Tom Gunning
Tom Gunning is the Edwin A. and Betty L. Bergman Distinguished Service Professor in the Departments of Art History, Cinema and Media Studies, and the College at the University of Chicago. He is the author of D.W. Griffith and the Origins of American Narrative Film (University of Illinois Press) and The Films of Fritz Lang; Allegories of Vision and Modernity (British Film Institute), and most recently co-authored the picture book The Fantasia of Color in Early Cinema with the Eye Museum in Amsterdam. He has published over one hundred and fifty articles on early cinema, film history and theory, avant-garde film, film genre, and the relation between cinema and modernism. With Andre Gaudreault he originated the influential theory of the “Cinema of Attractions.” In 2009, he was the first film scholar to receive an Andrew A. Mellon Distinguished Achievement Award, and in 2010, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is currently working on a book on the invention of the moving and projected image, as well as a theater project at California Institute of the Arts based on Fantômas, the phantom bandit of turn of the century French popular culture.
