Much more needs to be said about the passing of Thomas Elsaesser four days ago while in Beijing on a lecture tour.
For the moment here is a link to listen to his keynote address to the 9th Orphan Film Symposium, The Future of Obsolescence. March 31, 2014, at EYE Film Institute Netherlands. He kindly gave permission to share it. 32 minutes.
Thomas Elsaesser <www.thomas-elsaesser.com>, Professor Emeritus at the Department of Media and Culture of the University of Amsterdam, and Visiting Professor at Columbia University. He has authored, edited, and co-edited some twenty volumes on early cinema, film theory, German and European cinema, Hollywood, new media, and installation art. Among his recent books are Film Theory: An Introduction through the Senses (with Malte Hagener, 2010), The Persistence of Hollywood (2012), German Cinema – Terror and Trauma: Cultural Memory since 1945 (2013), as well as Film History as Media Archaeology (2016).
In 2005 he founded UvA’s master’s program in Preservation and Presentation of the Moving Image. The P&P Program, now an M.A. diploma in Heritage Studies, which co-hosted Orphans 9. Elsaesser also founded and chaired the Film Studies program at the University of East Anglia, which set up the East Anglian Film Archive with David Cleveland, leading to the world’s first graduate degree program in Film Studies and Film Archiving.
Professor E’s estimable career is well detailed in Wikipedia’s biographical entry.
Postscript:
Two weeks after this talk, we invited Thomas to the NYU Moving Image Archiving and Preservation Program’s 10th anniversary celebration in New York. Here is his gracious email reply.
------------------Dear Dan,
Thank you for your message, kind words and invitation. Alas: your cocktail time will see me on my way to JFK, where I board my plane back to Amsterdam (yet again).
Wish I could be there and celebrate 10 years of MIAP with you, but I feel with bringing together P&P and MIAP in the EYE was in itself a celebration of both our programs, and a confirmation of the rightness of our hunch that the time was right for such an initiative. That you — with Orphans — were able to give it such an internationally recognizable and recognised face is a stroke of good fortune.
So – on to the next ten years!
Best,
Thomas.
Prof. Thomas Elsaesser New York, NY