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 they exist, and how they function, Elsaesser maps the industrial-institutional challenges and constraints facing Hollywood, 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. 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 (self-) 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. Prescient and compelling, The Mind-Game Film will appeal to students, scholars, and enthusiasts of media studies, film studies, philosophy, and politics.

New essays by leading scholars giving a new picture of the variety of German expressionist cinema. This volume of fresh essays by leading scholars develops a new approach to expressionist film. For nearly half a century Siegfried Kracauer's From Caligari to Hitler and Lotte Eisner's The Haunted Screen have shapedthe understanding of the cinema of this period. However, fifty years on, there is a growing awareness that a new account is overdue. This attempt to rewrite the story of expressionist cinema begins with a fundamentally new interpretation of Dr. Caligari, and together with fresh views of other expressionist classics, offers new perspectives on important alternative film styles and genres that emerged in films by such eminent directors as Ernst Lubitsch, Joe May, Fritz Lang, Karl Grune, F. W. Murnau, and E. A. Dupont. In pursuing such variety, the book strives for a picture of the cinema in the early years of Weimar that in thematic as well as stylistic terms reflects the vibrant, multifaceted cultural and political developments of the period. The book is a joint venture of the Centre for European Film Studies at the University of Edinburgh, the Institute for Film Studies at the University of Mainz, and the German Film Museum in Frankfurt. The late Dietrich Scheunemann was Professor of German at the University of Edinburgh and wrote and edited several books on German literature and on film and media.

What is the relationship between cinema and spectator? This is the key question for film theory, and one that Thomas Elsaesser and Malte Hagener put at the center of their insightful and engaging book, now revised from its popular first edition. Every kind of cinema (and every film theory) first imagines an ideal spectator, and then maps certain dynamic interactions between the screen and the spectator's mind, body and senses. Using seven distinctive configurations of spectator and screen that move progressively from 'exterior' to 'interior' relationships, the authors retrace the most important stages of film theory from its beginnings to the present-from neo-realist and modernist theories to psychoanalytic, 'apparatus,' phenomenological and cognitivist theories, and including recent cross-overs with philosophy and neurology. This new and updated edition of Film Theory: An Introduction through the Senses has been extensively revised and rewritten throughout, incorporating discussion of contemporary films like Her and Gravity, and including a greatly expanded final chapter, which brings film theory fully into the digital age.

In German Cinema - Terror and Trauma Since 1945, Thomas Elsaesser reevaluates the meaning of the Holocaust for postwar German films and culture, while offering a reconsideration of trauma theory today. Elsaesser argues that Germany's attempts at "mastering the past" can be seen as both a failure and an achievement, making it appropriate to speak of an ongoing 'guilt management' that includes not only Germany, but Europe as a whole. In a series of case studies, which consider the work of Konrad Wolf, Alexander Kluge, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Herbert Achterbusch and Harun Farocki, as well as films made in the new century, Elsaesser tracks the different ways the Holocaust is present in German cinema from the 1950s onwards, even when it is absent, or referenced in oblique and hyperbolic ways. Its most emphatically "absent presence" might turn out to be the compulsive afterlife of the Red Army Faction, whose acts of terror in the 1970s were a response to-as well as a reminder of-Nazism's hold on the national imaginary. Since the end of the Cold War and 9/11, the terms of the debate around terror and trauma have shifted also in Germany, where generational memory now distributes the roles of historical agency and accountability differently. Against the background of universalized victimhood, a cinema of commemoration has, if anything, confirmed the violence that the past continues to exert on the present, in the form of missed encounters, retroactive incidents, unintended slippages and uncanny parallels, which Elsaesser-reviving the full meaning of Freud's Fehlleistung-calls the parapractic performativity of cultural memory.

In German Cinema - Terror and Trauma Since 1945, Thomas Elsaesser reevaluates the meaning of the Holocaust for postwar German films and culture, while offering a reconsideration of trauma theory today. Elsaesser argues that Germany's attempts at "mastering the past" can be seen as both a failure and an achievement, making it appropriate to speak of an ongoing 'guilt management' that includes not only Germany, but Europe as a whole. In a series of case studies, which consider the work of Konrad Wolf, Alexander Kluge, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Herbert Achterbusch and Harun Farocki, as well as films made in the new century, Elsaesser tracks the different ways the Holocaust is present in German cinema from the 1950s onwards, even when it is absent, or referenced in oblique and hyperbolic ways. Its most emphatically "absent presence" might turn out to be the compulsive afterlife of the Red Army Faction, whose acts of terror in the 1970s were a response to-as well as a reminder of-Nazism's hold on the national imaginary. Since the end of the Cold War and 9/11, the terms of the debate around terror and trauma have shifted also in Germany, where generational memory now distributes the roles of historical agency and accountability differently. Against the background of universalized victimhood, a cinema of commemoration has, if anything, confirmed the violence that the past continues to exert on the present, in the form of missed encounters, retroactive incidents, unintended slippages and uncanny parallels, which Elsaesser-reviving the full meaning of Freud's Fehlleistung-calls the parapractic performativity of cultural memory.

