Thomas Elsaesser
Biographic Data
| ID | 355389 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Thomas Elsaesser |
| GIVEN NAMES | Thomas |
| FAMILY NAME | Elsaesser |
| SIGNATURE | ELSAESSER T |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Amsterdam |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-6858-6605 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 43 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 47 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 38 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 5 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1981 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2021 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Attention, Distraction and the Distribution of the Senses: “Slow”, “Reflexive” and “Contemplative” between Cinema and the Museum
A classic definition of attention designates it as “the selective perception of a particular stimulus, sustained by means of concentration and the willing exclusion of interfering sense-data”. In our sense-data rich environments, attention has become a scarce commodity, increasingly valued and sought after, but with the paradoxical consequence that the very pursuit of attention cannot but register as distraction. How do artists confront and art s…
European cinema: Between Mit-sein, Da-sein and Nah-sein
This article expands on some of the polemical theses the author proposes in his book European Cinema and Continental Philosophy (2018), focusing on the idea of European cinema as 'thought experiment', the notion of 'double occupancy', which the author now articulates in terms of a 'cinema of abjection' and the idea of 'mutual interference', which is now re-examined as part of a broader re-assessment of the core Enlightenment values of 'liberty-eq…
New Media Archaeologies
Celluloid Revolt: German Screen Cultures and the Long 1968
Provides new insights into German-language cinema around 1968 and its relationship to the period's epoch-making cultural and political happenings
The Architectural Postcard: Photography, Cinema, and Modernist Mass Media
March 01 2018 The Architectural Postcard: Photography, Cinema, and Modernist Mass Media Thomas Elsaesser Thomas Elsaesser Thomas Elsaesser is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Media and Culture of the University of Amsterdam and since 2013 Visiting Professor at Columbia University. Among his recent publications are German Cinema—Terror and Trauma: Cultural Memory since 1945 (Routledge, 2013), Film Theory: An Introduction through the Senses …
European Cinema and Continental Philosophy: Film As Thought Experiment
The Hollywood turn: Persistence, reflexivity, feedback
During the past two decades the study of Hollywood, both contemporary and classical, has undergone a significant division. On the one hand Hollywood history has been rewritten from an economic and market-oriented perspective, taking note of three interconnected factors: the economic revival of Hollywood since the 1980s founded on the blockbuster as a multipurpose product and marketing concept, able to capture global audiences and recapture the do…
IIResponse to Miriam Ross
The 'Return' of 3-D: On Some of the Logics and Genealogies of the Image in the Twenty-First Century
Accustomed as we are to the artistic avant-garde as resistant to all commercial applications (which usually includes the Hollywood film industry), we tend to regard scientific inquiry as pure, technology as instrumental, and the military-industrial complex as immoral. What the return of 3-D shows is how difficult it is to maintain such neat distinctions. One needs to think creatively as well as critically about their entanglement, which has been …
World Cinema: Realismus, Evidenz, Präsenz
Das Weltkino (in der Nachfolge des nationalen Kinos) hat sich seit jeher gegenüber Hollywood durch seinen grösseren Realismus abgegrenzt. Ob man an den italienischen Neo-Realismus denkt, den semi-dokumentarischen Cinéma Vérité-Stil der französischen Nouvelle Vague oder aber an den klinisch sondierenden psychologischen Realismus eines Ingmar Bergmann: unsere Vorstellung von einem »repräsentativen« oder »authentischen« Filmschaffen sind im Allgemei…
European Cinema and the Postheroic Narrative: Jean-Luc Nancy, Claire Denis, and Beau Travail
What is European cinema? First: European cinema does not exist, except as a bureaucratic dream or a promotional tool for national producers and distributors of art house films. Second: insofar as it is willed into existence, European cinema has over the past three decades been funded mainly by governmental subsidy schemes, public service television, or via the European Union, i.e. the taxpayer. Third: since the end of WWII, national cinema new wa…
Time, Space and Causality: Joe May, Fritz Lang and the Modernism of German Detective Film
