Viewing Practices: An Interview with Tom Gunning

In September 2023, film scholar Tom Gunning—professor emeritus in the departments of Cinema and Media Studies, Art History, and the College at the University of Chicago—acted as guest programmer and lecturer for On Film, a student-run organization that programs and screens film series at the University of Rochester.1 The organizers of On Film (some of whom are the authors and editors of this interview) had a two-part agenda in requesting Professor Gunning’s collaboration for this special event. First, we felt that his presence could bring higher visibility to On Film (and the public programming it provides), which had been struggling to regain its following after the COVID-19 pandemic. Second, and more importantly, we felt that his visit might help call attention to the importance of film exhibition. More specifically, we told Gunning of our concern about the lack of collective screening practices within classrooms at the University of Rochester. While many universities and colleges with programs dedicated to the study of moving images include screenings as part of their classroom requirements, many other programs—including those at the University of Rochester—have removed such screenings from the classroom. Instead, students are expected to watch required films on their own, outside the classroom, rather than collectively.2 These individual—and siloed—viewing practices have increasingly become a pedagogical norm on US campuses. The authors feel that these siloed viewing practices, especially when considered in tandem with the shuttering and virtual decimation of commercial screening spaces, can be seen as contributing to a dispiriting, nationwide trend that fetters the diversity of film culture and collective spectatorship and that, consequently, has the potential to impede the future study of moving images. For these reasons, we felt strongly that Gunning’s collaboration would help us underscore the value of collective viewing practices. Not only did Gunning enthusiastically accept our invitation, but he also curated a program in support of our agenda.

Gunning’s program was titled Perfect Films and took place at the Visual Studies Workshop.3 Perfect Films consisted of four films, mostly selected from the University of Rochester’s Film and Media Studies Program’s collection of 16mm prints: Mothlight (Stan Brakhage, US, 1963), All My Life (Bruce Baillie, US, 1966), Valse Triste (Bruce Conner, US, 1977), and Trouble in Paradise (Ernst Lubitsch, US, 1932). In his lecture that followed the screening, Gunning made clear that his use of the word perfect was a provocation, not a superficial evaluation. “I’m not really a fan of perfection,” he reflected. “I have always felt that the best films are not really perfect.” At the same time, Gunning insists that a kind of perfect film exists. Generally speaking, perfection implies excellence, flawlessness, or a state of completion. Perfection-realized might suggest the end of a process—as if the quest to fill a void had been accomplished. But, Gunning noted, “If a film were perfect, you might never need to see another film.” It became clear that perfection-realized is not ultimately what Gunning aims to invoke; instead, a perfect film is closer to perfection-failed—it is a film that reaches so near perfection that instead of achieving a state of completion, it whets the appetite for more by evoking an experiential affect that Gunning describes as frisson, which is “the French term for the shiver of excitement and recognition when something goes right through you—body and soul.” Importantly, Gunning compares frisson to a “jab of pleasure,” one that does not produce total satisfaction. Frisson is what leaves the spectator delightfully unsatisfied and wanting. To illustrate this jab, Gunning lingered on a moment from George Cukor’s superb version of A Star is Born (US, 1954)—the moment when James Mason, in an attempt to describe the poignance of Judy Garland’s singing, can only do so by citing evocative metaphors and analogies. Because no words adequately describe the affect that Garland’s singing evokes in Mason, he can only describe other moments that affected him similarly, thereby encircling rather than symbolizing the affect. Perhaps the power of frisson, then, is that it is an affect that simultaneously gestures to experiences of both the past and the future anterior.

In our interview with Gunning, our questions about his film viewing practices acted as a means to gaining a greater understanding of our contemporary moment and how the transition from public to private screenings can shape the appreciation of film. Is this frisson at risk of being lost (or mostly lost) when private screenings become the norm? Does the absence of a collective experience of a film diminish the affective power of such an unrepresentable feeling? What emerged in our conversation was a reflection on the importance of both public and private screenings and on the role each of them plays in the study of cinema. Among other things, Gunning considers the place and purpose of different viewing practices and the reality of cinema as something that is inherently social and that brings our various relationships to the foreground. He speaks not only of what he saw but of whom he saw it with, of who introduced him to key films, of crowd sizes, and of many conversations he has had about films and film programming. And he makes it clear that the social impact of the cinema does not necessarily end when we leave the theater. For instead of simply condemning the trend of watching films on small screens and in isolation, Gunning takes a measured approach. While he understands that newer viewing practices have the potential to expand our cinematic experiences, he does not lose sight of the importance of our past. Rather than replace the old with the new, he advocates for a proliferation of viewing practices.

