editing, but often with non-narrative ends.
[50] In cinema's early years, editing techniques were often inherited from other contemporary cultural practices, in particular photography, prestidigitation and the magic lantern.
André Gaudreault's work has underscored the fact that these practices privilege, in the first place, a kind of presentation described as ministrative,[51] in keeping with the logic of a theatrical attraction or a one-act play.
[52] This was the case, for example, with crosscutting, which fragments into several different narrative segments the unity of time, space and action found in the theatrical model of the one-act tableau[53] The cinema of attractions is a thesis formulated by André Gaudreault and Tom Gunning to describe the style of early kinematography.
[54] Pictures by Edison, Lumière, Méliès and Urban, and comic scenes by Segundo de Chomón, Émile Cohl, Alice Guy and R.W.
[62] According to him, kinematic practices of the early years were the result of an “intermedial meshing[63]” which encouraged a “hodgepodge of institutions[64]”: “Before the cinema ended up becoming a relatively autonomous medium, kinematography was not merely subjected to the influence of the other media and cultural spaces in vogue at the turn of the twentieth century.
They acquired a cinematic nature only through necessity, a phenomenon Gaudreault calls cinema's “institutionalisation.” He demonstrates that “institutionalisation” is “an evolutionary and diachronic process that supposes the regulation, regularisation and consolidation of the relationship between those who work in it (stability); the choice of practices that are proper to the medium in question, thereby distinguishing it from other media (specificity); and the setting up of discourses and mechanisms that sanction these relationships and practices (legitimacy)".