Event

The Tri-College Faculty Group in Film and Visual Studies,
Swarthmore's Program in Film and Media Studies, and Penn Cinema Studies

present

Thomas Elsaesser
University of Amsterdam

A Mode of Feeling or a View of the World? Melodrama Revisited

Lang Performing Arts Center Cinema
Swarthmore College

Thomas Elsaesser is one of the world's leading cinema studies scholars. He is the author of numerous prize-winning books New German Cinema: A History (1989), Fassbinder's Germany (1996), Weimar Cinema and After (2000), and Metropolis (2000). Recent books have been on Studying Contemporary American Film (2002), the filmmaker and installation artist Harun Farocki (2005) and European Cinema Face to Face with Hollywood (2005). His essays on film theory and history and television have appeared in well over two hundred collections and anthologies and in such journals as Discourse, Framework, Iris, New German Critique, October, Persistence of Vision, Positif, Screen, Sight and Sound, and Wide Angle. At the University of Amsterdam, Elsaesser served as chair of the Department of Film and Television Studies from 1991-2001 and is now Research Professor in the Department of Media and Culture. In addition, twenty volumes have appeared to date under his editorship of the Amsterdam University Press series Film Culture in Transition. He is currently teaching at Yale University.

This presentation explores why the melodramatic imagination has become one of our most important forms of cultural memory and political expression.