Interview conducted by Taryn Ely and Danielle Genevro. Interview edited by Jacob Carter, Taryn Ely, Danielle Genevro. Interview transcribed by Robert Genevro II.

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This interview was conducted on September 22, 2023 and has been edited for clarity.4

Taryn Ely: One of the significant stakes of your concept the cinema of attractions is to challenge the assumption that film is essentially a storytelling medium.5 While your scholarship has, by no means, neglected narrative cinema, you have notably concentrated on varied forms of cinema. Your expertise in varied cinemas is well-documented in your publications, which include nearly two hundred pieces discussing, among other things, early cinema, international silent cinema, animation, and the avant-garde as well as French, German, Japanese, Soviet, and US narrative cinemas. Can you say something both about how you came to be exposed to such a diversity of cinemas and about whether the formats in which you viewed films at various points in your life contributed to this diversity?

Tom Gunning: My parents had always been interested in movies in a serious way. Movies weren’t my parents’ profession or obsession, but as they’ve told me, they used to program screenings of films rented from the Museum of Modern Art at their local art gallery. (Not many people came, so they had to bring in sailors off the street and things like that.) So, on my parent’s part, there was an interest in film. My father remembered seeing Intolerance (D.W. Griffith, US, 1916) in theaters when he was a kid. In fact, my father’s uncle, Wid Gunning (1886–1963), developed Wid’s Daily, one of the first trade papers on film, which eventually became Film Daily. Later on, he became a producer at First National film studio. I didn’t have any direct contact with him, but there is a film background in my family.6

Additionally, though I’m not a television scholar—and often, in the dichotomy between television and film, I’m understood as being interested in film, not television—it seems to me indisputable that one of the formative things for me is that I was born in the television era. My parents got their first television soon after I was born. So, it was a presence. Steven Spielberg has described becoming aware of film primarily through old movies on television. From an early age I watched old movies on television, which entailed a variety of films that were generally older than myself by a decade or more. I grew up near Columbus, Ohio, so there weren’t the variety of films that you had in New York. Later in my life, I talked to friends about their experiences with TV series like Million Dollar Movie, where they would show the same film over and over every week.7 I didn’t have anything like that, but nonetheless I do remember watching old movies on television late at night. Specifically, I remember watching horror films on Chiller Theatre on Saturday night, with this atmosphere of induced fright.8 Then in my teenage years, there was channel 34 WOSU, which was the public broadcasting channel for Ohio State University and existed long before PBS. They showed movies, and I remember seeing Battleship Potemkin (Sergei Eisenstein, USSR, 1925) on WOSU when I was about thirteen or fourteen.

Besides the fact that television was a place where I could see movies—and that was what I loved most—television was also a variety format: news, cartoons, soap operas, television dramas, and variety shows. There was not a plethora of channels as there is now, but there were at least three or four channels available. So, in that sense, television harks back to the cinema of attractions—to the early cinema and the nickelodeon—which wasn’t dominated by one central narrative, and where other genres and modes were also available.

We lived to the east of Columbus in a little town called Blacklick, which had a population of about five hundred, and I would see films screened at Ohio State University. When I was fifteen, maybe even fourteen, I remember this really formative experience of seeing Aleksandr Dovzhenko’s Zvenigora (USSR, 1928). I guess it was in a classroom, and I’m sure they projected it on 16mm. Half of the audience walked out, and I thought it was just amazing. Afterward, I remember going up to the organizer and saying, “That was the most amazing film. Are you ever going to show some more?” He said, “I don’t think I can show another Dovzhenko film after this,” because literally half the audience had walked out.

