Media Concepts According to Thomas Elsaesser
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Mind the Screen Media Concepts According to Thomas Elsaesser edited by Jaap Kooijman, Patricia Pisters and Wanda Strauven Amsterdam University Press Mind the Screen Mind the Screen Media Concepts According to Thomas Elsaesser Edited by Jaap Kooijman, Patricia Pisters and Wanda Strauven Cover illustration: Screen on Rembrandtplein Photo: Katinka Schreuder Cover design: Kok Korpershoek, Amsterdam Lay-out: japes, Amsterdam isbn 978 90 8964 025 3 e-isbn 978 90 4850 646 0 nur 674 © Jaap Kooijman, Patricia Pisters, Wanda Strauven / Amsterdam University Press, 2008 All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the written permission of both the copyright owner and the author of the book. Table of Contents A Looking Glass for Old and New Screens 9 Jaap Kooijman, Patricia Pisters and Wanda Strauven ACT I Melodrama, Memory, Mind Game Cinephilia in Transition 19 Malte Hagener and Marijke de Valck Theorizing Melodrama: A Rational Reconstruction of “Tales of Sound and Fury” 32 Warren Buckland Of Surfaces and Depths: The Afterlives of “Tales of Sound and Fury” 43 Sudeep Dasgupta and Wim Staat Failed Tragedy and Traumatic Love in Ingmar Bergman’s Shame 60 Tarja Laine Mediated Memories: A Snapshot of Remembered Experience 71 José van Dijck Running on Failure: Post-Fordism, Post-Politics, Parapraxis, and Cinema 82 Drehli Robnik Into the Mind and Out to the World: Memory Anxiety in the Mind-Game Film 96 Pepita Hesselberth and Laura Schuster A Critical Mind: The Game of Permanent Crisis Management 112 Jan Simons Intermezzo “Scholars, Dreams, and Memory Tapes” 125 Catherine M. Lord 6 Mind the Screen ACT II Europe-Hollywood-Europe The Cheetah of Cinema 141 Floris Paalman Bear Life: Autoscopic Recognition in Werner Herzog’s Grizzly Man 153 Dominic Pettman Constitutive Contingencies: Fritz Lang, Double Vision, and the Place of Rupture 166 Michael Wedel Lili and Rachel: Hollywood, History, and Women in Fassbinder and Verhoeven 177 Patricia Pisters Amsterdamned Global Village: A Cinematic Site of Karaoke Americanism 188 Jaap Kooijman Soundtracks of Double Occupancy: Sampling Sounds and Cultures in Fatih Akin’s Head On 198 Senta Siewert Hollywood Face to Face with the World: The Globalization of Hollywood and its Human Capital 209 Melis Behlil To Be or Not to Be Post-Classical 218 Eleftheria Thanouli Bumper Stories: The Framing of Commercial Blocks on Dutch Public Television 229 Charles Forceville Intermezzo “Where Were You When ...?” or “IPhone, Therefore I Am” 243 Bruce Gray Table of Contents 7 ACT III Archaeology, Avant-Garde, Archive Reflections in a Laserdisc: Toward a Cosmology of Cinema 267 Michael Punt S/M 276 Wanda Strauven Consumer Technology after Surveillance Theory 288 Richard Rogers Migratory Terrorism 297 Mieke Bal The Echo Chamber of History 310 Frank van Vree Displacing the Colonial Archive: How Fiona Tan Shows Us “Things We Don’tKnowWeKnow” 322 Julia Noordegraaf Found Footage, Performance, Reenactment: A Case for Repetition 333 Jennifer Steetskamp Digital Convergence Ten Years Later: Broadcast Your Selves and Web Karaoke 345 Jeroen de Kloet and Jan Teurlings Notes on Contributors 361 Key Publications by Thomas Elsaesser 369 A Looking Glass for Old and New Screens Jaap Kooijman, Patricia Pisters and Wanda Strauven Perhaps one of the longest videos on YouTube, In a Year with 13 Moons,is dedicated to a very classic topic of film studies: auteur cinema. The video docu- ments a 92-minute round table discussion of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s homonymous film at the New York Philoctetes Center for the Multidisciplinary Study of the Imagination on 13 January 2007.1 One of the panelists is Thomas Elsaesser, whose knowledge of German cinema in general and of Fassbinder in particular is widely respected. Although Elsaesser’s performance on this new medium is a contribution to traditional film studies, that does not necessarily mean that Elsaesser considers YouTube and other developments of contemporary screen culture as mere “remediations” of the film screen. On the contrary, be- sides his ongoing passion for classical Hollywood and (European) auteur cinema, Elsaesser has always kept a sharp eye out for historical, institutional, and techno- logical changes related to audiovisual media. In January 2008, at an Amsterdam conference on the video vortex of the Web 2.0 revolution, he proposed to picture contemporary image culture as a living organism with cell growth and selection (YouTube deletes or censors 20,000 videos daily, while 60,000 new ones are added) which requires a different set of analytical tools than for the study of a single masterpiece.2 This combination of cinephile passion for the silver screen with its aesthetic and historical implications on the one hand, and mindfulness of new developments in screen culture on the other, has always characterized Elsaesser’s academic approach, making him one of the most important first-gen- eration