A Looking Glass for Old and New Screens

Perhaps one of the longest videos on YouTube, In a Year with 13 Moons, is dedicated to a very classic topic of film studies: auteur cinema. The video documents a 92-minute round table discussion of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s homonymous film at the New York Philoctetes Center for the Multidisciplinary Study of the Imagination on 13 January 2007.¹ One of the panelists is Thomas Elsaesser, whose knowledge of German cinema in general and of Fassbinder in particular is widely respected. Although Elsaesser’s performance on this new medium is a contribution to traditional film studies, that does not necessarily mean that Elsaesser