Also, my family would take trips to New York City, so I began haunting the Museum of Modern Art in particular. Next to the screening room, the museum had Thomas Wilfred’s Lumia, which my father liked. He told me about it, I walked in, and from then on, every time I went to the Museum of Modern Art, that was something I looked at.9 And then, I began following the film programs. I was in New York only once a year, but I remember seeing a screening of Intolerance—I was interested in D.W. Griffith from an early age—and a Charlie Chaplin retrospective, where I saw both The Gold Rush (US, 1925) and Monsieur Verdoux (US, 1947).

By age fourteen or fifteen, I was already a kind of cineaste—seeing and reading what I could and collecting film books, which, at that point, there weren’t that many. You could almost have all those books (except for the ones that were out of print). The earliest book on film that I read was The Liveliest Art, which told me about German and Soviet expressionist film.10 Then when I was sixteen, I was thrown out of high school because I had long hair. I applied to New York University, which had a program that you could get in without having a diploma; I was just a high school junior, and I got admitted. So, I came to New York in 1966, which was an amazing year. One of the main things I wanted to do was see movies. I didn’t want to major in film, nor did I have much interest in the idea of filmmaking. (I wasn’t an amateur filmmaker, as was Spielberg at that age.) I wanted to see movies.

That first year at NYU I saw a lot of movies. Then in my sophomore year, when I was eighteen, I met a girl named Terry Watkins.11 She had been in Paris and London and had been close to the magazine Movie in England, which was one of the main places that the auteur theory was circulating.12 She was also close to Andrew Sarris and, at the time I met her, was helping him put his book together.13 She taught auteur theory to me. At that point I had mainly been interested art films, but she took me to a double-bill screening of Phil Karlson’s Phenix City Story (US, 1955) and Sam Fuller’s Shock Corridor (US, 1963). Those two films just blew my mind. We followed that up with a double bill of the Josef von Sternberg films Morocco (US, 1930) and Shanghai Express (US, 1932); and from then on, I talked to her and then began seeing probably three movies a day on average. So, that’s the archaeology! But I would say that at that point, I was still very much interested in narrative film, and Hollywood film became very important to me after Terry introduced me to the auteur theory. 

Ely: How many films do you view on a daily or weekly basis on average? Do you prefer public or private screenings?

Gunning: After my encounter with auteur theory and then beginning with Terry’s guidance, I remember getting the Film Culture issue where Andrew Sarris listed all the important American directors and their films.14 This later became Sarris’s book, but the special issue became my bible.15 I began seeing three movies a day on average. Sometimes I saw five, sometimes just one, but mathematically it would, on average, probably be a little less than three. But three was normal.

And I saw films in a variety of formats. Well, not that great a variety. The big dichotomy would be watching commercial screenings in a theater versus watching films on television. New York had many more late-night TV screenings than Columbus, Ohio. I remember that the last showing of films on TV was at three o’clock in the morning, and one night I stayed up to watch a Douglas Sirk movie and was so sleepy that every time there was an ad—which there weren’t that many late at night—I would put my head under the faucet with cold water to be awake enough to watch the whole film.

But primarily I went to commercial screenings. There were a number of repertory theaters—the most wonderful one was the New Yorker.16 In fact, if you have the original volume of the Film Culture Reader, you’ll see on its cover a photo of the New Yorker marquee, which had listed on it both The Magnificent Ambersons (Orson Welles, US, 1942) and The Sin of Jesus (Robert Frank, US, 1962).17 That was where I met Terry Watkins. The New Yorker changed films maybe twice a week, and it was a very good theater. But there were a number of others. I remember the “air-conditioned Thalia Theater,” as it was advertised, which was on 95th Street and Broadway and was a little more scuzzy.18 Then there were a number of others down in the Village, including Bleecker Street Cinema.19 So any night—in addition to seeing contemporary, commercial movies—you had the choice of the Museum of Modern Art and at least six or seven repertory theaters, most of which, other than the New Yorker, changed their program daily. So, there were lots of movies to see. One of the first things I would do every week was make a list of what was in the TV Guide and then what was in the various repertory theaters. People would want me to go on vacations with them during the summer, and I’d go, “Well, no, this movie is playing.” And they would be really irritated that I wasn’t willing to adjust my schedule.

