Tom Gunning > Quotes

“Filmmakers and film historians alike can turn to the past to discover energies that haven’t yet been fully explored and that can never be fully exhausted.”
― Tom Gunning, The Attractions of the Moving Image: Essays on History, Theory, and the Avant-Garde

“If the ontology of the image, digital as well as analog, is one of his concerns, so too is the idea of a film language, but with language now grounded less in structuralist and semiotic accounts and more in mysticism, human evolution, and modes of poetic register.”
― Tom Gunning, The Attractions of the Moving Image: Essays on History, Theory, and the Avant-Garde

“If graphism, Gunning argues, is about recording the movement of gesture, “late Brakhage reveals that his cinema, and that is to say, his medium, has been about the hand as much as the eye: the hand that marks and moves draws, writes, and gestures.”72 It a medium, a physical presence that can be revealed in multiple ways and which constitutes the affective charge of the films.”
― Tom Gunning, The Attractions of the Moving Image: Essays on History, Theory, and the Avant-Garde

“Whatever differences one might find between Lumière and Méliès, they should not represent the opposition between narrative and nonnarrative filmmaking, at least as it is understood today. Rather, one can unite them in a conception that sees cinema less as a way of telling stories than as a way of presenting a series of views to an audience, fascinating because of their illusory power (whether the realistic illusion of motion offered to the first audiences by Lumière, or the magical illusion concocted by Méliès) and exoticism.”
― Tom Gunning, The Attractions of the Moving Image: Essays on History, Theory, and the Avant-Garde

“The cinema of attractions directly solicits spectator attention, inciting visual curiosity and supplying pleasure through an exciting spectacle. This cinema is based in theatrical display rather than narrative absorption, emphasizing the direct stimulation of shock or surprise at the expense of unfolding a story or creating a diegetic universe. The cinema of attractions expends little energy creating characters with psychological motivations or individual personality.”
― Tom Gunning, The Attractions of the Moving Image: Essays on History, Theory, and the Avant-Garde

“Writings by the early modernists (Futurists, Dadaists, and Surrealists) on the cinema follow a pattern similar to Léger: enthusiasm for this new medium and its possibilities, and disappointment at the way it has already developed, its enslavement to traditional art forms, particularly theater and literature. This fascination with the potential of a medium (and the accompanying fantasy of rescuing the cinema from its enslavement to alien and passé forms) can be understood from a number of viewpoints. I want to use it to illuminate a topic I have also approached before, the strangely heterogeneous relation that film before 1906 (or so) bears to the films that follow, and the way a taking account of this heterogeneity signals a new conception of film history and film form.”
― Tom Gunning, The Attractions of the Moving Image: Essays on History, Theory, and the Avant-Garde

“Nor should we ever forget that in the earliest years of exhibition the cinema itself was an attraction. Early audiences went to exhibitions to see machines demonstrated (the newest technological wonder, following in the wake of such widely exhibited machines and marvels as X-rays or, earlier, the phonograph), rather than to view films. It was the Cinématographe, the Biograph, or the Vitascope that was advertised on the variety bills in which they premièred, not Le Déjeuner de bébé or The Black Diamond Express.”
― Tom Gunning, The Attractions of the Moving Image: Essays on History, Theory, and the Avant-Garde

“The enormous development of the entertainment industry since the 1910s and its growing acceptance by middle-class culture (and the accommodation that made this acceptance possible) have made it difficult to understand the liberation popular entertainment offered at the beginning of the century.”
― Tom Gunning, The Attractions of the Moving Image: Essays on History, Theory, and the Avant-Garde

“Imagine a world alive with incomprehensible objects and shimmering with an endless variety of movement and innumerable gradations of color. Imagine a world before ‘the beginning was the word.”
― Tom Gunning, The Attractions of the Moving Image: Essays on History, Theory, and the Avant-Garde

“early film the relation between narration and character is often secondary to the relation between spectacle and spectator.”
― Tom Gunning, The Attractions of the Moving Image: Essays on History, Theory, and the Avant-Garde

“Even when presented in the nickelodeons that were emerging at the end of this period, these short films always appeared in a variety format, trick films sandwiched in with farces, actualities, “illustrated songs,” and, quite frequently, cheap vaudeville acts. It was precisely this nonnarrative variety that placed this form of entertainment under attack by reform groups in the early 1910s. The Russell Sage Survey of popular entertainments found vaudeville “depends upon an artificial rather than a natural human and developing interest, these acts having no necessary and as a rule, no actual connection.”14 In other words, no narrative. A”
― Tom Gunning, The Attractions of the Moving Image: Essays on History, Theory, and the Avant-Garde

“The result is a theory of language, as Gunning quotes Novalis, that is part of a “higher linguistic power,” not so much conveying meaning as carrying us, as viewers and readers alike, along with it, “a process of being taken out of our selves somewhere.”
― Tom Gunning, The Attractions of the Moving Image: Essays on History, Theory, and the Avant-Garde

