11. The Home Movie as Essay Film: On Making Memory Posthumously

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.