Now, when you say “private screenings,” I would, of course, watch TV primarily by myself, but not entirely. Usually, one of my roommates was watching with me, or a friend. But then I got a 16mm projector and got in contact with a friend who was a film collector so I could watch films projected on my wall. But even those screenings were hardly private since they were almost always with friends, though not more than four or five. Only later on did I watch more privately, when I was teaching and was having to prepare a class and would be watching films and just taking notes and so on. The idea of a private screening was rare. I had a couple of friends who wrote reviews for The Village Voice or publications like that, and they would occasionally take me to a press screening. But press screenings weren’t private in the sense of individual; they were private in the commercial sense. I would occasionally attend those, but not often. What I saw was primarily on television or in a repertory theater. And in the late 1960s, which was a good time for new films, I went to contemporary, commercial cinema too. I vividly remember seeing Bonnie and Clyde (Arthur Penn, US, 1967) for the first time and being really excited that there was a contemporary film that was as interesting as the great films. I was also very impressed by John Cassavetes’s Faces (US, 1968), and I went to films like Ingmar Bergman’s Persona (Sweden, 1966) and other art films too. Though, at that point, I was almost a little disenchanted with art film because I was so excited by what I was discovering in auteur Hollywood. There was a kind of artistry that was not as obvious but was just as complex.

Danielle Genevro: It seems safe to assume that you’ve seen thousands of films. Peter Bogdanovich had a lifelong practice of using index cards to document each film that he saw and what he found memorable about them. I use an Excel spreadsheet myself. I was wondering if you have a preferred method for documenting the films that you’ve seen. If so, what kinds of information would you typically include and how does this documentation serve you? And if you don’t do this, I’m curious as to why not.

Gunning: I wouldn’t say I do. I keep a list of everything I see, but I don’t by any means index them or so on. I do often, but it is sporadic. Back in my undergraduate days, I kept a list of what I saw, who directed it, what year. However, it was just kind of rudimentary. More recently, I’ve begun writing a note or two, because I realize I don’t necessarily remember each film, and having just a note of what was central to the plot or what shot was really impressive will jog my memory. I have a file that I’ve kept on my computer for the last twenty years or so, where I take notes, particularly when I have issues that I’m thinking about—even though these are not things that I would end up working on. For a long time, I was very interested in film noir, and I would often take notes because the films were often kind of fugitive. Not the classics, like Touch of Evil(Orson Welles, US, 1958) or The Big Sleep (Howard Hawks, US, 1946), but films that were kind of obscure and that could otherwise be forgotten. In addition, I have a strong interest in cinematography, so I have notes on who cinematographers were and what things struck me. For a long time, I kept track of long takes, finding what films had shots that were more than a minute or a minute and a half. Of course, with my interest in early film, I would keep pretty detailed notes when going to festivals. When I went to Pordenone, I would keep notes—often scribbling illegible things in the dark.20 I was never systematically collecting notes. When I’m working on a project and doing research, that’s different. But that’s not my regular practice.

Genevro: I heard you once say to your students that attending film screenings for your class is more important than attending your lectures. In my experience, your lectures are—to understate it—memorable and worth attending. But also, the films on your syllabi are so carefully selected and arranged that I’ve often had the feeling that when viewed in sequence, the films reveal, or at least anticipate, your argument and how it will unfold. Could you discuss your process for selecting films for a syllabus?

Gunning: Of course, a statement like the one I made is ironic in a certain sense. Some people have the attitude that they don’t have to go to the screening—but they do have to go to the screening. I would say that polemically; I wasn’t really saying lectures don’t matter. It was polemic in the sense that I’m trying to invert it so that people wouldn’t think, “Well, I don’t have to go to the movie,” or, “I can catch it, maybe,” or whatever. And there is something that I think is unfortunately encouraged when there aren’t screening screenings. Paige Starling Sorvillo and I were talking about streaming, and she was talking about people watching La Région Centrale (Michael Snow, Canada, 1971)—one of my favorite films of all time—and watching it at four times speed.21 I’d rather they didn’t watch it!

