The Attractions of the Moving Image
Essays on History, Theory, and the Avant-Garde
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The Attractions of the Moving Image
Essays on History, Theory, and the Avant-Garde
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.
Table of Contents
Preface: Pulling Pieces Together
Tom Gunning
Introduction. The Energies of Cinema: On the Methods of Tom Gunning
Daniel Morgan
Part I. History
1. The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, Its Spectator, and the Avant-Garde (1986/1990)
2. What I Saw from the Rear Window of the Hôtel des Folies-Dramatiques, or the Story Point-of-View Films Told (1988)
3. An Aesthetic of Astonishment: Early Film and the (In)Credulous Spectator (1989)
4. In Your Face: Physiognomy, Photography, and the Gnostic Mission of Early Film (1997)
5. Landscape and the Fantasy of Moving Pictures: Early Cinema’s Phantom Rides (2010)
6. The Play between Still and Moving Images: Nineteenth-Century “Philosophical Toys” and Their Discourse (2011)
Part II. Theory
7. The Exterior as Intérieur: Benjamin’s Optical Detective (2003)
8. Systematizing the Electric Message: Narrative Form, Gender, and Modernity in The Lonedale Operator (2004)
9. Moving Away from the Index: Cinema and the Impression of Reality (2007)
10. To Scan a Ghost: The Ontology of Mediated Vision (2007)
11. The Long and the Short of It: Centuries of Projecting Shadows, from Natural Magic to the Avant-Garde (2009)
12. Chaplin and the Body of Modernity (2010)
13. The Language of Motion: Moving Images within the Evolution of Human Technology (2011; unpublished)
14. Moving through Friedberg’s Properly Adjusted Virtual Window (2019)
Part III. Avant-Garde
15. Dr. Jacobs’s Dream Work: Ken Jacobs’s The Doctor’s Dream (1981–1982)
16. The Critique of Seeing with One’s Own Eyes: Ernie Gehr’s Untitled (1977) (1982–1983)
17. “Films That Tell Time”: The Paradoxes of the Cinema of Ken Jacobs (1989)
18. Towards a Minor Cinema: Fonoroff, Herwitz, Ahwesh, Lapore, Klahr, and Solomon (1989–1990)
19. Perspective and Retrospective: The Films of Ernie Gehr (1993)
20. Bodies Rest and Motion: The Films of Mark LaPore (2006)
21. From Fossils of Time to a Cinematic Genesis: Gustav Deutsch’s Film ist. (2009)
22. Flaming Images: Burning through the Celluloid Closet (2009/2020; unpublished)
23. Abigail Child: The Pulse of the Last Machine (2011)
24. The Secret Language of the Traces of Light: David Gatten’s Dividing Line (2011)
25. The Grain of the Scratch: The Precarity of Transparency in Cinema (2015; unpublished)
26. Transport of Joy: A Meditation on the Medium of Stan Brakhage (2013/2021; unpublished)
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
Tom Gunning
Introduction. The Energies of Cinema: On the Methods of Tom Gunning
Daniel Morgan
Part I. History
1. The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, Its Spectator, and the Avant-Garde (1986/1990)
2. What I Saw from the Rear Window of the Hôtel des Folies-Dramatiques, or the Story Point-of-View Films Told (1988)
3. An Aesthetic of Astonishment: Early Film and the (In)Credulous Spectator (1989)
4. In Your Face: Physiognomy, Photography, and the Gnostic Mission of Early Film (1997)
5. Landscape and the Fantasy of Moving Pictures: Early Cinema’s Phantom Rides (2010)
6. The Play between Still and Moving Images: Nineteenth-Century “Philosophical Toys” and Their Discourse (2011)
Part II. Theory
7. The Exterior as Intérieur: Benjamin’s Optical Detective (2003)
8. Systematizing the Electric Message: Narrative Form, Gender, and Modernity in The Lonedale Operator (2004)
9. Moving Away from the Index: Cinema and the Impression of Reality (2007)
10. To Scan a Ghost: The Ontology of Mediated Vision (2007)
11. The Long and the Short of It: Centuries of Projecting Shadows, from Natural Magic to the Avant-Garde (2009)
12. Chaplin and the Body of Modernity (2010)
13. The Language of Motion: Moving Images within the Evolution of Human Technology (2011; unpublished)
14. Moving through Friedberg’s Properly Adjusted Virtual Window (2019)
Part III. Avant-Garde
15. Dr. Jacobs’s Dream Work: Ken Jacobs’s The Doctor’s Dream (1981–1982)
16. The Critique of Seeing with One’s Own Eyes: Ernie Gehr’s Untitled (1977) (1982–1983)
17. “Films That Tell Time”: The Paradoxes of the Cinema of Ken Jacobs (1989)
18. Towards a Minor Cinema: Fonoroff, Herwitz, Ahwesh, Lapore, Klahr, and Solomon (1989–1990)
19. Perspective and Retrospective: The Films of Ernie Gehr (1993)
20. Bodies Rest and Motion: The Films of Mark LaPore (2006)
21. From Fossils of Time to a Cinematic Genesis: Gustav Deutsch’s Film ist. (2009)
22. Flaming Images: Burning through the Celluloid Closet (2009/2020; unpublished)
23. Abigail Child: The Pulse of the Last Machine (2011)
24. The Secret Language of the Traces of Light: David Gatten’s Dividing Line (2011)
25. The Grain of the Scratch: The Precarity of Transparency in Cinema (2015; unpublished)
26. Transport of Joy: A Meditation on the Medium of Stan Brakhage (2013/2021; unpublished)
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index