The Attractions of the Moving Image: Essays on History, Theory, and the Avant-Garde

by Tom Gunning, Daniel Morgan (Editor)

Overview

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.
 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780226479828
Publisher:	University of Chicago Press
Publication date:	04/30/2025
Pages:	592
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.30(d)

About the Author

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 author of Late Godard and the Possibilities of Cinema and The Lure of the Image: Epistemic Fantasies of the Moving Camera.

Editorial Reviews

This collection demonstrates why and how Tom Gunning has inspired scholars, critics, curators, archivists and filmmakers thinking across all aspects of cinema around the world. In Dan Morgan’s selections from Gunning’s voluminous body of work, we see that as technologies and film cultures have morphed, principled attention to film form anchors Gunning’s bold and far-reaching explorations of film history, theory, authorship and style. These masterful essays reward repeat readings for Gunning’s consistent provocations to be open to the wonders of moving images.

Jacqueline Stewart

This first collection of Gunning’s essays makes a dazzling contribution to film scholarship. His well-known essays, which have already had an extremely important impact on film history, theory and criticism (he is master of all three), are enhanced and complemented by the inclusion of lesser-known and hitherto unpublished work. The book builds on Gunning’s revolutionary essay on early cinema as ‘attractions’, bringing into one volume his subsequent, recurring, reflections on film spectators’ relations to moving images. Into these key issues, he weaves historical, pre-cinematic, examples of the human mind’s pleasure in deception and illusion, as well as the aesthetics of the twentieth century’s avant-garde film. While raising and reflecting on fundamental issues of film spectatorship, Gunning’s interest in magic and the magic of the cinema runs like a thread of ‘attraction’ across this fascinating collection of essays.  
 
The book has been thoughtfully and elegantly edited by Morgan. Gunning’s wide-ranging interests are organized into three sections, allowing unexpected continuities to emerge across each. At the same time, his originality, the depth of thought and unusual perspectives he has always brought to his work, gives the collection an aesthetic and intellectual consistency.

Laura Mulvey

If only for his Preface and for Dan Morgan’s Introduction, The Attractions of the Moving Image will confirm Gunning’s place in America’s pantheon of film scholars. For these two texts make sense of a spate of superb essays that struck us one by one over a long career. Now, lined up and organized, these gems reflect light off each other, accumulating such energy that the cinema in toto seems to glow. Gunning the essayist who always celebrated mutability stands before us in this splendid book as immutable.

Dudley Andrew

"Gunning's writings burst with joyful creativity and irresistible nuance. Compiling twenty-six of his most essential works—spanning early cinema, the avant-garde, spirit photography, phantom rides, natural magic, and philosophical toys—this tour-de-force collection is a living archive that finds playful historical precedent and utopian possibility toward confronting the mediated crises of our age. To think with Gunning's writing is to feel perpetually inspired and delighted, which is why his expansive scholarship will never cease to be timely.

Maggie Hennefeld