Emphasizing the importance of those screenings was the point of that statement. It was a little bit like a story I often tell about pedagogy. When I taught at SUNY Purchase, screenings were part of the class, and once, when I was showing the Douglas Sirk version of Imitation of Life (US, 1959)—a film that I care about a lot—I said, “OK, now I know some people find this film amusing. Sandra Dee is kind of amusing. But it’s not just that. It’s very important that you respond to it.” And I said, “In fact, if you don’t cry by the end of this film, you flunk this course.” I said it with a total straight face, but of course I didn’t mean it. Somebody told me that the kid next to her said, “Oh god, I didn’t think I was going to cry, but then, at the end of the funeral, I did. So, I guess I passed the course.” I realized they really thought I meant it. But I would rather they have that misapprehension. I don’t believe in telling people how they should react to a film, but with a film like that, it’s very interesting because their tendency—even if they’re moved—will be not to show it or not to show it in a class. And so, doing this ridiculous thing of saying you have to cry opened them up in a certain way.

This is tangential to your main question, but when I taught at Northwestern, Chuck Kleinhans (a colleague of mine) told me that a lot of people treat Sirk and his melodramas as comedy. You go to a screening and people are laughing. Chuck agreed with this [response] because he thought that was what those films were partly about: making fun. He had this attitude of encouraging each class to laugh at it. And one time, after he showed the film, an African American secretary came up to him and asked if he would show it again for a group of her friends. So, he arranged the screening, and a Black audience, including some younger people, came and they all cried. It made him think, “Maybe I’m not getting the point; maybe there’s some other way I could approach the film.”

But the question about selecting films . . . I’m very glad to hear you say that. The succession of films is almost a commentary. In fact, the thing that I almost wish I wouldn’t confess is that as I would teach the class, I would suddenly discover connections that I hadn’t planned. I would think, “this is so perfect,” and teach it as though I had thought this film will lead to that film, or this film is the inverse of that film. This encourages people to see each film not just as an individual thing but as a course. I do think about it beforehand, but more emerges after the fact. It constitutes a large part of what the logic of the course would be even though in some ways it wasn’t conscious. That succession is very important to me.

Genevro: At the University of Chicago, did you have a particular film archive you had to draw from, or were you able to just select anything you needed for a course?

Gunning: Pretty much anything. Most of the years I was there, Julia Gibbs, the director of the Film Studies Center at the University of Chicago, who just retired, booked the films, and she was terrific. We had our own archive, and I certainly drew on that, but I didn’t have to draw only from that. Not everything you want is always available. For a long time, 16mm rental places had a lot of films. It’s less true now, now that a lot of things are digital. I have no real objection to digital formats if you have a good projector and you have a Blu-ray. Sometimes, that can be just as good as a 16mm print. At the University of Chicago, we sometimes had 35mm formats and even 3D. I know it’s unusual to have access to film prints—admittedly, not every place can do it—but that should at least be seen as the ideal. So, I didn’t primarily draw on one archive, although we had an archive and it was very good, but I would have been unhappy if that was all I could draw on.

Ely: Following up on that, we’re wondering how this process of curating film screenings for a class differs from the one you follow when preparing programs for public screenings.

Gunning: I guess that the real difference would usually be the public parameter. I’m hesitating a little bit on what a public screening is as opposed to a class screening. At the University of Chicago, we would post every week all the films that were being shown in the screening room. Obviously, you were expected to come if you were in the class. But you also could come if you weren’t in class. For legal reasons, attendance was restricted to students, but I never had any trouble with people who snuck in from outside the university. The idea of a public versus a class screening is less clear to me. Certainly, there are public screenings that are not part of a class, and those films are not in a pedagogical succession dealing with a topic or a director. That would be the biggest difference. But my understanding is a little bit artificial because I haven’t had a job as a programmer for a museum. If I had, I would definitely not consider the exact same aspects as I would for a class.