Such are the scars the First World War left on the face of modernity in cultural memory that film historians assume the end of the war to have been as radical a break in the development of the cinema as it was in political history and the arts. Not only would it be counter-intuitive to argue otherwise, but it would also cast doubt on the cinema as a legitimate art form – precisely what the films of the post-war period, under the name of ‘Expressi…
Time, Space and Causality: Joe May, Fritz Lang and the Modernism of German Detective Film
Ingmar Bergman in the museum? Thresholds, limits, conditions of possibility
Cinema is part of contemporary life; there is no barrier between them.But this dialogue between visual forms of representation,this new relationship between the cinema and the museum, this is a problem for me.(Victor Erice)
Freud as media theorist: Mystic writing-pads and the matter of memory
Journal Article Freud as media theorist: mystic writing-pads and the matter of memory Get access Thomas Elsaesser Thomas Elsaesser [email protected] Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Screen, Volume 50, Issue 1, Spring 2009, Pages 100–113, https://doi.org/10.1093/screen/hjn078 Published: 01 March 2009
Between Erlebnis and Erfahrung: Cinema Experience with Benjamin
The 'turn' to emotion and affect in film and media studies may take its distance from earlier ways of understanding spectatorial involvement (modelled on psychoanalytic notions of identification). But such approaches, whether cognitivist in intent, or inspired by phenomenology, also return to an earlier interest in bodily sensations and somatic responses when exposed to sudden motion and moving images (associated with ideas such as innervation, s…
Space, Place and Identity in European Cinema of the 1990s
The Strasbourg‐born New York political cartoonist and writer of children’s books, Tomi Ungerer (b 1931) was once asked what it was like to grow up in Alsace. He replied that it was like living in t
European Cinema: Face to Face with Hollywood (Amsterdam University Press - Film Culture in Transition)
European Cinema: Face to Face with Hollywood
1 electronic resource (566 p.)
European Cinema: Face to Face with Hollywood
The New Film History as Media Archaeology
The article assesses the impact of digital technologies on our understanding of film history. While the "New Film History" has revitalized the study of the cinema's "origins," it has not yet proven itself equally successful in analyzing the subsequent turn-of-the-century multi-media conjuncture. Faced with this challenge, the essay makes a case for a new historiographical model, "Media Archaeology," in order to overcome the opposition between "ol…
Harun Farocki: Working the Sight-lines
Harun Farocki: Working on the Sightlines
Filmmaker, film essayist, installation artist, writer: the Berlin artist Harun Farocki has devoted his life to the power of images. Over the thirty-plus years of his career, Farocki has explored not the images of life but rather the life of images that surrounds us in newspapers, cinema, books, television, and advertising. Harun Farocki examines, from different critical perspectives, his vast oeuvre, which includes three feature films, critical m…
Harun Farocki: Working on the Sight-Lines
Metropolis
The New Film History as Media Archaeology
The article assesses the impact of digital technologies on our understanding of film history. While the "New Film History" has revitalized the study of the cinema's "origins," it has not yet proven itself equally successful in analyzing the subsequent turn-of-the-century multi-media conjuncture. Faced with this challenge, the essay makes a case for a new historiographical model, "Media Archaeology," in order to overcome the opposition between "ol…
The 'Return' of 3-D: On Some of the Logics and Genealogies of the Image in the Twenty-First Century
Accustomed as we are to the artistic avant-garde as resistant to all commercial applications (which usually includes the Hollywood film industry), we tend to regard scientific inquiry as pure, technology as instrumental, and the military-industrial complex as immoral. What the return of 3-D shows is how difficult it is to maintain such neat distinctions. One needs to think creatively as well as critically about their entanglement, which has been …
The Architectural Postcard: Photography, Cinema, and Modernist Mass Media
March 01 2018 The Architectural Postcard: Photography, Cinema, and Modernist Mass Media Thomas Elsaesser Thomas Elsaesser Thomas Elsaesser is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Media and Culture of the University of Amsterdam and since 2013 Visiting Professor at Columbia University. Among his recent publications are German Cinema—Terror and Trauma: Cultural Memory since 1945 (Routledge, 2013), Film Theory: An Introduction through the Senses …
