The fifth lecture in the Colloquium
Prof. Emeritus Tom Gunning, University of Chicago | Brakhage: Film and the Obscurity of the Image
The summary of the lecture:
The Cinema of Stan Brakhage has been seen as one of the benchmarks of non-narrative, experimental cinema. But more fundamentally it can be described as a cinema which explores the very nature of the cinematic image: it’s engagement with light and projection and, as I will argue in my presentation, vision and obscurity. Drawing on themes of the phenomenologists Michel Henry and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, I will probe Brakhage’s understanding of cinema as engaging both light and the darkness of night.
About the lecturer: Prof. Emeritus Tom Gunning, University of Chicago
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 storytelling. 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.
Monday the 19th of February , 2024 at 18:15-19:45
A link for the meeting: https://tau-ac-il.zoom.us/j/89618077752
Poster of the fifth meeting in the colloquium series
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