Illustrations by Stephanie Monohan.
We begin with the unprocessed burst from the flare end of the camera roll, a fleeting, almost accidental image that will mirror the film’s final fade. Then, a flurry of opaque, milky strokes begins to churn, like dancing dust particles violently uprooted by a gust of wind. This is our immediate visual field. Slowly, behind this initial wave of chalky bands—now revealing themselves as slightly more defined forms with a faster, more chaotic movement—true three-dimensionality begins to emerge. We soon start to wonder: Is there more that will come into view? Will this impression of depth keep getting deeper? A blurry, reddish figure persists in the distance, stubbornly resisting focus. Gradually, it begins to sharpen. And finally, the initial queries are resolved: The white lines are snowfall; the red is a brick wall. The endless, mysterious depth we initially perceived—a promise, perhaps, inherent in the abstract motion—is quietly denied; the pleasure of a seemingly infinite cascade of flurries dissolves into the ordinary. This is Untitled (1977) by Ernie Gehr—a film some might consider so minor, so insignificant, that its lack of a title seems only to confirm their view. To me—and to film historian Tom Gunning—it is one of the finest achievements in Gehr’s oeuvre: a masterclass in the exploration of perception and one of the greatest cinematic magic tricks ever conceived. (At a screening at Anthology Film Archives this April, Gunning called it “more dramatic than most melodramas.”)
Gunning’s description of Mothlight (1963) in “Transport of Joy: A Meditation on the Medium of Stan Brakhage” as a “seemingly simple film, four minutes in length, without plot or characters yet not truly abstract,” and his assertion that it is “the ultimate film, the movie that shows us where movies come from and what they can do,” resonate deeply here. It is precisely this act of revealing cinema’s fundamental nature and its boundless possibilities that powerfully demonstrates Gehr’s abilities, which Gunning has elaborated on elsewhere.1 Likewise, Gunning’s descriptions demonstrate the equally profound contributions the historian has made to the field of film studies. His newly released collection, The Attractions of the Moving Image: Essays on History, Theory, and the Avant-Garde, encompassing 26 essays—including a more conversational, yet no less penetrating piece on Untitled—spanning over four decades of his writing and research, provides not only an accessible and unpretentious historical overview of cinema’s origins, but also a comprehensive exploration of the myriad directions moving-image art has taken since the likes of the Lumière brothers and Méliès, and what new directions remain available to it.
Mothlight (Stan Brakhage, 1963).
The first essay in the collection is “The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, Its Spectator, and the Avant-Garde” (1990), Gunning’s most important piece of scholarship and one of the most widely read and discussed essays concerning film history—a staple of “Intro to Film” syllabi, having displaced the prevailing French psychoanalytic school of thought that had dominated film scholarship for a generation. In its place, Gunning proposes a new model: one that prioritizes quantitative data (such as the number of tickets to a screening sold or how frequently certain types of films were shown) and the actual material at hand, rather than pontificating on the “spectator” and whatever “apparatus” they’re presumed to inhabit. Beyond this methodological pivot, the essay also offers a total reframing of early cinema: not as a primitive stage on the path to classical narrative storytelling, but its own distinct mode of engagement. This conceptual shift serves as the foundation upon which Gunning’s subsequent theoretical musings on the illusion of movement, its play with temporality, and cinema’s relation to realism have been erected.
Reading it for the first time since I was an undergraduate student, I was struck both by how accessible Gunning’s prose is, and by the clarity and concision of his arguments. He provides rock-solid examples to make his points stick: The close-up cut of a woman’s ankle in Edwin S. Porter’s The Gay Shoe Clerk (1903), for example, “may anticipate later continuity techniques, but its principal motive is again pure exhibitionism.” There’s even a film still of said ankle, in case this wasn’t clear enough. He invites us to find such “series of visual shocks” in just about any type of movie: old or new films, commercial or otherwise, narrative features or experimental shorts; in the works of everyone from D. W. Griffith to David Gatten, Peggy Ahwesh to Paul Thomas Anderson. The essay lays out a key preoccupation for Gunning: a desire to question preconceived assumptions about where we are and how we got there—in this case, that movies were made to tell stories and have always done so.
The Gay Shoe Clerk (Edwin S. Porter, 1903).
But as editor Daniel Morgan illustrates in his unreservedly encomiastic introduction, Gunning’s reputation does not rest on “The Cinema of Attractions” alone. Gunning has written extensively on an astonishing range of topics: race in American cinema after Griffith, the use of formal techniques like flashbacks and camera movement, city symphonies, Alfred Hitchcock, the history of film theory, genre cinema, British cinema, special effects, and even the relationship between dance, painting, and film. Such intellectual breadth is remarkable since most academics focus narrowly on a single area, building their careers around deep specialization. Gunning’s ability to pursue so many diverse threads in cinema history with equal rigor and insight—refusing to let cinema be flattened into a single trajectory—speaks to an extraordinary degree of self-motivation and scholarly curiosity. And in the endnotes for the introduction, most of the subjects on this list point toward essays not featured in this collection, implying that the book itself is merely the visible shard of a vast iceberg of scholarship.
