Daniel R. Kieckhefer
Daniel Kieckhefer is the author of The Cinematograph. After studying philosophy at Northwestern University and humanities at the University of Chicago, he taught film history and appreciation for four years at Triton College. In 2019 Academica Press published his book Secrets of Cinema: 100 Movies That Are Not What They Seem, and after reacquiring the rights to the book in 2022 he launched this website.
Daniel was born in Austin, Texas and grew up in Evanston, Illinois. He studied film in the U. of C. Master’s Program in the Humanities, where his teachers included Tom Gunning (cinema theory), Berthold Hoeckner (film music), and David Levin (thesis advisor). His master’s thesis was titled Syntactic Cinema: Structure and Meaning in Jean-Luc Godard’s Late Early Films.
More than his academic credentials, Daniel credits his education to his long friendship with Lawrence Fox, whose imaginative approach to watching films Daniel likens to a psychoanalyst listening closely to a patient.
In June 2021 Daniel founded the Understanding Movies group on the Clubhouse app, which he continues to participate in.
Daniel is married to Noemi Kieckhefer and has two children, Alexander and Arabella. His mother, Margaret Kieckhefer, is a retired reference librarian from the Library of Congress, and his father, Richard Kieckhefer, is professor emeritus in religion at Northwestern University and author of several books on topics like witchcraft, sainthood, necromancy, medieval magic, and church architecture.
