Since the Greek myth of the sculptor Pygmalion, who fell in love with his statue and prayed to the Goddess Venus to grant his wish and bring the figure to life, the dream of animating inanimate images has taken many forms both literary and visual. Drawing on critical and literary texts ,visual images and films this seminar will explore this obsession. From the Latin poet Ovid, through medieval and Renaissance re-tellings of the myth and the images they inspired we will explore the mythic roots of this fantasy, guided by the critical work of art historian Victor Stoichita. In the nineteenth century E.T. A Hoffmann, Jules Verne and Villiers d’Isle Adam all wrote fictional accounts of bringing a female image to life — or seeming to. During the same century the technical innovations of scientific toys, photography, chronophotography and motion pictures realized the dream of an image which moved and seemed alive. Early in the 20th century, inspired by the comic strip, motion picture technology was used to bring drawings to life and the animated cartoon was born. Pioneers of animation such as Emile Cohl, Windsor McKay and Walt Disney created a whole world of animated characters, while abstract artists such as Oskar Fischinger, Walter Ruttmann and Robert Breer showed that animation could also make the lines and colors dance across the screen.
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Seminar 1: Pygmalion and Galeata and Their Avatars
Mon, Oct 27, 2025 -
Seminar 2: The Moving Image
Tue, Oct 28, 2025 -
Seminar 3: Animation bringing drawings to life
Wed, Oct 29, 2025 -
Public Lecture: Animation, or, Bringing images to Life
Thu, Oct 30, 2025
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.