Is it possible to seriously pursue philosophy with mass-produced consumer goods? Is it possible to discover something in Hollywood films that goes beyond the commodity character ascribed to them as an illusion machine and vehicle for flight from the world? For the German film theorist and historian Thomas Elsaesser, who died at the age of 76, the answer was quite natural: yes. Audience successes such as "Pulp Fiction" were for him "pictorial riddles of a new world order".
This is what Elsaesser wrote in one of his most famous books, "Hollywood Today", which appeared in 2009 and bears the subtitle "History, Gender and Nation in Post-Classical Cinema". In it he dealt with well-known films of the recent past, including "Memento" and "The Silence of the Lambs," and regarded them as symptoms of a complex reality; as the exact opposite of escapism in popcorn haze.
For a German film theorist this was not necessarily self-evident, because in German academic circles of the post-war era Hollywood was for decades regarded as a machine of stupidity, not worth dealing with scientifically. This was true even for the film as a whole and is one reason why film theory in Germany until the nineties was extremely neglected and the research in other countries, especially in France and the United States lagged behind.
Impressive scientific career
It is significant that Thomas Elsaesser, one of the most important German heads of the subject, made an impressive scientific career not in Germany but first in Sussex, then at the Sorbonne in Paris and later at the University of Amsterdam. Born in Berlin in 1968 at the University of Sussex to write film reviews and first essays, in the mid-1970s he founded one of the first institutes for film studies in England at the University of East Anglia.
Elsaesser wrote a dozen books and more than 200 essays, but to understand his importance in film studies, one has to honor his influence as a teacher. From 1991, Elsaesser established one of the most important and largest European chairs for film and television science in Amsterdam, which he also directed until 2001.
In his books, he managed to reach non-university readers with a mixture of essayistic complexity and a clear, direct approach. His interests were broad: Thomas Elsaesser wrote about Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Fritz Lang's "Metropolis"; He published a book on the New German Film and set with "The Weimar Cinema" after Siegfried Kracauer and Lotte Eisner a new benchmark for dealing with the influential German silent film.
Media breaks are no exception, but the rule
His work "Film History and Early Cinema - Archeology of a Media Change" should also be of lasting importance. Here, Elsaesser exemplifies how the funfair attraction Film until 1920 became an industry whose basic features still exist today. Impressively clear, he lays down traces of the present time (the book was published in 2002), which can also be applied to the sometimes chaotic current situation of competition between linear television, cinema and new streaming services. Changes, according to Elsaesser, are not the exception but the rule since the invention of reproducing media.
After his retirement in 2008, Thomas Elsaesser did not retire at all. He continued to teach, including at Yale and Columbia University, writing further, and in 2017 he finally made his own debut as a director: In "The Sun Island" he mounted amateur film recordings of his father Martin Elsaesser, who had become known as an architect, and explored his family history cinematically.
Fascinated by his research subject was Thomas Elsaesser to last. Only last week he opened a conference on film theory in Europe in Frankfurt, after which he began a visiting professorship in Beijing.
There he died unexpectedly last Wednesday, as the publisher Berz + Fischer and the University of Amsterdam confirmed the SPIEGEL. Thomas Elsaesser was 76 years old.