Forthcoming Book from Former Visiting Professor Thomas Elsaesser
Former Visiting Professor Thomas Elsaesser has a new book, which will be released posthumously in March from Routledge, called The Mind-Game Film. Developed from the course Elsaesser taught at Columbia, The Mind-Game Film was completed by his colleagues and former students, among whom is Adjunct Assistant Professor Seung-hoon Jeong. Jeong came from Korea to teach the course in Spring 2020 after Elsaesser’s passing. This book represents the culmination of Thomas Elsaesser’s intense and passionate thinking about the Hollywood mind-game film from the previous two decades.
In order to answer what the mind-game film is, why the films exist, and how they function, Elsaesser maps the challenges and constraints facing Hollywood’s institutions, and the broader philosophic horizon within which American cinema thrives today. He demonstrates how the ‘Persistence of Hollywood’ continues as it has adapted to include new twists and turns, as well as revisions of past concerns, as film moves through the 21st century.
In the first chapter of The Mind-Game Film, Elsaessar writes, “Let us assume that the mind-game film sets the viewer a number of narratological problems or puzzles: Mind-game films at the narrative level, offer – with their plot twists and narrational double-takes – a range of strategies that could be summarized by saying that they suspend the common contract between the film and its viewers, which is that films do not “lie” to the spectator, but are truthful and self-consistent within the premises of their diegetic worlds, that permit, of course, “virtual” worlds, impossible situations, and improbable events.”
Through examples such as Minority Report, Mulholland Drive, Source Code, and Back to the Future, Elsaesser explores how mind-game films challenge us and play games with our perception of reality, creating skepticism and doubt. He also highlights the mind-game film's tendency to intervene in a complex fashion in the political moment by questioning the dominant power’s intent to program both body and mind alike.
Elsaessar was a Professor Emeritus at the Department of Media and Culture of the University of Amsterdam. From 2006 to 2012 he was a Visiting Professor at Yale University and was a Visiting Professor at Columbia University from 2013 to 2020. He authored, edited and co-edited several volumes on Early Cinema, Film Theory, German and European cinema, Hollywood, New Media and Installation Art. Among his books as author are The Persistence of Hollywood, German Cinema – Terror and Trauma: Cultural Memory Since 1945, Film Theory – An Introduction through the Senses, and Film History as Media Archaeology– Tracking Digital Cinema. The Mind-Game Film will be available March 29, 2021.