Thomas Elsaesser

Thomas Elsaesser (* 1943 in Berlin -Charlottenburg ) is a German film scholar and professor of film and television studies at the University of Amsterdam. He is the grandson of architects Martin Elsaesser and the brother of Regine Elsässer.

Life

Thomas Elsaesser was born in 1943 in Berlin. He spent his childhood in Upper Franconia, but moved in 1951 with his family to Mannheim, where until 1962 he attended from 1955 modern languages ​​high school and then studied English and German at the Ruprecht Karls University in Heidelberg. In 1963 he moved to the UK Elsaesser, studied English literature at the University of Sussex ( 1963-1966 ) and spent a year at the Sorbonne in Paris ( 1967-68 ). In 1971 he received his doctorate with a thesis on the historian Jules Michelet and the French Revolution Thomas Carlyle in Comparative Literature at the University of Sussex.

In 1968 he started at the University of Sussex, a movie magazine ( Brighton Film Review ) surrendered that he continued from 1971 under the name Monogram in London and internationally introduced him as a critic and theorist of classical Hollywood cinema, and especially of melodrama.

From 1972 to 1976 he taught English and French literature at the University of East Anglia. In 1976 he founded together with Charles Barr one of the first independent Institute of Film Studies ( Film Studies Department) in the UK. In addition to seminars for early cinema, Hitchcock and Fritz Lang Elsaesser also initiated a training course to the cinema of the Weimar Republic, which he taught with his colleague WG Sebald.

In 1991 he received a professorship at the University of Amsterdam. There he founded the Department of Film and Television Studies, which he directed until 2000. In 1992, he initiated an international master's and doctoral program, a book series ( Film Culture in Transition, published by Amsterdam University Press / Chicago University Press) and co-founded the Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis ( ASCA ), a Graduate Humanities School by the U.S. model.

Since 1976 Elsaesser regularly teaches as a visiting professor at American universities such as the University of Iowa, University of California (Los Angeles, San Diego, Berkeley, Irvine, Santa Barbara ), New York University. From 1993 to 1999 he was Professor II at the University of Bergen, Norway 2005-2006 and owner of " Ingmar Bergman " Chair at the University of Stockholm.

2006-2007 he was Leverhulme Professor at the University of Cambridge. He also taught several times as a guest 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, 2004 Fellow at the Sackler Institute at Tel Aviv University and 2007 " Overseas Fellow" at Churchill College, Cambridge. Since 2005 Elsaesser also teaches one semester a year at Yale University as a visiting professor.

From 2000-2005 he headed in Amsterdam an international research project on "Cinema Europe ", from the several book publications have emerged on the European film, so studies on the relationship Europe - Hollywood ( European Cinema - Face to Face with Hollywood) to Cinephilia ( Cinephilia - Movies, Love and Memory), to the European avant-garde film ( Moving Forward Looking Back ), Lars von Trier ( Playing the Waves ) and the European film Festival ( film Festival - From European Geopolitics to Global Cinephilia ).

Elsaesser is an important representative of the international film studies, whose books and essays on film theory, genre theory, Hollywood, Film History, Media Archaeology and New Media, European auteur cinema and installation art have appeared in more than 20 languages. In Germany known Elsaesser is mainly for his studies on almost every era of German film history, from early film ( film history and early cinema: Archaeology of a media change; cinema of the imperial period ), the film of the Weimar Republic ( Weimar Cinema: enlightened and ambiguous ) and Fritz Lang ( Metroplis ) until the New German Cinema, as well as a monograph on Rainer Werner Fassbinder, a study on the afterlife of Nazi period in German film and an anthology to Harun Farocki.

Together with his sister Regine Elsässer he founded in March 2009, Martin Elsaesser Foundation, which is dedicated to the life and work of the architects Martin Elsaesser, and is preparing an exhibition about him. Thomas Elsaesser is the Chairman of the Foundation.

Awards

For his book on the New German Cinema got Elsaesser 1990 Jay Leyda both the Prize (New York University ) and the Nancy Singer Kovacs Prize (Society for Cinema and Media Studies ). His Weimar Cinema and After: Germany 's Historical Imaginary in turn received the Nancy Singer Kovacs Prize for the best film book of the year 1998.

In 2006 Elsaesser was awarded the Royal Order of the Ridder in de Orde van de Nederlandse Leeuw. In 2008 he was honored the Society for Film and Media Studies in Philadelphia with a "Life Membership".

The University of Udine (Italy ) recognized in 2007 for his book European Cinema Face to Face with Hollywood the Premio limina Carniolan, which is awarded annually to the best international film book.

For Elsaesser's 60th birthday published German colleagues the Festschrift The track through the mirror. Another Festschrift was published on his 65th birthday: Mind the Screen: Media Concepts According to Thomas Elsaesser. Also in 2008 he was elected a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy.

Writings ( in German language )

  • Hollywood today. History, gender and nation in the post-classical cinema. Bertz Fischer, Berlin 2009, ISBN 978-3-86505-301-5
  • Terror and trauma. For the violence of the past in Germany. Kadmos, Berlin 2007, ISBN 3-931659-83-6.
  • The Weimar cinema - enlightened and ambiguous. Vorwerk 8, Berlin 1999, ISBN 3-930916-24- X.
  • The New German Cinema. Heyne, Munich 1994, ISBN 3-453-08123-4.
  • Metropolis. The classic film by Fritz Lang. Europe, Hamburg 2001, ISBN 3-203-84118-5
  • Film history and early cinema. Archaeology of a media change. Edition text and criticism, Munich 2002, ISBN 3-88377-696-3.
  • Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Bertz and Fischer, Berlin 2001, ISBN 3-929470-79-9.
  • With Malte Hagen: film theory for the introduction. Junius, Hamburg 2008, ISBN 3-88506-621-1.
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