The collection is broken up into three rather porous sections: History, Theory, and Avant-Garde. The essay “Towards a Minor Cinema: Fonoroff, Herwitz, Ahwesh, LaPore, Klahr, and Solomon,” which serves as a primer on five vital experimental filmmakers of the mid-to-late 1980s, falls into the final section, though it might have been filed under either of the others. Most of the essays found in the book’s first leg, History, deal predominantly with films (and other spectacles) produced during cinema’s nascent, formative decades: POV shots of men peeping through keyholes, phantom rides aboard freshly constructed locomotives, a lineage of optical toys. A detour into physiology finds Gunning devoting eight paragraphs to what he calls a “basically discredited” field as it relates to early cinema’s fascination with close-ups. This focus on early cinema’s technological and perceptual experiments underscores Gunning’s larger critical project. He aims not merely to analyze a given film’s content, but to examine how its presentation—shaped by the material and cultural conditions of its time—actively conditions the way viewers engage with moving images, laying the groundwork for what we understand to be the “cinematic experience” today.
The Lonedale Operator (D. W. Griffith, 1911).
Gunning’s approach to his subject, any subject, is characterized by an admirable commitment to elaboration that can, at times, verge on overkill; one marvels at his attention to the minutiae but can’t help questioning its significance. But when he sets his sights on a singular object, he goes about it scrupulously. In fiendishly meticulous detail, he dissects Griffith’s The Lonedale Operator (1911), the peak of the director’s “single-reel era” whose seventeen minutes, we’re told, consist of 98 shots with 23 individual camera set-ups; production was accomplished in under a week. The numbers game continues into Gunning’s commentary on the film’s mise-en-scène (“two desks facing opposite directions in two separate planes of action, the complementary men standing before each desk”) and editing rhythms (the “three-pronged rotation” of the heroine, her rescuers, and the bad guys). This summary only scratches the surface of Gunning’s extensive analysis, which also includes a nuanced examination of Griffith’s use of close-ups—particularly on objects—across his films, before attending thoughtfully to concerns about gender and modernity mobilized by these formal decisions.
In the context of The Lonedale Operator, this level of nuts-and-bolts formal analysis has a clear purpose. As Gunning puts it, “The system of strong formal devices—repetition, symmetry, alternation, and variation on several levels—supports the film’s obvious commercial purpose of telling a story in a clear and exciting manner.” That seems reasonable enough. When he undertakes the same procedure in his essay on Abigail Child’s Mutiny (1983), he admits at the outset that “translating images and their juxtapositions into words dooms the writer to a prolix form of betrayal of the brevity, the wit, the ambiguity, and the pure physical sensation of actually viewing them.” It’s like translating poetry from another language: You capture the basics but risk losing the nuance of what makes the work worthwhile in the first place. At times, Gunning’s almost reverential prose risks overwhelming his insights, as the tone of adoration dulls what might otherwise have been more incisive analysis. A lack of criticality is to be expected of those pieces originally published on the occasion of the filmmaker’s retrospective, but one wonders if Gehr or Ken Jacobs, for instance, have ever made a film that didn’t dazzle Gunning. Omission can also obscure: A conspicuous silence hangs around Andy Warhol and his films, which is surprising given Gunning’s deep engagement with other aspects of the American avant-garde.
In the book’s preface, Gunning makes note of his own “somewhat tortured detour into definition and description,” a habit that can become somewhat tortuous for the reader. Such lexical nitpicking, while academically rigorous, reflects a broader tendency in scholarly writing to privilege form over substance; by nature, few academic texts get to the point quickly. Semantic debates abound: whether it is more correct to use “system” or “structure” to describe the narrative harmony of The Lonedale Operator; if it makes sense for the term “moving image” to replace “cinema” or “film”; what exactly a “transitional” period, for either an artist or a movement, entails; and what constitutes a “medium,” which is most aggressively considered in the 10,000-word, previously unpublished essay on Stan Brakhage that closes the book. An expansive definition of that last term—medium as an attitude more than a material, for Gunning—is in line with Gunning’s tendency to widen rather than restrict. He writes that he views cinema “as a braid made of various aspects rather than a unified essence with firm boundaries,” which “would seem to offer a further argument against the essentialist approach of classical film theory.”
How many academics now carry Gunning’s torch, not merely in terms of the content of their research, but in their relentless, probing curiosity? Who else has even dared to traverse such a vast range of topics? And how many of them are afforded the resources of a tenured university position for such inquiries? The rockstar academic, like the public intellectual, is an endangered species in 2025, undermined by funding cuts and warped by the obsession and disciplinary pressure of citation counts. Gunning’s writings are a blueprint for the kind of fearless, restless scholarship we desperately need more of, yet the type of career this book represents and champions increasingly seems like a relic of the past. Sadly, the scholarly model Gunning represents has gone the way of the Zoetrope.
- For instance, “Perspective and Retrospective: The Films of Ernie Gehr,” in Films of Ernie Gehr (San Francisco Cinematheque, 1993). ↩