“Likewise, the traditional spectacle film proved true to its name by highlighting moments of pure visual stimulation along with narrative. The 1924 version of Ben Hur was in fact shown at a Boston theater with a timetable announcing the moment of its prime attractions: 8.35 The Star of Bethlehem 8.40 Jerusalem Restored 8.59 Fall of the House of Hur 10.29 The Last Supper 10.50 Reunion18 The Hollywood advertising policy of enumerating the features of a film, each emblazoned with the command “See!” shows this primal power of the attraction running beneath the armature of narrative regulation.”
― Tom Gunning, The Attractions of the Moving Image: Essays on History, Theory, and the Avant-Garde

“The drive toward display in the cinema of attraction which subverts the creation of self-contained diegesis operates at full force in these films. However, a close examination of editing and narrative patterns in some of these films does indicate the means by which this scopic force was absorbed and channeled in later narrative films.”
― Tom Gunning, The Attractions of the Moving Image: Essays on History, Theory, and the Avant-Garde

“This shift has immediate consequences. First, it moves the site of realism from a relation between camera and world to one between image and viewer, from ontology to phenomenology; it is our engagement with the moving image, the “increased sense of involvement with the cinematic image,” that is fundamental to the impression of reality. It”
― Tom Gunning, The Attractions of the Moving Image: Essays on History, Theory, and the Avant-Garde

“Every change in film history implies a change in its address to the spectator, and each period constructs its spectator in a new way.”
― Tom Gunning, The Attractions of the Moving Image: Essays on History, Theory, and the Avant-Garde

“Again, the use of footage from early cinema gives this perceptual charge a historical force, making the spectator confront the present moment of the film’s projection—and the perceptual transformations that are occurring—at the same time as the pastness of the images shown on screen. Moving back and forth, never settling, a model of uncertain temporality that weaves together history and experience into one.”
― Tom Gunning, The Attractions of the Moving Image: Essays on History, Theory, and the Avant-Garde

“Many trick films are, in effect, plotless, a series of transformations strung together with little connection and certainly no characterization. But to approach even the plotted trick films, such as Voyage dans la lune (1902), simply as precursors of later narrative structures is to miss the point. The story simply provides a frame upon which to string a demonstration of the magical possibilities of the cinema.”
― Tom Gunning, The Attractions of the Moving Image: Essays on History, Theory, and the Avant-Garde

“Its role as comic parody should limit viewing The Unclean World as a subversive, self-reflective film. It belongs to the tradition of gags in comic films such as Sherlock Jr. (1924), Hellzapoppin’ (1941), or The Nutty Professor (1963), which punch holes in audiences’ expectations of a coherent diegesis.”
― Tom Gunning, The Attractions of the Moving Image: Essays on History, Theory, and the Avant-Garde

“Where Friedberg reads Bergson as aligning the virtual with the possible, hence creating an opposition between possible and actual, Gunning posits a more complex relation: “the virtual is not simply the immaterial waiting in the wings to become material, nor is it a refusal of materialization, a purist pursuit of abstraction. The virtual implies the force of invention and creation, never fully given, but moving toward actualization” (14:328). The virtual image is not opposed to the actual but, rather, part of what allows the actual to come into being—along with “an element of the indeterminate in its unfurling” that makes this connection less secure.”
― Tom Gunning, The Attractions of the Moving Image: Essays on History, Theory, and the Avant-Garde

“The history of early cinema, like the history of cinema generally, has been written and theorized under the hegemony of narrative films.”
― Tom Gunning, The Attractions of the Moving Image: Essays on History, Theory, and the Avant-Garde

“The first is better known. “Moving Away from the Index: Cinema and the Impression of Reality” emerges against the backdrop of anxiety engendered by the rise in digital technologies of image production and modification.”
― Tom Gunning, The Attractions of the Moving Image: Essays on History, Theory, and the Avant-Garde

“Dealing with early cinema within the context of archive and academy, we risk missing its vital relation to vaudeville, its primary place of exhibition until around 1905. Film appeared as one attraction on the vaudeville program, surrounded by a mass of unrelated acts in a nonnarrative and even nearly illogical succession of performances.”
― Tom Gunning, The Attractions of the Moving Image: Essays on History, Theory, and the Avant-Garde

“The ambivalence of early film allows for varying mixes of pure indulgence of scopic attractions and the channeling of visual involvement toward narrative ends.”
― Tom Gunning, The Attractions of the Moving Image: Essays on History, Theory, and the Avant-Garde

“An attraction aggressively subjected the spectator to “sensual or psychological impact.” According to Eisenstein, theater should consist of a montage of such attractions, creating a relation to the spectator entirely different from his absorption in “illusory depictions.”
― Tom Gunning, The Attractions of the Moving Image: Essays on History, Theory, and the Avant-Garde

“His look back, though, is not nostalgic; rather, it seeks to uncover what he calls “tales of cinema’s forgotten future” and to bring them into the present.”
― Tom Gunning, The Attractions of the Moving Image: Essays on History, Theory, and the Avant-Garde

“A vision of the past has always been central to Gunning’s work, one in which cinema’s history continues to matter to an ongoing sense of its present and future.”
― Tom Gunning, The Attractions of the Moving Image: Essays on History, Theory, and the Avant-Garde