Daniel Morgan will discuss his book The Lure of the Image at the Seminary Co-op Monday, March 14. He will be joined in conversation by Davide Panagia.
About the book
The Lure of the Image shows how a close study of camera movement challenges key assumptions underlying a wide range of debates within cinema and media studies. Highlighting the shifting intersection of point of view and camera position, Daniel Morgan draws on a range of theoretical arguments and detailed analyses across cinemas to reimagine the relation between spectator and camera -- and between camera and film world. With sustained accounts of how the camera moves in films by Fritz Lang, Guru Dutt, Max Ophuls, and Terrence Malick and in contemporary digital technologies, The Lure of the Image exposes the persistent fantasy that we move with the camera within the world of the film and examines the ways that filmmakers have exploited this fantasy. In so doing, Morgan provides a more flexible account of camera movement, one that enables a fuller understanding of the political and ethical stakes entailed by this key component of cinematic style.
About the author
Daniel Morgan is Professor of Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Chicago. He is author of Late Godard and the Possibilities of Cinema (UC Press, 2013) and The Lure of the Image: Epistemic Fantasies of the Moving Camera (UC Press, 2021), as well as numerous articles on topics in film theory and aesthetics, non-fiction film, animation, and experimental cinema.
About the interlocutor
Davide Panagia is Professor of Political Science at UCLA. He is author of The Poetics of Political Thinking (Duke, 2006), The Political Life of Sensation (Duke, 2009), Rancière’s Sentiments (Duke, 2018), Ten Theses for an Aesthetics of Politics (Minnesota, 2016) and Impressions of Hume: Cinematic Thinking and the Politics of Discontinuity (Rowman and Littlefield, 2013). His current research project, #datapolitik, is a study of the forms of power in the age of the algorithm.