Thomas Elsaesser


Thomas Elsaesser was a German film historian and professor of Film and Television Studies at the University of Amsterdam. He was also the writer and director of The Sun Island, a documentary essay film about his grandfather, the architect Martin Elsaesser. He was married to scholar Silvia Vega-Llona.

Early life and education

Thomas Elsaesser was born in 1943 in Berlin-Charlottenburg. The grandson of the architect Martin Elsaesser, he spent his childhood in Upper Franconia and in 1951 moved with his family to Mannheim, where from 1955 to 1962 he attended a Humanist Gymnasium, before studying English and German Literature at the Ruprecht-Karl University in Heidelberg. In 1963, Elsaesser left Germany for the United Kingdom, where he studied English Literature at the University of Sussex ; after receiving his B.A. degree there, he spent a year at the Sorbonne in Paris.
In 1971, he received his doctorate in Comparative Literature with a thesis on Jules Michelet and Thomas Carlyle’s Histories of the French Revolution from the University of Sussex.

Film journal work

Between 1968 and 1970, he contributed to and co-edited a film journal published by the University of Sussex Film Society. Other editors included Phil Hardy, David Morse and Gary Herman. He subsequently edited a similar journal from 1971 to 1975 in London, encouraged by Peter Wollen and supported by a grant from the Education Department of the British Film Institute. Writing as a film critic and theorist of classical Hollywood cinema, it was his essay on Hollywood melodrama that made Elsaesser known internationally.

Academia

From 1972 to 1976, Elsaesser taught English, French and Comparative Literature at the University of East Anglia. In 1976, he established at UEA, together with Charles Barr, one of the first independent centres for Film Studies in the UK, with a full undergraduate, MA and PhD program. In addition to seminars on early cinema, on Alfred Hitchcock, and Fritz Lang, Elsaesser also initiated a course on the cinema of the Weimar Republic, which he co-taught with his colleague W.G. Sebald.
In 1991, Elsaesser was appointed to a chair at the University 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 and he was co-founder of the Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis, set up after the US-American model of a Humanities Graduate School. In 2005, Elsaesser founded the international MA Programme in Preservation and Presentation of the Moving Image.
From 1976, Elsaesser taught as a visiting professor at American universities including the University of Iowa, University of California, New York University and Yale University. From 1993-1999, he was Professor II at the University of Bergen, Norway, and in 2005-2006 he held the Ingmar Bergman Chair at Stockholm University. In 2006-2007 he was a Leverhulme Professor at the University of Cambridge. In addition, he taught several times as a visiting professor at the University of Hamburg, the Free University of Berlin and the University of Vienna. In 2003, he was a Fellow at the IFK-International Research Center for Cultural Studies Vienna, in 2004 Fellow at the Sackler Institute of the University of Tel Aviv and in 2007 Overseas Fellow at Churchill 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 at Columbia University.
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, on Contemporary Cinephilia, on the European avant-garde and film society movement, on Lars von Trier’s cinema as gaming prototype and the European Film Festival circuit. Other studies from the project were devoted to comparative studies, such as Post-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.

Assessment of work

Elsaesser is an important representative of international film studies, whose books and essays on film theory, genre theory, Hollywood, film, history, archeology media and new media, the European cinema d'auteur and installation art have been published in more than 20 languages. Elsaesser is known primarily for his studies on almost every period of German film history, from early film, the cinema of the Weimar Republic and Fritz Lang, including the much-cited New German Cinema – A History, as well as a monograph on Rainer Werner Fassbinder, a study on the afterlife of the Nazi era in German post-war film, an anthology on the work of Harun Farocki and The 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 and an innovative Introduction to Film Theory.

Awards

His book New German Cinema: A History won both the 1990 Jay Leyda Prize and the Kathy Singer Kovacs Prize. His Weimar Cinema and After: Germany's Historical Imaginary received once more the Kathy Singer Kovacs Prize for best film book of 1998. His book European Cinema Face to Face with Hollywood won the 2006 Premio Limina-Carnica, an annual prize awarded by the University of Udine Film Conference for the best international book in cinema studies.
In 2006, Elsaesser received the Royal Order of the Ridder in de Orde van de Nederlandse Leeuw. In 2008 the Society for Film and Media Studies honored him with a "". Also in 2008 he was elected of the British Academy.
In March 2017, Elsaesser was awarded a doctor honoris causa by the Université de Liège
On the occasion of Elsaesser's 60th birthday, Die Spur durch den Spiegel was issued, edited by Malte Hagener, Johannes N. Schmidt, und Michael Wedel. 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.

Death

On 4 December 2019, Thomas Elsaesser died unexpectedly aged 76 in Beijing, where he was scheduled to give a lecture.

Selected bibliography