The mind-game film: distributed agency, time travel, and productive pathology

While he pursued a mercurial breadth of topics across his career – ranging from Weimar film to early cinema to media archaeology – pioneering film scholar Thomas Elsaesser maintained a long-standing interest in Hollywood. The Mind-Game Film: Distributed Agency, Time Travel, and Productive Pathology, a posthumous collection of Elsaesser’s essays edited by Warren Buckland, Dana Polan, and Seung-hoon Jeong, brings together his analyses of the complex narratives emerging in contemporary Hollywood cinema. This book, however, is not the first appearance of his evolving framework, which premiered within Buckland’s edited anthology Puzzle Films: Complex Storytelling in Contemporary Cinema (2009) and continued to mature until Elsaesser’s passing in December 2019. In The Mind-Game Film, Elsaesser expands upon Hollywood’s post-classical films and their self-referential classicism to formulate an emergent mode of contemporary cinema that plays games with either the spectator or the protagonist. As his final contribution to the discipline of film and media studies, the ‘mind-game’ continues to bear the imprint of Thomas Elsaesser’s indelible legacy.