T. Elsaesser

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 oppositional, interdependent, and cooperative-complicit all at the same time. Perhaps the reason why Hugo, clutching his fathers robot and snatched by the stationmaster from the tracks of the digitally onrushing train, yields such a memorable 3-D image is because its several dimensions hint at just such an improbable but necessary constellation of antagonistic mutuality.

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. German Cinema 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 concerning the historical and cultural significance of popular cinema in Wilhelmine Germany.

The Last Great American Picture Show : New Hollywood Cinema in the 1970s

Table of Contents - 6[-] Part One Introductions - 8[-] The Impure Cinema: New Hollywood 1967-1976 - 10[-] The Last Good Time We Ever Had : Remembering the New Hollywood Cinema - 20[-] American Auteur Cinema: The Last - or First - Great Picture Show - 38[-] Part Two Histories - 72[-] The Decade When Movies Mattered - 74[-] A Walking Contradiction (Partly Truth and Partly Fiction) - 84[-] The Exploitation Generation. or: How Marginal Movies Came in from the Cold - 108[-] New Hollywood and the Sixties Melting Pot - 132[-] Part Three People and Places - 154[-] Dinosaurs in the Age of the Cinemobile - 156[-] The Cylinders Were Whispering My Name : The Films of Monte Hellman - 166[-] Nashville contra Jaws, or -The Imagination of Disaster Revisited - 196[-] For Wanda - 224[-] Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere: The Uneasy Ride of Hollywood and Rock - 250[-] Auteurism and War-teurism: Terrence Malicks War Movie - 268[-] Part Four Critical Debates - 278[-] The Pathos of Failure: American Films in the 1970s: Notes on the Unmotivated Hero [1975] - 280[-] Trapped in the Affection Image: Hollywoods Post-traumatic Cycle (1970-1976) - 294[-] Grim Fascination: Fingers, James Toback and 1970s American Cinema - 310[-] Allegories of Post-Fordism in 1970s New Hollywood: Countercultural Combat Films, Conspiracy Thrillers as Genre Recycling - 334[-] Bibliography - 360[-] List of Contributors - 372[-] Pictures (with credits) - 376[-] Index of Film Titles - 378

The Last Great American Picture Show

The Last Great American Picture Show brings together essays by scholars and writers who chart the changing evaluations of the American cinema of the 1970s, sometimes referred to as the decade of the lost generation, but now more and more recognized as the first New Hollywood, without which the cinema of Francis Coppola, Steven Spielberg, Robert Zemeckis, Tim Burton or Quentin Tarantino could not have come into existence.Identified with directors such as Sam Peckinpah, Arthur Penn, Peter Bogdanovich, Monte Hellman, Bob Rafelson, Hal Ashby, Robert Altman and James Toback, American cinema of the 1970s is long overdue for this re-evaluation. Many of the films have not only come back from oblivion, as the benchmark for new directorial talents. They have also become cult films in the video shops and the classics of film courses all over the world.

James Cameron’s Avatar: access for all

In this extract from his forthcoming book The Persistence of Hollywood (Routledge, 2012), Thomas Elsaesser examines James Camerons film Avatar in terms of its auto-representation and personalized narrative, affective engagement with diverse publics and ambition to effect through technology a change of paradigm.

Cinema Futures: Cain, Abel or Cable?

In the late 1960s, the cinema was pronounced dead. Television, like a Biblical Cain had slain his brother Abel. Some thirty years later, a remarkable reversal: rarely has the cinema been more popular. And yet, rarely has the cinemas future seemed more uncertain. Cinema Futures: Cain, Abel or Cable? presents a careful and forceful argument about predictions that tend to be made when new technologies appear. Examining the complex dynamics of convergence and divergence among the audio-visual media, the authors are realistic in their estimate of the future of the cinemas distinctive aesthetic identity, and robustly optimistic that the different social needs audiences bring to the public and domestic media will ensure their distinctiveness, as well as the necessary openness of cultural meaning and creative imput. The chief contributors include producers, historians, critics and journalists from several countries, creating a lively volume, rich in information and case studies, useful to media students and film scholars, as well as to anyone interested in better understanding the momentous changes transforming our worlds of sound and image.

Double occupancy: space, place and identity in European cinema of the 1990s

Taylor and Francis Ltd CTTE_A_206805.sgm 10.1080/09528820601068716 hird Text 0952822 (pri t)/1475-5297 (online) Or ginal Article 2 06 & Francis 6 000November 2 06 omasElsaesser Elsaess r@uv .nl 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 the toilet of a rural railway station: toujours occupé (always occupied). He was, of course, referring to the fact that for about four hundred years, and certainly during the period of 1871 to 1945, Alsace changed nationality many times, back and forth between France and Germany, and for the most part both nations were felt to be occupying powers by the inhabitants.

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, shock and over-stimulation). The essay proposes to bring Walter Benjamin into the debate, with a term central to his idea of modernity, namely ‘experience’, and to revive his distinction between Erfahrung and Erlebnis. Noting certain features of excess and liminiality in contemporary cinema, and mapping them across the three distinct domains of body, time and agency, Benjamins own attempt to locate the emotional core of the technical media is reappraised. Grounded in the peculiar variability but also interdependence of place, narration and perception, the cinema w...

Film History as Media Archaeology: Tracking Digital Cinema

Fryderyk Kwiatkowski is a joint-PhD candidate at the Institute of Philosophy of the Jagiellonian University and the Faculty of Theology and Religious Studies of the University of Groningen; he has recently contributed a chapter to the multi-author volume The Gnostic World (Routledge 2018), and published several articles in peer-reviewed journals such as “Canadian-American Slavic Studies” (Brill), “Journal of Religion & Film” (University of Nebraska at Omaha), or “CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture” (Purdue University); he works as an editorial assistant in the “Facta Ficta Journal,” and is a fellow member of the “Titus Brandsma Instituut” (Nijmegen) and the “Theology, Religion and Popular Culture Network”; his scientific interest center around the reception of Gnosticism, with particular attention to Hollywood, philosophy, and Western esotericism, and its conceptual as well as historical intersections with utopianism and conspiracy theories.

Media archaeology as symptom

Abstract This essay constitutes the epilogue to the forthcoming book Film History as Media Archaeology – Tracing Digital Cinema, Thomas Elsaesser’s collected essays on media archaeology. In this essay, Elsaesser reflects upon the previous 25 years of research into media archaeology, highlighting its methods, terminology and problematic status as a discipline.