Attractions of the Moving Image
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An essential collection of new and selected essays by influential cinema and media studies scholar Tom Gunning.
Tom Gunning is the author of multiple books and nearly two hundred essays that have defined the field of cinema and media studies. His works have transformed our understanding of early cinema and the American avant-garde and reset the terms of many central debates in film and media history and theory. His 1986 essay “The Cinema of Attractions” is among the most cited essays on film ever published. Gunning’s writings articulate a distinctive and powerful model for thinking about cinema’s history and likely future, addressing the full range of moving-image media, from film to still photography to digital media. His discussions draw on stage melodrama and magic lantern shows, as well as criminology, world’s fairs, and Spiritualism, surveying the medium as a cultural phenomenon informed by the industrial and information ages, psychiatry, urban experience, discourses on art and aesthetics, and more.
This collection brings together twenty-six essays that showcase the depth and range of Gunning’s scholarship, including four that have never before been published. Together, they solidify Gunning’s place as a scholar who has transformed the way generations of scholars, archivists, critics, and artists think about cinema.
Tom Gunning is the author of multiple books and nearly two hundred essays that have defined the field of cinema and media studies. His works have transformed our understanding of early cinema and the American avant-garde and reset the terms of many central debates in film and media history and theory. His 1986 essay “The Cinema of Attractions” is among the most cited essays on film ever published. Gunning’s writings articulate a distinctive and powerful model for thinking about cinema’s history and likely future, addressing the full range of moving-image media, from film to still photography to digital media. His discussions draw on stage melodrama and magic lantern shows, as well as criminology, world’s fairs, and Spiritualism, surveying the medium as a cultural phenomenon informed by the industrial and information ages, psychiatry, urban experience, discourses on art and aesthetics, and more.
This collection brings together twenty-six essays that showcase the depth and range of Gunning’s scholarship, including four that have never before been published. Together, they solidify Gunning’s place as a scholar who has transformed the way generations of scholars, archivists, critics, and artists think about cinema.
Tom Gunning is professor emeritus in the Department of Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Chicago, where he taught for over two decades. He is the author of D. W. Griffith and the Origins of American Narrative Film and The Films of Fritz Lang: Allegories of Vision and Modernity, as well as numerous articles. With André Gaudreault he originated the influential theory of the “Cinema of Attractions.” Daniel Morgan is professor of cinema and media studies at the University of Chicago. He is the author of Late Godard and the Possibilities of Cinema and The Lure of the Image: Epistemic Fantasies of the Moving Camera.