Ghostly Ontologies: The Haunted Image in Murnau and Epstein

Are images haunted? Join Prof. Tom Gunning for a pre-Halloween cinematic séance as he explores the preternatural power that photography and cinema exert over nature and human imagination. Through the work of two visionaries of silent cinema, Murnau and Epstein, Gunning will investigate how cinema can go beyond representation and speak of the otherworldly. Tom Gunning is Edwin A. and Betty L. Bergman Distinguished Service Professor in the Departments of Art History, and Cinema and Media Studies, at the University of Chicago. He is a specialist of early and silent cinema, avant-garde cinema, modernist aesthetics, with wide interests ranging from visual culture to historiography and spectatorship studies, from American and French auteurs to Japanese cinema, and from film theory to photography and optical culture. With André Gaudreault he developed the influential concept of ‘the cinema of attractions” that reoriented film studies over the last thirty years from narrower models of movies a