Thomas Elsaesser and Siegfried Zielinski: Conversations on cinema and media archaeology

Suggested citation: Thomas Elsaesser and Siegfried Zielinski, Conversations on cinema and media archaeology. Interface Critique 3 (2021), pp. 227–271.

DOI: 10.11588/ic.2021.3.81311. 

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Thomas Elsaesser (1943–2019) was professor emeritus in film and television studies at the University of Amsterdam, and between 2013 and 2019 taught part-time at Columbia University, New York. He gained his PhD in 1971 at the University of Sussex and subsequently taught for nearly 20 years at the University of East Anglia, where he co-founded one of the first Film Studies departments in the United Kingdom. Appointed professor in Amsterdam in 1991, he founded (and chaired until 2001) the Department of Film and Television Studies – the first in the Netherlands. His writings include the fields of film theory and film history, genre theory, Hollywood cinema, European cinéma d’auteur, media archeology and the theory of new media. On December 4, 2019 Thomas Elsaesser passed away unexpectedly in Beijing.

Siegfried Zielinski is Michel Foucault Professor of Media Archaeology & Techno-Culture at the European Graduate School (C.H.), honorary doctor and professor at the Budapest University of Arts, and Professor Emeritus of Media Theory at Berlin University of the Arts. He was founding rector (1994–2000) of the Academy of Media Arts Cologne, director of the Vilém Flusser Archive (1998–2016), and rector of the Karlsruhe University of Arts & Design (2016–2018). Zielinski has published extensively on the archaeology and variantology of the arts and media.