2025 Annual Rajiv Vaidya Memorial Lecture: Tom Gunning on Perfect Films
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Still from Ernst Lubitsch’s Trouble in Paradise, courtesy of UCLA Film and Television Archive.
The 2025 Rajiv Vaidya Memorial Lecture is presented by film scholar Tom Gunning and will be followed by a special screening of Ernst Lubitsch’s 1932 romantic comedy Trouble in Paradise.
Can there be a perfect film? Tom Gunning argues that many of the greatest films include flaws that make them less perfect but that do not affect their overall impact. Rather than avoiding problems in casting, story construction, or visual style, a great film overcomes these issues.
So is the concept of a “perfect film” irrelevant? With this lecture, Gunning argues that while a film doesn’t need to be perfect to be masterpiece, certain films possess a crystalline perfection of form and content. He will show two experimental 16 mm short films “whose very brevity,” according to Gunning, “shines with perfection:” Stan Brakhage’s Mothlight (1963) and Bruce Baillies’ All My Life (1966). A screening of Ernst Lubitsch’s 1932 romantic comedy Trouble in Paradise will follow. “To me, the latter offers such a perfection of dialogue, performance, sound, and image—not to mention plot and character—that it stands as a perfect film. My point in this talk won’t be to argue my evaluation, but to display how certain filmmakers have perfected cinematic form to a degree that everything seems to fit.”
About the presenter
Tom Gunning has been published over 200 times, often concentrating on early cinema, from its origins to WWI, as well as on the culture of modernity. His concept of the “cinema of attractions,” developed with Andre Gaudreault, has been widely influential. His books include D.W. Griffith and the Origins of American Narrative Film: The Early Years at Biograph, and The Films of Fritz Lang: Allegories of Vison and Modernity. Besides early cinema, he has written on the avant-garde film genre in Hollywood cinema and the relationship between cinema and technology. An anthology of his essays The Attractions of the Moving Image was published by the University of Chicago Press in 2025.
The Rajiv Vaidya Memorial Lecture Series affords an opportunity for prominent filmmakers to discuss their work and for notable scholars to present perspectives on the history of film as an art form. Dr. Shailendra Vaidya of Chester County, Pennsylvania, and family and friends have generously endowed this series in honor of Rajiv Vaidya, a film devotee and writer who held a degree in creative writing from Johns Hopkins University.
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