While Hollywood's success - its persistence - has remained constant for almost one hundred years, the study of its success has undergone significant expansion and transformation. Since the 1960s, Thomas Elsaesser's research has spearheaded the study of Hollywood, beginning with his classic essays on auteurism and cinephilia, focused around a director's themes and style, up to his analysis of the "corporate authorship" of contemporary director James Cameron. In between, he has helped to transform film studies by incorporating questions of narrative, genre, desire, ideology and, more recently, Hollywood's economic-technological infrastructure and its place within global capitalism. The Persistence of Hollywood brings together Elsaesser's key writings about Hollywood filmmaking. It includes his detailed studies of individual directors (including Minnelli, Fuller, Ray, Hitchcock, Lang, Altman, Kubrick, Coppola, and Cameron), as well as essays charting the shifts from classic to corporate Hollywood by way of the New Hollywood and the resurgence of the blockbuster. The book also presents a history of the different critical-theoretical paradigms central to film studies in its analysis of Hollywood, from auteurism and cinephilia to textual analysis, Marxism, psychoanalysis, and post-industrial analysis.

While Hollywood's success - its persistence - has remained constant for almost one hundred years, the study of its success has undergone significant expansion and transformation. Since the 1960s, Thomas Elsaesser's research has spearheaded the study of Hollywood, beginning with his classic essays on auteurism and cinephilia, focused around a director's themes and style, up to his analysis of the "corporate authorship" of contemporary director James Cameron. In between, he has helped to transform film studies by incorporating questions of narrative, genre, desire, ideology and, more recently, Hollywood's economic-technological infrastructure and its place within global capitalism. The Persistence of Hollywood brings together Elsaesser's key writings about Hollywood filmmaking. It includes his detailed studies of individual directors (including Minnelli, Fuller, Ray, Hitchcock, Lang, Altman, Kubrick, Coppola, and Cameron), as well as essays charting the shifts from classic to corporate Hollywood by way of the New Hollywood and the resurgence of the blockbuster. The book also presents a history of the different critical-theoretical paradigms central to film studies in its analysis of Hollywood, from auteurism and cinephilia to textual analysis, Marxism, psychoanalysis, and post-industrial analysis.

German cinema of the 1920s is still regarded as one of the 'golden ages' of world cinema. Films such as The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, Dr Mabuse the Gambler, Nosferatu, Metropolis, Pandora's Box and The Blue Angel have long been canonised as classics, but they are also among the key films defining an image of Germany as a nation uneasy with itself. The work of directors like Fritz Lang, F.W. Murnau and G.W. Pabst, which having apparently announced the horrors of fascism, while testifying to the traumas of a defeated nation, still casts a long shadow over cinema in Germany, leaving film history and political history permanently intertwined.
Weimar Cinema and After offers a fresh perspective on this most 'national' of national cinemas, re-evaluating the arguments which view genres and movements such as 'films of the fantastic', 'Nazi Cinema', 'film noir' and 'New German Cinema' as typically German contributions to twentieth century visual culture. Thomas Elsaesser questions conventional readings which link these genres to romanticism and expressionism, and offers new approaches to analysing the function of national cinema in an advanced 'culture industry' and in a Germany constantly reinventing itself both geographically and politically.
Elsaesser argues that German cinema's significance lies less in its ability to promote democracy or predict fascism than in its contribution to the creation of a community sharing a 'historical imaginary' rather than a 'national identity'. In this respect, he argues, German cinema anticipated some of the problems facing contemporary nations in reconstituting their identities by means of media images, memory, and invented traditions.

