September 14, 2005
2005-2006/004

“Fantasmagoria” topic for talk at UIUC Sept. 23

University of Chicago professor to discuss history of popular European stage shows


Tom Gunning, Professor of Art History and Cinema & Media Studies at the University of Chicago, will give a lecture entitled, "Staging Ghost Shows in Post Revolutionary France, or, Seeing is Not Believing," on Friday, Sept. 23, at 4 p.m., in the Lucy Ellis Lounge, 1080 Foreign Languages Building, 707 S. Mathews Avenue, Urbana, on the U. of I. campus.

The lecture is free and open to the public.

In his talk Gunning will discuss the history of “fantasmagoria”—popular European stage shows of the late 18th and early 19th centuries that used optical effects to create macabre illusions.

The author of “D.W. Griffith and the Origin of American Narrative Film” (1991) and co-author of “An Invention of the Devil? Religion and Early Cinema” (1992), Gunning’s interests include problems of film style and interpretation, film history and film culture. His published work (approximately 100 publications) has concentrated on early cinema (from its origins to World War 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).

Professor Gunning’s lecture is cosponsored by UIUC Department of French, Unit for Cinema Studies, Art History Program, and the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities (IPRH).