McElhaney, Joe
Office: Hunter North 529
E-mail: joemcel@aol.com
Phone: 212.650.3606
Joe McElhaney is the author of The Death of Classical Cinema: Hitchcock, Lang, Minnelli (SUNY Press), Albert Maysles (University of Illinois Press), Luchino Visconti and the Fabric of Cinema (Wayne State University Press) and the editor of Vincente Minnelli: The Art of Entertainment (Wayne State University Press) and A Companion to Fritz Lang (Wiley-Blackwell). He is the recipient of the 2022 Presidential Award for Excellence in Scholarship.
McElhaney is the author of numerous essays in periodicals, including “Elaine May: Dispassionate,” (Screening the Past) “Discarded Objects: No Sad Songs for Me (La Furia Umana), “Terrence Malick: Moving Beyond the Threshold” (La Furia Umana,) “Howard Hawks: American Gesture” (Journal of Film and Video) and Chris Marker: Primitive Projections (Millennium Film Journal).
His essays in edited volumes include “Ingmar Bergman: Beyond the Walls of Reality,” (A Companion to Ingmar Bergman, Blackwell), “Lubitsch, In and Out of Bed,” (New Approaches to Ernst Lubitsch, Amsterdam University Press), “Woody Allen, Out of the Past: A Rainy Day in New York (Imágenes de la memoria, SACO), “A Nagging Physical Discomfort: Fassbinder and Martha,” (A Companion to Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Blackwell), “Floating Above the Awful Abyss: Robert Altman’s 3 Women” (A Companion to Robert Altman, Blackwell), “Nicholas Ray: The Breadth of Modern Gesture” (Lonely Places, Dangerous Ground, SUNY Press), “Looking for a Path: Fritz Lang and Clash by Night” (A Companion to Fritz Lang, Blackwell), “Red Line 7000: Fatal Disharmonies” (Howard Hawks: New Perspectives, BFI), “The Actor, Framed” (A Companion to Wong Kar-wai, Blackwell), “Alain Resnais, Tsai Ming-liang and the Apartment Plot Musical,” (The Apartment Complex, Rutgers), “Rosemary’s Baby: Polanski, New York and the Urban Irrational” (The City That Never Sleeps,Rutgers), “Preston Sturges and the Speed of Language” (Cinema and Modernity,Rutgers), Fritz Lang and the Cinema of Tactility (I cinque sensi del cinema/XI Convengon Internazionale sul Cinema), “Hollywood, años cuarenta y cincuenta: transformación del modelo clásico Americano o de cómo Europa toma Hollywood por la furza,” (En Tránsito: De Berlin a Hollywood y Alrededors, Las Palmas, “Little Soldiers of the New Frontier: American Movies in 1963” (The 1960s: Themes and Variations,Rutgers).
His essays on Hitchcock and Minnelli include “Pure Cinema, 1972: Hitchcock and Frenzy” (Il cinema é Hitchcock, Marsilio), “Donen and Minnelli: An Exchange of Energies, (Deleuze and Film Criticism, Springer) “Hitchcock and the Tippi Hedren Screen Tests” (Hitchcock Annual), “Like Motion Pictures: Long Take Staging in Bells Are Ringing” (The Long Take: Critical Approaches, Palgrave) “The Object and the Face: Notorious, Bergman and the Close-Up” (Hitchcock: Past and Future, Routledge), “Hitchcock: Metteur-en-Scène” (A Companion to Alfred Hitchcock,Blackwell), “Laughter and Agony in The Long, Long Trailer or: ‘Isn’t This Fun, Honey?’” (History of American Film,Blackwell) and “Medium-Shot Gestures: Vincente Minnelli and Some Came Running,” originally published in 16:9 and reprinted in Vincente Minnelli: The Art of Entertainment.
He has been an invited speaker to such institutions as Stanford University, Yale University, Rutgers University, Goethe University, Columbia University, the University of Kent at Canterbury, the Deutsche Filmmuseum, Anthology Film Archives, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the Locarno Film Festival, the Centre Pompidou, and the Philoctetes Center. He has also served as an interview subject for the Criterion Collection DVD/blu ray of Fritz Lang’s Ministry of Fear, for the Warner Brothers DVD of Vincente Minnelli’s Some Came Running, for the Olive Films blu-ray/DVD of Nicholas Ray’s Johnny Guitar and for the French television documentaries Gene Kelly le novateur and Le couples mythiques du cinema.
At Hunter College, he regularly teaches courses on camera movement, cinematic space, film acting, aesthetics of film sound, the American musical, director courses focused on such figures as Woody Allen, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Fritz Lang and Vincente Minnelli, and history classes addressing such decades as the 1950s, the 1960s, and the 1980s. He also regularly teaches a close analysis course devoted to Martin Scorsese’s The Age of Innocence and another on Hitchcock’s Vertigo.
Links to some online publications:
“Bits of Business: The American Films of Max Ophüls”:
http://www.lolajournal.com/6/ophuls.html
“Frank Borzage: Architect of Ineffable Desires”:
http://sensesofcinema.com/2003/great-directors/borzage/
“Paul’s Movie: MIXED BLOOD”:
http://desistfilm.com/pauls-movie-mixed-blood/
“The Artist and the Killer: Fritz Lang’s Cinema of the Hand”:
https://16-9.dk/2006/06/the-artist-and-the-killer/
“Lauren Bacall: The Walk”:
http://www.thecine-files.com/lauren-bacall-the-walk/
On German Filmmakers in Hollywood
http://www.lolajournal.com/5/survival.html
Links to invited talks and discussions:
“Fritz Lang: In Our Time,” BBC Radio 4, Melvyn Bragg.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0012s94
Interview on Borzage’s STREET ANGEL, CUNY TV
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ENAz_O2Jfvo
Interview on Visconti’s CONVERSATION PIECE, CUNY TV
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-2RSS5MMOXo
Barbara Stanwyck: German Actress?, Deutsche Film Museum
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TGyY3Cb4BjA
On Albert Maysles, for the Centre Pompidou
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PRdUuZ205z4