Daniel Morgan, The Lure of the Image: Epistemic Fantasies of the Moving Camera
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 incontemporary 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.
Daniel Morgan is Chair of Cinema and Media Studies, and Professor in the Department of Cinema and Media Studies and the College at The University of Chicago. His work focuses largely on the intersection between cinema and aesthetics. He has written extensively on André Bazin and other figures within the history of film theory, on contemporary trends in film and media theory, and on the broader implications posed by considerations of film form: the virtuosic camera movements of Max Ophuls; the perceptual games of Orson Welles; the shifts in subjectivity in Fritz Lang’s early films; the production of conceptual knowledge in Robert Gardner’s ethnographic documentaries; and the role of backgrounds in classical animation.