film scholars to have contributed to the establishment of film, television, and media studies within academia. Twenty years ago, in 1988, the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Am- sterdam took the first steps toward the creation of a chair in Film and Television Studies. A committee was established to investigate how the “new media” of film and television could be studied as seriously as the written word from a huma- nities perspective. Unlike the United States and a few other European countries, Film and Television Studies had never been considered a full-fledged academic discipline in the Netherlands, even though pioneers such as Janus van Domburg, Jan Marie Peters, and Jan Hes had been teaching film since the 1940s, and the department of Theater Studies at the University of Amsterdam had been offering courses in film analysis and film history since the mid-1980s. In 1991, the Uni- versity of Amsterdam appointed Thomas Elsaesser to the first chair of Film and 10 Jaap Kooijman, Patricia Pisters and Wanda Strauven Television Studies in the Netherlands. Prior to his Amsterdam appointment, El- saesser had initiated a film studies program at the University of East Anglia in Great Britain. The University of Amsterdam press release at the time empha- sized the uniqueness of the program in taking the audiovisual image as an object of study.3 Likewise, in his opening speech on 6 November 1991, Elsaesser re- ferred to the traditional study of literature, while at the same time clearly distan- cing from it in terms of aesthetic parameters, institutional influences, and tech- nological conditions that continue to evolve at such a rapid pace in the fields of cinema and television. Whereas video recorders and television sets in the early 1990s were still fairly strange objects at the universities and laserdiscs seemed futuristic, they are now considered as part of media’s archaeological past in the classroom with its beamers, DVD players, and WiFi, where fragments from film history and media culture at large can be “Googled” or seen on YouTube and similar websites. The Film and Television Studies program that was established in 1991 with 75 students has grown into the Media Studies department, which currently counts around 1500 students and is one of the biggest departments of the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Amsterdam. Many people have contributed to this development, but Thomas Elsaesser, as a “founding father” of the department, has played a crucial role in the various phases of its program building. The city of Amsterdam became not only Elsaesser’s new home where he both worked and lived, but also a “playing field” for his conceptual thinking, which spans from film historical mapping to new locative media applications. Fasci- nated by the visible and the not-so visible traces of Amsterdam’s rich past of movie theaters, traveling exhibitors, and film traders, Elsaesser has invited us to take an interactive walk from the Muntplein to the Rembrandtplein along the apparently insignificant Reguliersbreestraat to discover media-archaeological connections between the porn shop windows and a Toshiba TV screen advertise- ment, between the McDonald’s Restaurant (and its Disney placemats) and the rooster of the French Pathé logo, between the pre-cinematic slot machines of a casino and the imposing towers of the Tuschinski Theater; cinema’s history seems to be everywhere.4 One year after the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City, Elsaesser wrote a memorial piece that once again positions us in the center of Amsterdam, on the Rembrandtplein, to describe “what look[s] like a scene from a Beckett play” and to reflect on the impact the new media have on our notion of (social) “normality.” On the square that he crosses every evening on his way home, he encounters two men who have nothing in common except for their “behavior” in this public space: a homeless man and a business man are both gesturing and talking to themselves, the former out of despair, the latter interact- A Looking Glass for Old and New Screens 11 ing with his hands-free mobile phone.5 The same Rembrandtplein now has a huge plasma TV screen, forcing us to digest an endless stream of (commercial) images. On the other side of the city, at the WTC’s Zuidplein, another enormous screen has recently been installed: CASZuidas (Contemporary Art Screen Zuid- as). The “opening hours” of this virtual museum are from 6 a.m. to midnight, offering a daily program of works by local and international film and video ar- tists. The target audience for this screen are the “managers and office workers, students and academics as well as other inhabitants and users of the Zuidas.”6 Elsaesser’s knowledge of locative media practices has made him eager to develop a 21st-century high-tech platform for the city of Amsterdam, where old and new screens can be connected and where historical and theoretical research results on media and mobility can be utilized in real time and space.