Thomas Elsaesser Collection

In 2023, with designer Matt Wolff, I produced the web-based research archive for Thomas Elsaesser—one of the founding figures of film studies as a discipline. It was a collaboration I had started with Thomas before his untimely death in 2019. I continued to oversee its completion in cooperation with the Deutsches Filminstitut and Filmmuseum, which now holds his working archive, consisting of more than 400 boxes of documents, books, videotapes, as well as digital files. Thomas’ many books and more than 200 essays on Hollywood melodrama, Weimar cinema, media archaeology, and early cinema before 1915 as well as chronicles of German filmmakers Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Harun Farocki, and Alexander Kluge, established him as a leading figure in film criticism. I worked closely with Ellen M. Harrington, Director of the DFF, researcher Alo Paistik, and Thomas’ widow, Professor Silvia Vega-Llona to establish the website as a publicly accessible archive of his work and the first step towards a dedicated research center at the DFF in honor of Thomas Elsaesser’s legacy.