Thomas Elsaesser (22 June 1943 – 4 December 2019) was a German film historian and professor of Film and Television Studies at the University of Amsterdam. He was also the writer and director of The Sun Island, a documentary essay film about his grandfather, the architect Martin Elsaesser. He was married to scholar Silvia Vega-Llona. Early life and education Thomas Elsaesser was born in 1943 in Berlin-Charlottenburg. The grandson of the architect Martin Elsaesser, he spent his childhood in Upper Franconia and in 1951 moved with his family to Mannheim, where from 1955 to 1962 he attended a Humanist Gymnasium (academic secondary school), before studying English and German Literature at the Ruprecht-Karl University in Heidelberg. In 1963, Elsaesser left Germany for the United Kingdom, where he studied English literature at the University of Sussex (1963–1966); after receiving his B.A. degree there, he spent a year (1967–68) at the Sorbonne in Paris. In 1971, he received his doctorate in Comparative Literature with a thesis on Jules Michelet and Thomas Carlyle’s Histories of the French Revolution from the University of Sussex. Film journal work Between 1968 and 1970, he contributed to and co-edited a film journal published by the University of Sussex Film Society (Brighton Film Review). Other editors included Phil Hardy, David Morse and Gary Herman. He subsequently edited a similar journal (Monogram) from 1971 to 1975 in London, encouraged by Peter Wollen and supported by a grant from the Education Department of the British Film Institute. Writing as a film critic and theorist of classical Hollywood cinema, it was his essay on Hollywood melodrama (Tales of Sound and Fury, 1972) that made Elsaesser known internationally. Academia From 1972 to 1976, Elsaesser taught English, French and Comparative Literature at the University of East Anglia. In 1976, he established at UEA, together with Charles Barr, one of the first independent centres for Film Studies in the UK, with a full undergraduate, MA and PhD program. In addition to seminars on early cinema, on Alfred Hitchcock, and Fritz Lang, Elsaesser also initiated a course on the cinema of the Weimar Republic, which he co-taught with his colleague W.G. Sebald. In 1991, Elsaesser was appointed to a chair at the University of Amsterdam. There, he founded the Department of Film and Television Studies, of which he was the head until 2000. In 1992, he initiated an international Master's and Doctoral Program, a book series