An Evening with Tom Gunning
Tuesday, April 29, 2025 at 7pm
361 Stagg Street, Suite 407, Brooklyn
Grandma's Reading Glass, George Albert Smith, 1900
The Big Swallow, James Williamson, 1901
Le village de Namo: panorama pris d’une chaise à porteurs, Gabriel Veyre for the Lumière company, 1900
The Man with a Rubber Head, Georges Méliès, 1901
The Melomaniac, Georges Méliès, 1903
A Spiritualist Photographer, Georges Méliès, 1903
The Magic Lantern, Georges Méliès, 1903
The Red Specter, Segundo de Chomón, 1907
Interior N.Y. Subway, 14th St. to 42nd St., Biograph, 1905
The Country Doctor, D.W. Griffith, 1909
Better than Ever, Ernie Gehr, 2015
Tom Gunning, one of the most influential film historians of his generation, returns to Light Industry to present a personal selection of early cinema. Our program is one of several happening at venues across the city, following screenings at the Museum of the Moving Image and Anthology Film Archives, all coinciding with the publication of Gunning's new book, The Attractions of the Moving Image.
"What to call these films in order to both describe them historically (in terms of the past) and indicate what they can offer us now (the present and the future)? Primitive cinema? Tainted with colonist overtones and biological determinism. The first films? But what comes before the first, and who's counting? These glowing moving images had centuries of play with light and movement preceding them: toys and scientific experiments, tools of education and means of creating illusions—tricks. I adopted Charlie Musser's term 'Early Cinema' (or as my friend André Gaudreault would put it: le cinéma des premiers temps. A sense of beginnings and freshness, rather than clumsy attempts at making movies. A dawn of something to remember and envision in what now seems like dark times…
Too often historians made a dichotomy between the path of realism (Lumière company's views from around the world) and the magic of Méliès (illusions created by the camera). But in fact they both were after the same thing: images that moved and seemed to live and change. What after all was the nature of magic? The British filmmakers who gathered around Brighton saw magic in the tricks of the photography and continued their previous work with the Magic Lantern and spiritualist seances (Grandma’s Reading Glass, The Big Swallow). The trick film became a genre. Méliès may be its father, but the Spaniard Segundo de Chomón perfected it in his work at Pathé around 1907 (The Red Specter).
The fact is, technology was changing the world around the turn of the century, and cinema both participated in these changes and recorded them for us to see. The subway tunneling under Manhattan and electric light illuminating its snaking path.
But film could tell stories as well. It could dramatize the split between rich and poor and demonstrate cinema's power to take us back and forth, creating the experience of time we call suspense (The Country Doctor). Or illuminate the dark forces that could inhabit the city streets of Paris and reveal that the world we recognize may not be what it seems (Juve versus Fantômas).
Better than ever. 'They’re dancing better than ever,' commented Ernie Gehr's wife Myrel Glick on seeing how he brought these girls' dance into contemporary light. Yes indeed. That's the mystery. That the past dances now better than ever, even while we feel the world getting dimmer and dimmer."
- TG
Copies of Attractions of the Moving Image will be available for sale at the event.
Tickets - Pay what you can ($10 suggested donation), available at door.
Please note: seating is limited. First-come, first-served. Box office opens at 6:30pm. No entry 10 minutes after start of show.