Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1 35 Years On: Is the ‘Text’, Once Again, Unattainable?
- 2 To Attain the Text. But Which Text?
- 3 Compounding the Lyric Essay Film : Towards a Theory of Poetic Counter-Narrative
- 4 ‘Every love story is a ghost story’ : The Spectral Network of Laurie Anderson’s Heart of a Dog (2015)
- 5 Lines of Interpretation in Fields of Perception and Remembrance : The Multiscreen Array as Essay
- 6 Deborah Stratman’s The Illinois Parables (2016) : Intellectual Vagabond and Vagabond Matter
- 7 Rethinking the Human, Rethinking the Essay Film : The Ecocritical Work of The Pearl Button
- 8 Montage Reloaded: From Russian Avant-Garde to the Audiovisual Essay
- 9 ‘All I have to offer is myself’: The Film-Maker as Narrator
- 10 The Shudder of a Cinephiliac Idea? Videographic Film Studies Practice as Material Thinking
- 11 The Home Movie as Essay Film: On Making Memory Posthumously
- Index
11 - The Home Movie as Essay Film: On Making Memory Posthumously
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 November 2020
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1 35 Years On: Is the ‘Text’, Once Again, Unattainable?
- 2 To Attain the Text. But Which Text?
- 3 Compounding the Lyric Essay Film : Towards a Theory of Poetic Counter-Narrative
- 4 ‘Every love story is a ghost story’ : The Spectral Network of Laurie Anderson’s Heart of a Dog (2015)
- 5 Lines of Interpretation in Fields of Perception and Remembrance : The Multiscreen Array as Essay
- 6 Deborah Stratman’s The Illinois Parables (2016) : Intellectual Vagabond and Vagabond Matter
- 7 Rethinking the Human, Rethinking the Essay Film : The Ecocritical Work of The Pearl Button
- 8 Montage Reloaded: From Russian Avant-Garde to the Audiovisual Essay
- 9 ‘All I have to offer is myself’: The Film-Maker as Narrator
- 10 The Shudder of a Cinephiliac Idea? Videographic Film Studies Practice as Material Thinking
- 11 The Home Movie as Essay Film: On Making Memory Posthumously
- Index
Summary
Abstract
The chapter outlines the posthumous constellations that led to the making of Thomas Elsaesser's essay film The Sun Island, about his grandfather, Martin Elsaesser, chief city architect in Frankfurt during the Weimar Republic. It reflects on the migration of non-theatrical film material into archives and art spaces, encouraging the emergence of found footage as essay film, but it also makes a case for The Sun Island as ‘home movies re-purposed’ in order to highlight the specifics of home movies as a historically and politically important practice. While acknowledging his father as ‘author’, whose images the film ‘appropriates’, The Sun Island also revisits topics associated with Thomas's own film historical writings: family melodrama; German cinema; media archaeology; history, memory, and trauma.
Keywords: home movies, ethics of appropriation, Weimar/Nazi Germany, architecture, Frankfurt, Berlin
The Past and the Posthumous
In 2007, through circumstances not entirely of my own choosing, I found myself resurrecting a family ancestor, my grandfather, the architect, Martin Elsaesser. I was asked to write a biographical essay for a catalogue accompanying a retrospective of his work at the Deutsche Architekturmuseum Frankfurt. The exhibition honoured him as one of the chief city architects in Frankfurt between 1925 and 1932, during the peak years of what came to be called Das Neue Bauen. His key building from the period, the Frankfurt Central Market, had been acquired by the European Central Bank in 2004 as the site of the Bank's new headquarters. Although a listed building and therefore protected as a national monument, the Grossmarkthalle was under threat: the plans envisaged by the Central Bank – along with the notoriously deconstructionist impulses of the star architect designing the ensemble – meant that the integrity of the building, and thus its value as a historical landmark had to be sacrificed. The general context of the retrospective was therefore as much an act of compensation or restitution as it was of celebration and recognition: the temporary nature of the exhibition and the online existence of the Foundation had to substitute for the physical survival of the architect's most famous building.
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- Information
- Beyond the Essay FilmSubjectivity, Textuality and Technology, pp. 215 - 240Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2020