Ingmar Bergman in the museum? Thresholds, limits, conditions of possibility
Cinema is part of contemporary life; there is no barrier between them.But this dialogue between visual forms of representation,this new relationship between the cinema and the museum, this is a problem for me.(Victor Erice)
Freud as media theorist: Mystic writing-pads and the matter of memory
Journal Article Freud as media theorist: mystic writing-pads and the matter of memory Get access Thomas Elsaesser Thomas Elsaesser [email protected] Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Screen, Volume 50, Issue 1, Spring 2009, Pages 100–113, https://doi.org/10.1093/screen/hjn078 Published: 01 March 2009
Between Erlebnis and Erfahrung: Cinema Experience with Benjamin
The 'turn' to emotion and affect in film and media studies may take its distance from earlier ways of understanding spectatorial involvement (modelled on psychoanalytic notions of identification). But such approaches, whether cognitivist in intent, or inspired by phenomenology, also return to an earlier interest in bodily sensations and somatic responses when exposed to sudden motion and moving images (associated with ideas such as innervation, s…
Space, Place and Identity in European Cinema of the 1990s
The Strasbourg‐born New York political cartoonist and writer of children’s books, Tomi Ungerer (b 1931) was once asked what it was like to grow up in Alsace. He replied that it was like living in t
Historicizing the Subject: A Body of Work
the already voluminous literature, too soon to presume to have a perspective on the phenomenon Fassbinder. As the 1992 celebrations around the tenth anniversary of his death amply proved in Germany itself, Fassbinder's films still split the critical establishment and baffle audiences. During his lifetime, the director had passionate detractors, but also a number of loyal followers who watched his progress from sub-Hollywood B-pictures to middle-c…
Myth as the Phantasmagoria of History H. J. Syberberg, Cinema and Representation
Lili Marleen: Fascism and the Film Industry
Filmmaking in West Germany since the late 1960s has a complex background. Its current high productivity follows twenty-five exceptionally arid years, a moribund period for the country's commercial film industry. Hollywood's particularly ruthless exploitation policy as applied to the West German market meant the enforcement by distributors of block-booking and other nearmonopolistic practices. The Germans, unlike the French or British, were unable…
Lulu and the Meter Man
Journal Article Lulu and the Meter Man Get access Thomas Elsaesser Thomas Elsaesser Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Screen, Volume 24, Issue 4-5, July-October 1983, Pages 4–36, https://doi.org/10.1093/screen/24.4-5.4 Published: 01 July 1983
Dossier on Heimat
Miriam Hansen, Karsten Witte, J. Hoberman, Thomas Elsaesser, Gertrud Koch, Friedrich P. Kahlenberg, Klaus Kreimeier, , Dossier on Heimat, New German Critique, No. 36, Special Issue on Heimat (Autumn, 1985), pp. 3-24
"Cinema -- The Irresponsible Signifier or "The Gamble with History: Film Theory or Cinema Theory
A Retrospect on the New German Cinema
Early Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative
In the twenty years preceding the First World War, cinema rapidly developed from a fairground curiosity into a major industry and social institution, a source of information and entertainment for millions of people. Only recently have film scholars and historians begun to study these early years of cinema in their own right and not simply as first steps towards the classical narrative cinema we now associate with Hollywood. The essays in this col…
New German Cinema -- A History
Aufzeichnungen zum Neuen deutschen Film
Early Cinema: Space-Frame-Narrative
In the twenty years preceding the First World War, cinema rapidly developed from a fairground curiosity into a major industry and social institution, a source of information and entertainment for millions of people. Only recently have film scholars and historians begun to study these early years of cinema in their own right and not simply as first steps towards the classical narrative cinema we now associate with Hollywood.The essays in this coll…
Writing for the Medium: Television in transition
This collection of essays, by well known writers on the subject of writing for television, is divided into three sections, with the first one devoted to the debates on quality television. The second one focuses on literature and television. The final section examines 'Science on television', with series editors from Britain and Germany giving first-hand accounts of the scope for serious science reporting on television.
