Thomas Elsaesser, an influential German-born film scholar and teacher whose writings brimmed with a fascination for Hollywood melodramas, the works of Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Weimar-era movies, died on Dec. 4 in Beijing. He was 76.

His wife, Silvia Vega-Llona, said he had been on a lecture tour in China and was found in his hotel room after he had failed to show up for an appearance. He later died of cardiac arrest in a hospital, she said.

“I spoke to him a few hours before he died and he was fine,” she said by phone.

Mr. Elsaesser’s many books and more than 200 essays established him, beginning in the mid-1970s, as a leading figure in film criticism. He also started and ran major film studies departments at the University of East Anglia, in Norwich, England, and the University of Amsterdam.

“He was there when modern film studies was really beginning, when the understanding of film was switching from ‘I like that film’ to actually studying it,” Dana Polan, a professor of cinema studies at New York University, said in a phone interview.