German cinema of the 1920s is still regarded as one of the 'golden ages' of world cinema. Films such as The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, Dr Mabuse the Gambler, Nosferatu, Metropolis, Pandora's Box and The Blue Angel have long been canonised as classics, but they are also among the key films defining an image of Germany as a nation uneasy with itself. The work of directors like Fritz Lang, F.W. Murnau and G.W. Pabst, which having apparently announced the horrors of fascism, while testifying to the traumas of a defeated nation, still casts a long shadow over cinema in Germany, leaving film history and political history permanently intertwined.
Weimar Cinema and After offers a fresh perspective on this most 'national' of national cinemas, re-evaluating the arguments which view genres and movements such as 'films of the fantastic', 'Nazi Cinema', 'film noir' and 'New German Cinema' as typically German contributions to twentieth century visual culture. Thomas Elsaesser questions conventional readings which link these genres to romanticism and expressionism, and offers new approaches to analysing the function of national cinema in an advanced 'culture industry' and in a Germany constantly reinventing itself both geographically and politically.
Elsaesser argues that German cinema's significance lies less in its ability to promote democracy or predict fascism than in its contribution to the creation of a community sharing a 'historical imaginary' rather than a 'national identity'. In this respect, he argues, German cinema anticipated some of the problems facing contemporary nations in reconstituting their identities by means of media images, memory, and invented traditions.

What is the relationship between cinema and spectator? This is the key question for film theory, and one that Thomas Elsaesser and Malte Hagener put at the center of their insightful and engaging book, now revised from its popular first edition. Every kind of cinema (and every film theory) first imagines an ideal spectator, and then maps certain dynamic interactions between the screen and the spectator's mind, body and senses. Using seven distinctive configurations of spectator and screen that move progressively from 'exterior' to 'interior' relationships, the authors retrace the most important stages of film theory from its beginnings to the present-from neo-realist and modernist theories to psychoanalytic, 'apparatus,' phenomenological and cognitivist theories, and including recent cross-overs with philosophy and neurology. This new and updated edition of Film Theory: An Introduction through the Senses has been extensively revised and rewritten throughout, incorporating discussion of contemporary films like Her and Gravity, and including a greatly expanded final chapter, which brings film theory fully into the digital age.

Hydrogen bonds represent type of molecular interaction that determines the structure and function of a large variety of molecular systems. The elementary dynamics of hydrogen bonds and related proton transfer reactions, both occurring in the ultra fast time domain between 10-14 and 10-11s, form a research topic of high current interest.
In this book addressing scientists and graduate students in physics, chemistry and biology, the ultra fast dynamics of hydrogen bonds and proton transfer in the condensed phase are reviewed by leading scientists, documenting the state of the art in this exciting field from the viewpoint of theory and experiment. The nonequilibrium behavior of hydrogen-bonded liquids and intramolecular hydrogen bonds as well as photo induced hydrogen and proton transfer are covered in 7 chapters, making reference to the most recent literature.

Hydrogen bonds represent type of molecular interaction that determines the structure and function of a large variety of molecular systems. The elementary dynamics of hydrogen bonds and related proton transfer reactions, both occurring in the ultra fast time domain between 10-14 and 10-11s, form a research topic of high current interest.
In this book addressing scientists and graduate students in physics, chemistry and biology, the ultra fast dynamics of hydrogen bonds and proton transfer in the condensed phase are reviewed by leading scientists, documenting the state of the art in this exciting field from the viewpoint of theory and experiment. The nonequilibrium behavior of hydrogen-bonded liquids and intramolecular hydrogen bonds as well as photo induced hydrogen and proton transfer are covered in 7 chapters, making reference to the most recent literature.

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 they exist, and how they function, Elsaesser maps the industrial-institutional challenges and constraints facing Hollywood, 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. 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 (self-) 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. Prescient and compelling, The Mind-Game Film will appeal to students, scholars, and enthusiasts of media studies, film studies, philosophy, and politics.

This groundbreaking inaugural volume for the Thinking Cinema series focuses on the extent to which contemporary cinema contributes to political and philosophical thinking about the future of Europe's core Enlightenment values. In light of the challenges of globalization, multi-cultural communities and post-nation state democracy, the book interrogates the borders of ethics and politics and roots itself in debates about post-secular, post-Enlightenment philosophy. By defining a cinema that knows that it is no longer a competitor to Hollywood (i.e. the classic self-other construction), Elsaesser also thinks past the kind of self-exoticism or auto-ethnography that is the perpetual temptation of such a co-produced, multi-platform 'national cinema as world cinema'. Discussing key filmmakers and philosophers, like: Claire Denis and Jean-Luc Nancy; Aki Kaurismaki, abjection and Julia Kristeva; Michael Haneke, the paradoxes of Christianity and Slavoj Zizek; Fatih Akin, Alain Badiou and Jacques Ranciere, Elsaesser is able to approach European cinema and assesses its key questions within a global context.His combination of political and philosophical thinking will surely ground the debate in film philosophy for years to come.