Historicizing the Subject: A Body of Work
the already voluminous literature, too soon to presume to have a perspective on the phenomenon Fassbinder. As the 1992 celebrations around the tenth anniversary of his death amply proved in Germany itself, Fassbinder's films still split the critical establishment and baffle audiences. During his lifetime, the director had passionate detractors, but also a number of loyal followers who watched his progress from sub-Hollywood B-pictures to middle-c…
A Second Life: German Cinema's First Decades
German cinema is best known for its art cinema and its long line of outstanding individual directors. The double spotlight on these two subject has only deepened the obscurity surrounding the popular cinema. A Second Life performs a kind of archaeology on a period largely overlooked: the first two decades of German cinema. This collection of essays by established authors refocuses the terms of a debate that will develop in the years to come conce…
A Second Life: German Cinema's First Decades
A Second Life. German Cinema's First Decades
De Duitse film is het bekendst om zijn kunstfilms en zijn geschiedenis van eminente regisseurs. De aandacht voor deze twee heeft aandacht voor de populaire film in Duitsland vertroebeld. 'A Second Life' doet een soort van archeologie naar deze grotendeels over overschaduwde periode: namelijk de eerste twee decennia van Duitse film. Deze verzameling essays door gevestigde auteurs focusset zich op wat in de nabije toekomst onderwerp zal zijn van de…
Fassbinder's Germany. History Identity Subject
Elsaesser, Thomas. Fassbinder's Germany. History Identity Subject. Amsterdam: Amsterdam UP 1996. 396 pp. $49.50 hardcover, $24.95 paperback. This volume reassessing Fassbinder's ceuvre, published in the Film Culture in Transition series, is pure Elsaesser-his first fulllength book since 1990. Fassbinder's represents, according to the author, some twenty years of thinking and writing (11) about one of Germany's most intriguing filmmakers, or bette…
Defining Defa's Historical Imaginary: The Films of Konrad Wolf
Metropolis
The BFI Companion to German Cinema
The BFI Companion to German is a concise and authoritative source of reference. Over two hundred entries on film actors, directors, producers, cinematographers, critics, film industry, film movements and festivals covers the entire spectrum of German-speaking cinema from the 1890s to the popular comedies of the 1990s. In-depth articles consider the artistic peaks of Weimer cinema, the emigre directors, film politics, and the star system of Nazi c…
Harun Farocki: Working the Sight-lines
Harun Farocki: Working on the Sightlines
Filmmaker, film essayist, installation artist, writer: the Berlin artist Harun Farocki has devoted his life to the power of images. Over the thirty-plus years of his career, Farocki has explored not the images of life but rather the life of images that surrounds us in newspapers, cinema, books, television, and advertising. Harun Farocki examines, from different critical perspectives, his vast oeuvre, which includes three feature films, critical m…
Harun Farocki: Working on the Sight-Lines
European Cinema: Face to Face with Hollywood (Amsterdam University Press - Film Culture in Transition)
European Cinema: Face to Face with Hollywood
1 electronic resource (566 p.)
European Cinema: Face to Face with Hollywood
Art (32 works) · Art history (25 works) · Movie theater (24 works) · European history and politics (18 works) · Cinema and Media Studies (17 works) · History (16 works) · Italian Fascism and Post-war Society (13 works) · Sociology (12 works) · Political science (11 works) · Media studies (10 works)