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A+RC Virtual Lecture by Tom Gunning: Animation, or, Bringing images to Life
ICA Miami welcomes Professor Tom Gunning to the Art + Research Center for a virtual lecture. This lecture is free and open to the public with advance RSVP and is presented in conjunction with A +RC Fall 2025 semester on Animation and the Future of the Image in dialogue with the museum’s landmark exhibition Joyce Pensato (1941–2019).
This lecture will probe the roots of our fascination with images that come to life. Starting from the Greek myth of Pygmalion and its resonances in western culture (guided by art historian Victor Stoichita’s wonderful study The Pygmalion Effect: From Ovid to Hitchcock) in both literature and the visual arts, the lecture will explore how the modern media of photography, cinema, animation and digital effects have fulfilled this dream by making images move and seem to possess life. The uncanny effects of this animation and the way the icons of cartoons have inspired the arts in the modern era will be explored. The ambiguous legacy of the Pygmalion myth of a male artist creating an ideal woman will provide a thread whose ideology and imagery will be traced.
About Tom Gunning
Tom Gunning works on problems of film style and interpretation, film history and film culture. His published work (approximately one hundred publications) has concentrated on early cinema (from its origins to the WW 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 concept of the “cinema of attractions” has tried to relate 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. His book D.W. Griffith and the Origins of American Narrative Film traces the ways film style interacted with new economic structures in the early American film industry and with new tasks of story telling. His forthcoming book on Fritz Lang deals with the systematic nature of the director’s oeuvre and the processes of interpretation. He has written on the Avant-Garde film, both in its European pre-World War I manifestations and the American Avant-Garde film up to the present day. He has also written on genre in Hollywood cinema and on the relation between cinema and technology. 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.