Terahertz (THz) radiation with frequencies between 100 GHz and 30 THz has developed into an important tool of science and technology, with numerous applications in materials characterization, imaging, sensor technologies, and telecommunications. Recent progress in THz generation has provided ultrashort THz pulses with electric field amplitudes of up to several megavolts/cm. This development opens the new research field of nonlinear THz spectroscopy in which strong light-matter interactions are exploited to induce quantum excitations and/or charge transport and follow their nonequilibrium dynamics in time-resolved experiments. This book introduces methods of THz generation and nonlinear THz spectroscopy in a tutorial way, discusses the relevant theoretical concepts, and presents prototypical, experimental, and theoretical results in condensed matter physics. The potential of nonlinear THz spectroscopy is illustrated by recent research, including an overview of the relevant literature.

Metropolis is a monumental work. On its release in 1925, after sixteen months' filming, it was Germany's most expensive feature film, a canvas for director Fritz Lang's increasingly extravagant ambitions. Lang, inspired by the skyline of New York, created a whole new vision of cities. One of the greatest works of science fiction, the film also tells human stories about love and family. Thomas Elsaesser explores the cultural phenomenon of Metropolis: its different versions (there is no definitive one), its changing meanings, and its role as a database of twentieth-century imagery and ideologies. In his foreword to this special edition, published to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the BFI Film Classics series, Elsaesser discusses the impact of the 27 minutes of 'lost' footage discovered in Buenos Aires in 2008, and incorporated in a restored edition, which premiered in 2010.

This book offers a comprehensive scholarly examination of Vincente Minnelli, one of American cinema's central filmmakers.Widely known for innovative films like ""Meet Me in St. Louis"", ""An American in Paris"", and ""The Band Wagon"", Vincente Minnelli also directed classic film comedies like ""Father of the Bride"" and ""Designing Woman"", and melodramas such as ""The Bad and the Beautiful"" and ""Some Came Running"". Though his work is beloved by filmmakers and audiences alike, Minnelli has nonetheless received very little critical attention in English. ""Vincente Minnelli: The Art of Entertainment"" remedies this imbalance, offering the first-ever comprehensive and scholarly examination of Minnelli's career within a variety of discourses and methods.Bringing together a number of previously uncollected and untranslated essays by some of the most important scholars and critics in North America, Australia, and Europe, ""Vincente Minnelli: The Art of Entertainment"" places Minnelli's cinema in its rightful position at the forefront of film history. In essays written over the last five decades, as well as a number of new essays commissioned especially for this volume, contributors consider Minnelli from a number of perspectives from auteurism to genre studies and psychoanalysis to close textual analysis.The volume is divided into four chronological sections, Minnelli in the 1960s: The Rise and Fall of an Auteur; The 1970s and 1980s: Genre, Psychoanalysis, and Close Readings; The 1990s: Matters of History, Culture, and Sexuality; and, Minnelli Today: The Return of the Artist. An introduction by Joe McElhaney addresses the history of the reception of Minnelli's films, situating this reception within larger questions of film theory, criticism, and aesthetics.Too often dismissed as little more than a stylist dependent on the resources of the studio system and the structures of genre, Vincente Minnelli deserves a second look from serious film scholars. ""Vincente Minnelli: The Art of Entertainment"" demonstrates the remarkable and sustained rigor of Minnelli's vision and will appeal to students and teachers of film studies as well as fans of Minnelli's work.

What are the most appropriate theories and methods for analysing contemporary American cinema? In this book Thomas Elsaesser and Warren Buckland answer this question by taking an innovative approach to writing about individual movies: in each of the main chapters they examine the assumptions behind one traditional theory of film, distil a method of analysis from it, and then analyse a contemporary American movie. They then go beyond the traditional theory by analysing the same movie using a more current theory and method. This book has identically structured, coherent chapters, which overcomes the dogmatism of subscribing to one theory and method, and instead encourages students to adopt a comparative, pluralistic approach to film analysis. The traditional theories include: mise en scene criticism, auteurism, structural analysis, narratology, studies of realism, psychoanalysis, and feminism. The more current theories include: new and post-Lacanian approaches to subjectivity, cognitivism, computerised statistical style analysis, the philosophy of modal logic, new media theory, and deconstruction. Films analysed include: "Chinatown", "Die Hard", "The Silence of the Lambs", "Pulp Fict

This book presents the latest advances in ultrafast science, including ultrafast laser and measurement technology as well as studies of ultrafast phenomena. Pico- and femtosecond processes relevant in physics, chemistry, biology and engineering are presented. Ultrafast technology has had a profound impact in a wide range of applications, among them imaging, material diagnostics and transformation and high-speed optoelectronics. This book summarizes the results presented at the 12th Ultrafast Phenomena Conference and reviews the state of the art of this important and rapidly advancing field.

