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Cinéma & Cie. Film and Media Studies Journal
Thomas Elsaesser, European Cinema and Continental Philosophy: Film as Thought Experiment | New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019, pp. 341
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Reviews / Comptes rendus
2020-10-01
2021-10-05
2020-10-01
2024-03-10
Cinéma & Cie
Malte Hagener
2020/10/01
Philipps-Universität Marburg
2036-461X
35
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Thomas Elsaesser, European Cinema and Continental Philosophy: Film as Thought Experiment | New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019, pp. 341
https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/cinemaetcie/article/download/16545/20226
20
XVIII Limina Award for Film Studies Books
Thomas Elsaesser
European Cinema and Continental Philosophy: Film as Thought
Experiment
New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019, pp. 341




   Thomas Elsaesser passed away on 4 December 2019 in Beijing during a visiting
professorship in China. His death occurred completely unexpectedly during a
life of high-speed scientific activity in many countries around the world, as most
of us have known and loved him for years. The Limina Award 2020 conferred
on his last book is also a posthumous homage for his whole work, in recognition
of his outstanding contribution to the development of cinema and media studies
during the last four decades. It is no exaggeration to say that he occupied a
leading role in international film historiography.
   Born 1943 in Berlin, growing up in Mannheim, in 1963 he went to England
as a student, where he then became a teacher at the University of East Anglia,
founding a Film Studies department there in 1976. In 1991 he moved to the
University of Amsterdam to build up a new and large Department of Film and
Television Studies. He taught as a Visiting Professor in the USA and many other
countries.
   His books cover European and American cinema, often with a comparative
approach and covering a wide range from early cinema to digitalisation
nowadays, with a special focus on German film history. Elsaesser opens a broad
historical contextualisation in a complex methodological setting using the results
of different disciplines bringing up a completely new analytical reading of film
history. His Weimar Cinema and After (2000) is certainly the most important
writing on this topic; it is grounded on Kracauer’s From Caligari to Hitler, but at
the same time methodologically goes beyond Kracauer.
   In 2007 Elsaesser already received the Premio Limina for his European
Cinema: Face to Face with Hollywood (2006). His latest book, European Cinema
and Continental Philosophy: Film as Thought Experiment, is in a certain sense
a continuation of the previous work. Starting from an analysis of the crisis of
European cinema and society and referring to philosophers such as Badiou,
Rancière, Nancy, Deleuze, Žižek, Agamben, Lévinas and Julia Kristeva’s concept
of the ‘abject’ as well as to films by Claire Denis, Aki Karismäki, Fatih Akin, Lars
von Trier, Christian Petzold and others, he postulates filmmaking as a ‘thought
experiment,’ as a kind of a new ‘politique des auteurs,’ a cinematic philosophy
with ‘post-heroic narratives’ told from the perspective of social outsiders. The

                                                 Cinéma & Cie, vol. XX, no. 35, Fall 2020
                              Reviews / Comptes-rendus


book, which includes new and older essays, presents a highly experimental and
radical line of argumentation, and it is not free of contradictions. But it is exactly
this analytic radicality that reminds us of Thomas Elsaesser, who has given so
many fundamental impulses to many colleagues and students all over the world,
thus setting a new standard for film historiography and film theory.

                                            [Irmbert Schenk, Bremen Universität]


   This is the last book that Thomas Elsaesser saw published during his
lifetime. It brings together two concerns that were close to his heart and that
he continuously returned to: European cinema in all its permutations and
transformations and contemporary theory for which he had a voracious appetite.
Whenever you would have a coffee or drink with him, he would inquire if you
had seen or read something interesting and new. His gift for quickly grasping the
essential intellectual essence of a thought system and integrating it into his own
intellectual universe were formidable. This book is a testament to Thomas’ talent,
as it presents some of the most exciting current European filmmakers (Claire
Denis, Christian Petzold, Lars von Trier) and confronts them with contemporary
theoreticians (Jean-Luc Nancy, Julia Kristeva, Jacques Rancière) — and vice versa.
European Cinema and Continental Philosophy is itself a thought experiment that
will continue to be influential long after Thomas’ untimely death.

                                  [Malte Hagener, Philipps-Universität Marburg]




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