Lecture: Professor Tom Gunning

Professor Tom Gunning, "Putting the digital back in digital cinema: The elusive touch, the evasive grasp, the open gesture"

Tom Gunning is among the leading scholars of film in the United States and Distinguished Service Professor of Art History and Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Chicago. In over one hundred publications, Gunning has concentrated on early cinema (from its origins to World War I) as well as on the culture of modernity from which cinema arose--relating it to still photography, stage melodrama, magic lantern shows, as well as wider cultural concerns such as the tracking of criminals, the World Expositions, and Spiritualism. His influential concept of the "Cinema of Attractions" has related the development of cinema to other forces than storytelling, such as new experiences of space and time in modernity, and an emerging modern visual culture. The issues of film culture, the historical factors of exhibition and criticism and spectator's experience throughout film history are recurrent themes in his work. He comes to UGA as a Willson Center Visiting Fellow and as a guest of the Interdisciplinary Modernism/s Workshop faculty research cluster.