Thomas Elsaesser | |
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| Born | (1943-06-22)June 22, 1943 |
| Died | December 4, 2019(2019-12-04) (aged 76) |
| Nationality | German |
| Alma mater | University of Heidelberg University of Sussex |
Thomas Elsaesser (22 June 1943 – 4 December 2019) was aGerman film historian andprofessor of Film and Television Studies at theUniversity of Amsterdam. He was also the writer and director ofThe Sun Island,[1] a documentary essay film about his grandfather, the architectMartin Elsaesser. He was married to scholar Silvia Vega-Llona.
Thomas Elsaesser was born in 1943 inBerlin-Charlottenburg. The grandson of the architectMartin Elsaesser, he spent his childhood inUpper Franconia and in 1951 moved with his family toMannheim, where from 1955 to 1962 he attended aHumanistGymnasium (academic secondary school), before studyingEnglish andGerman Literature at theRuprecht-Karl University inHeidelberg. In 1963, Elsaesser left Germany for theUnited Kingdom, where he studied English literature at theUniversity of Sussex (1963–1966); after receiving hisB.A. degree there, he spent a year (1967–68) at theSorbonne inParis.
In 1971, he received hisdoctorate inComparative Literature with athesis[2] onJules Michelet andThomas Carlyle’s Histories of theFrench Revolution from theUniversity of Sussex.
Between 1968 and 1970, he contributed to and co-edited a film journal published by the University of Sussex Film Society (Brighton Film Review).[3] Other editors includedPhil Hardy,David Morse and Gary Herman. He subsequently edited a similar journal (Monogram) from 1971 to 1975 inLondon, encouraged byPeter Wollen and supported by a grant from the Education Department of theBritish Film Institute. Writing as a film critic and theorist of classicalHollywood cinema, it was his essay on Hollywood melodrama (Tales of Sound and Fury, 1972) that made Elsaesser known internationally.[4]
From 1972 to 1976, Elsaesser taught English,French andComparative Literature at theUniversity of East Anglia. In 1976, he established at UEA, together withCharles Barr, one of the first independent centres for Film Studies in the UK, with a fullundergraduate,MA andPhD program. In addition to seminars onearly cinema, onAlfred Hitchcock, andFritz Lang, Elsaesser also initiated a course on the cinema of theWeimar Republic, which he co-taught with his colleagueW.G. Sebald.
In 1991, Elsaesser was appointed to a chair at theUniversity of Amsterdam. There, he founded the Department of Film and Television Studies, of which he was the head until 2000. In 1992, he initiated an international Master's and Doctoral Program, a book series (Film Culture in Transition, published byAmsterdam University Press andUniversity of Chicago Press) and he was co-founder of the Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis (ASCA), set up after the US-American model of a Humanities Graduate School. In 2003, Elsaesser founded the international MA Programme in Preservation and Presentation of the Moving Image.[5][6]
From 1976, Elsaesser taught as a visiting professor at American universities including theUniversity of Iowa,University of California (Los Angeles,San Diego,Berkeley,Irvine,Santa Barbara),New York University andYale University. From 1993-1999, he was Professor II at theUniversity of Bergen,Norway, and in 2005-2006 he held theIngmar Bergman Chair atStockholm University. In 2006-2007 he was aLeverhulme Professor at theUniversity of Cambridge. In addition, he taught several times as a visiting professor at theUniversity of Hamburg, theFree University of Berlin and theUniversity of Vienna. In 2003, he was a Fellow at the IFK-International Research Center for Cultural StudiesVienna, in 2004 Fellow at the Sackler Institute of theUniversity of Tel Aviv, and in 2007 Overseas Fellow atChurchill College, Cambridge. From 2006-2012, Elsaesser taught one semester a year at Yale University as a visiting professor. Since 2013 he was visiting professor, The School of the Arts atColumbia University.[7]
From 2000 to 2005, he was in charge of an international research project on "Cinema Europe" at the University of Amsterdam. The project resulted in several book publications on European cinema and film history, such as a study on the relationship between Hollywood and Europe (European Cinema – Face to Face with Hollywood), on ContemporaryCinephilia (Cinephilia - Movies, Love and Memory), on the European avant-garde and film society movement (Moving Forward Looking Back), onLars von Trier’s cinema as gaming prototype (Playing the Waves) and the European Film Festival circuit (Film Festivals - From European Geopolitics to Global Cinephilia). Other studies from the project were devoted to comparative studies, such asPost-classical Narration and World Cinema,Cinema, War and Memory,Finnish Visual Culture,Music in European cinema of the 1990s, and several studies on European Cities and Media Culture.
Elsaesser is an important representative of international film studies, whose books and essays onfilm theory,genre theory,Hollywood, new film history,media archaeology,new media, mind-game film, European auteur cinema, andinstallation art have been published in more than 20 languages. Elsaesser is known primarily for his studies on almost every period ofGerman film history, from early film (A Second Life: German Cinema’s First Decade), the cinema of the Weimar Republic (Weimar Cinema and After: Germany’s Historical Imaginary) and Fritz Lang (Metropolis), including the much-citedNew German Cinema – A History, as well as a monograph onRainer Werner Fassbinder, a study on the afterlife of theNazi era in German post-war film, ananthology on the work ofHarun Farocki andThe BFI Companion to German Cinema.
Besides his publications on German cinema, Elsaesser has also edited and co-edited collections on Early Cinema, Television, New Media, as well as co-authoring a book on Contemporary Hollywood (Studying Contemporary American Film, with Warren Buckland) and an innovative Introduction to Film Theory (Film Theory: An Introduction through the Senses, with Malte Hagener).
His bookNew German Cinema: A History won both the 1990Jay Leyda Prize (awarded by Anthology Film Archives in New York City) and theKatherine Singer Kovács Prize in Film and Video Studies (awarded by the Society for Cinema and Media Studies). HisWeimar Cinema and After: Germany's Historical Imaginary received once more theKatherine Singer Kovács Prize for best film book of 1998. His bookEuropean Cinema Face to Face with Hollywood won the 2006 Premio Limina-Carnica, an annual prize awarded by theUniversity of Udine Film Conference for the best international book in cinema studies.
In 2006, Elsaesser received theRoyal Order of the Ridder in de Orde van de Nederlandse Leeuw.[8] In 2008 the Society for Film and Media Studies honored him with a "Distinguished Career Achievement Award". Also in 2008 he was electedCorresponding Fellow of theBritish Academy.[9]In March 2017, Elsaesser was awarded adoctor honoris causa by theUniversité de Liège[10]
On the occasion of Elsaesser's 60th birthday,Die Spur durch den Spiegel ("The path through the mirror") was issued, edited by Malte Hagener, Johannes N. Schmidt, und Michael Wedel.[11] A further commemorative publication was issued for his 65th birthday, with contributions by colleagues and former students:Mind the Screen: Media Concepts According to Thomas Elsaesser.[12]
On 4 December 2019, Thomas Elsaesser died unexpectedly aged 76 inBeijing, where he was scheduled to give a lecture.[4]
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