Description: 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.Brief description: Daniel Morgan is professor of cinema and media studies at the University of Chicago. He is author of Late Godard and the Possibilities of Cinema and The Lure of the Image: Epistemic Fantasies of the Moving Camera.
Review Quotes:
"Remarkably, it is the first time a selection of Gunning's essays has been gathered into a single volume, and the result is an embarrassment of riches. . . . To read one of Gunning's essays . . . is to be struck by his matter-of-factness, and his remarkable ability to coin a phrase. Often, he begins not only with an atypically clear statement of his position but also the circumstances that brought him to the point of writing: a filmic discovery, a call for papers, or an ongoing debate to which he feels he can contribute. Indeed, Gunning makes palpable his active engagement with contemporary moving image culture--here is a scholar who clearly goes to the movies--even when he is writing about proto- or early cinema."
-- "Cineaste"