- Speaker:
Tom Gunning
- Time
-
Wednesday, Apr 15, 2026 at 1:10 pm
- Location
-
212 Ross Hall
- Co-Sponsors:
- English Department
- World Languages and Cultures Department
- Committee on Lectures (funded by Student Government)
PLEASE NOTE: This lecture has been canceled as of March 16, 2026.
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2026 Goldtrap Lecture
Pygmalion, a legendary Cyprian sculptor, fell in love with the work of his own hands, a figure he fashioned of a beautiful woman. In the version of the tale in Ovid’s "Metamorphoses," being obsessed with his creation, Pygmalion asks Aphrodite to give him a woman in her image. Returning to his studio, he discovers his statue has actually been transformed from ivory to flesh and is alive. This theme has inspired visual artworks (paintings and sculptures), as well as literary works. In his work "The Pygmalion Effect: From Ovid to Hitchcock," art historian Victor Stoichita has brilliantly traced its manifestations from antiquity through to the modern era, including a discussion of Alfred Hitchcock’s masterful 1958 film Vertigo.
As a film historian, Gunning will extend Stoicita’s fine insight into Hitchcock’s connection to the theme by exploring the motif of creating the ideal woman throughout his film career. He will also probe the ties the myth of creating an ideal woman has to the early conception of cinema technology in the symbolist novel by Auguste Villiers de l’Isle-Adam (L’Eve Future) and the theorization of montage by Soviet filmmaker Lev Kuleshov. The ambivalence of this male fantasy will be examined, as well as its inherent auto-critique.
Tom Gunning is the author of multiple books and nearly two hundred essays that have defined the field of cinema and media studies. His works have transformed our understanding of early cinema and the American avant-garde and reset the terms of many central debates in film and media history and theory. His 1986 essay “The Cinema of Attractions” is among the most cited essays on film ever published. Gunning’s writings articulate a distinctive and powerful model for thinking about cinema’s history and likely future, addressing the full range of moving-image media, from film to still photography to digital media. His discussions draw on stage melodrama and magic lantern shows, as well as criminology, world’s fairs, and Spiritualism, surveying the medium as a cultural phenomenon informed by the industrial and information ages, psychiatry, urban experience, discourses on art and aesthetics, and more.
Please note: this lecture will not be recorded.