I had a good friend at the Netherlands Film Museum, Nico de Klerk, and he had very strong opinions about programming which I sometimes disagreed with, but they were really interesting. One of the things that he believed—and I have friends who have the exact opposite belief—was that there should not be long programs. He didn’t like the idea of showing nine or ten short films together, and he wanted pauses between films. I found that very interesting. I wasn’t sure I believed in it because sometimes you want to get in as many films as possible. But I understood his point that things become blurred. Even though I loved Pordenone, they had films from eight o’clock in the morning until midnight. When I first went (I think it has gotten a little more varied since then), you saw twelve films, and there was this kind of plus or minus. On the one hand, you felt like you’d just been at an orgy, or you’d just been at a feast. On the other hand, you think, “What did I just see?”

There are interesting questions about public programming, which I’ve never quite had to deal with but which I’ve thought about both as a participant and in talking to friends who are at archives or film festivals. A good friend of mine for years, Mark McElhatten, an avant-garde programmer, often specializes in programs that are three or four hours long. They are excessive, and that is part of the point. But there are moments when I question this. When I would go to Pordenone, I would try to see everything, and my friend André Gaudreault would always want to pull me out for a meeting about this or that because we had various projects. I would say, “No, I’m here to see these films.” And in his French-Canadian accent, André would say, “You know, Tom, you’re bulimic about films.” There is a part of that that I would certainly confess to. Perfect Films, this film program that we just did in Rochester, was something where I thought about how things combine, and it is something I’d like to do more of. But I’m not like Mark McElhatten, who really is, some people have said, an auteur programmer because he puts his signature on the programs he puts together.

Genevro: Do you do guest programming? It sounds like you don’t. I would have imagined that you’re constantly guest programming, but it sounds like that’s not necessarily the case.

Gunning: Yeah, I think it’s rare.

Genevro: I’m surprised by this.

Gunning: Well, I think most places have programmers. It’s a profession, and they want to keep their jobs. [laughs]

Ely: I think we’re surprised that more people don’t ask you to do public programming because we’re always so in awe of the way you’re able to combine seemingly disparate modes and genres on a syllabus. The films form such pleasantly unexpected combinations.

Gunning: Mark McElhatten is a kind of master of this type of programming, although as I say, excessive. The Perfect Films program that you helped me realize was very much about being able to put Brakhage and Lubitsch together, and then of course, in the lecture, to bring in George Cukor. That is one of my general attitudes for getting people to think about cinema: bringing together both the narrative and the nonnarrative—to not think just in terms of one or the other. Not that you can’t, because obviously that allows you to concentrate on something. But the idea of the two together interests me a lot.22

Genevro: Considering the rise and proliferation of small screens as well as the shuttering of public screening spaces, not just commercial spaces but also classroom spaces—which is certainly the case here at the University of Rochester—why do you think that certain kinds of screening venues are closing while others remain strong? Do you think that public film screenings remain important for the cinematic experience?

Gunning: To address the first part first, it disturbs me very much that screenings as part of an education have begun to vanish. Many places that used to have them now don’t. I think I mentioned to you a course I taught at Tel Aviv University, which was a wonderful course with wonderful colleagues and very interesting students, but everything was screened on their computer at home. And when I tried to institute projecting the films in the classroom, only four or five people could attend because of their schedules. I was kind of surprised they didn’t make it more of a priority, but they’ve got families, work, and other classes. It had to have been arranged beforehand. I found out from students there that they used to have screenings, and the screenings were not only for the class, but you could attend as a student at the university.

It’s wonderful to be able to stream films because there is a difference between your first viewing and your analysis. You should be able to have access to rewatch films, and that is possible only through streaming or similar things. So, the technology is absolutely a plus. But the idea that new technology replaces old technology—this is one of the things that so often happens with technology! Instead of it being about ameliorating and making a situation better, it is always, “How do we do it for less money?” It always fascinates me when I talk about the history of deep focus and technological change. Deep focus is partly achieved in the late thirties and early forties because the film stocks become so much more sensitive, and that theoretically allowed you to stop down and achieve deep focus through a more closed lens. But the way most people did it was that they shot just as they normally did, but they eliminated lights. They just didn’t use as many lights. It didn’t have to be as bright, because it was cheaper. But it was people like Gregg Toland who said we could do this a different way; we could actually stop down the lens and achieve deep focus. And that then became important, not just for Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, US, 1941) but for a lot of films in the forties, and you would suddenly get this wonderful deep space. But the initial response was just, “How can we use this new technology to do what we’ve always done more cheaply?” And it’s always that kind of a fight: to use new technology to do something you didn’t do before.