This groundbreaking inaugural volume for the Thinking Cinema series focuses on the extent to which contemporary cinema contributes to political and philosophical thinking about the future of Europe's core Enlightenment values. In light of the challenges of globalization, multi-cultural communities and post-nation state democracy, the book interrogates the borders of ethics and politics and roots itself in debates about post-secular, post-Enlightenment philosophy. By defining a cinema that knows that it is no longer a competitor to Hollywood (i.e. the classic self-other construction), Elsaesser also thinks past the kind of self-exoticism or auto-ethnography that is the perpetual temptation of such a co-produced, multi-platform 'national cinema as world cinema'. Discussing key filmmakers and philosophers, like: Claire Denis and Jean-Luc Nancy; Aki Kaurismaki, abjection and Julia Kristeva; Michael Haneke, the paradoxes of Christianity and Slavoj Zizek; Fatih Akin, Alain Badiou and Jacques Ranciere, Elsaesser is able to approach European cinema and assesses its key questions within a global context.His combination of political and philosophical thinking will surely ground the debate in film philosophy for years to come.

Since cinema has entered the digital era, its very nature has come under renewed scrutiny. Countering the 'death of cinema' debate, Film History as Media Archaeology presents a robust argument for the cinema's current status as a new epistemological object, of interest to philosophers, while also examining the presence of moving images in the museum and art spaces as a challenge for art history. The current study is the fruit of some twenty years of research and writing at the interface of film history, media theory and media archaeology by one of the acknowledged pioneers of the 'new film history' and 'media archaeology'. It joins the efforts of other media scholars to locate cinema's historical emergence and subsequent transformations within the broader field of media change and interaction, as we experience them today.

Terahertz (THz) radiation with frequencies between 100 GHz and 30 THz has developed into an important tool of science and technology, with numerous applications in materials characterization, imaging, sensor technologies, and telecommunications. Recent progress in THz generation has provided ultrashort THz pulses with electric field amplitudes of up to several megavolts/cm. This development opens the new research field of nonlinear THz spectroscopy in which strong light-matter interactions are exploited to induce quantum excitations and/or charge transport and follow their nonequilibrium dynamics in time-resolved experiments. This book introduces methods of THz generation and nonlinear THz spectroscopy in a tutorial way, discusses the relevant theoretical concepts, and presents prototypical, experimental, and theoretical results in condensed matter physics. The potential of nonlinear THz spectroscopy is illustrated by recent research, including an overview of the relevant literature.

In the late 1960s, the cinema was pronounced dead. Television, like a Biblical Cain had slain his brother Abel, bewitching the mass audience and provoking an exodus - from the cinemas to the living room. Some 30 years later, a remarkable reversal: rarely has the cinema been more popular, as inner-city multiplexes record rising attendances. And yet, rarely has the cinema's future seemed more uncertain. 70-80 per cent of all films shown on commercial screens come from Hollywood, launched with publicity campaigns costing more than the total budget of most European films. Television, the independent cinema's chief financier for the past decades, cannot match these investments, not can it compete, even if it wanted to, with the barrage of special effects. The New Media, virtual images, the relentless digitization of reality, it is argued, are responsible for the global concentration of production, which in turn leads to the global uniformity of the products. Just as Cain and Abel are about to bury their differences, then along comes Cable to resolve them both into mere myriads of pixels. Beyond the hyperbole and the metaphors, "Cinema Futures: Cain, Abel or Cable?" presents an argument about predictions that tend to be made when new technologies appear. Television did not swallow radio, just as it did not replace the cinema. Yet each new technological medium has certainly changed the place of the others in society and affected their function. What do these precedents tell us about the future of the cinema in the digital age, or rather for the future of the "experience cinema", as it redefines itself in the home and in public? The authors of this book are realistic in their estimate of the future of cinema's distinctive identity, and optimistic that the different social needs audiences bring to the media will ensure their distinctiveness. The book also contains case studies, and should be useful to anyone interested in a better understanding of the changes facing the worlds of sound and vision.