One of the things at the University of Chicago that has been maintained is the screening space and the importance of screenings for classes. Maybe it can be done only in a few institutions, but I’m not really sure that that is true. It’s often the case that places had the ability, but they eliminated it because bureaucrats took over. It’s terrible how people do not care about the visual aspect of things. I’m amazed how often you’ll have an art exhibition, and the curators will, for example, have Entr’acte (René Clair, France, 1924) on a VHS showing on a wall. You could get the film print, and then you could get a better system, a better projector, and so on. And they’ll say, “Oh, but that’s expensive.” But they would not think twice about spending thousands of dollars to bring a painting from Paris. It’s not finances that are really running it. It’s prejudice against the visual image in film; it’s hierarchy. It’s really shocking. I have tried, at various museums, to tell them about this other possibility. And I have even convinced people, and they would set up something. But then later on, they’d choose a cheaper option.

Genevro: So, you do think public film screenings remain important for the cinematic experience.

Gunning: Yeah, absolutely. As I say, it’s not how you go about a close analysis, and it’s not what you do when you’re individually doing research. To review a film, you probably need it on your computer so you can stop and start it. All these things are really wonderful innovations. But I would say a public screening is important, particularly for your first exposure to the film. If you’ve seen Battleship Potemkin fifteen times, I don’t know that you have to screen it another fifteen times. I would say public screenings are important. Not adamantly. But for your first viewing, absolutely.

Ely: I really loved what you said, during your lecture, about cinema being social. It was refreshing to hear someone articulate it that way.

Gunning: Well, we all have it. Although I guess there are probably people now who have never seen a movie publicly. I’m not the biggest Spielberg fan, and people have told me, “I know you don’t like Spielberg. You’re going to hate The Fabelmans (US, 2022).” But I found, as with every Spielberg, it’s uneven; it had wonderful scenes, but then something ruins it. I love the scene where Sammy talks to John Ford. But then Sammy leaves the office, clicks his feet, and jumps in the air, and I thought, “Oh god, you just had a good scene. Why’d you ruin it?” But the opening of The Fabelmans, which records the experience of watching a film as a child, is really terrific. When people said they thought I wouldn’t like the film, I expected it just to be sentimental. But it’s not. That opening scene about Cecile B. DeMille’s The Greatest Show on Earth(US, 1952) is about trauma and about a kid being traumatized by what he sees on the screen. Trauma is not something to be avoided. Number one, you cannot avoid it. But number two, it is something to be processed. What is great about The Fabelmans—and I really do admire this part very much—is the way that Sammy becomes a filmmaker trying to work through his trauma of having, as a kid, seen this train wreck in The Greatest Show on Earth. I thought, “This is smart. Spielberg really does understand something.” But I’m also so amazed that at points, he doesn’t.

So, quick answer, yes, public screens are extremely important. We were talking more in terms of pedagogy for film students, but I think it’s important for everybody. That isn’t to gainsay the private experience. I remember at one point, at least twenty-five if not thirty years ago, having an interaction with David Cronenberg, and people had asked him about this concern about public screening versus private screening, and he said anyone who has had the experience of watching a film late at night on a good television with headphones can have an experience that is just as powerful. And powerful, maybe, in a different way than screening it publicly. I would not deny that at all. The scary thing, the error, is substituting one thing for another. Proliferation is great. But eliminating something because you can do it a different way—that’s very concerning.

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The Attractions of the Moving Image: Essays on History, Theory, and the Avant-Garde by Tom Gunning and edited by Daniel Morgan will be available from the University of Chicago Press March 2025.

Tom Gunning is Professor Emeritus of Art History, Cinema and Media Studies, and the College Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Chicago. He received his PhD from New York University in 1986 and received the Society for Cinema Studies best dissertation prize. In 2009 he was the recipient of the Distinguished Achievement Award from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation in recognition of his major contribution to the fields of film history and theory, and in 2010 was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.