In February 1982 Rainer Werner Fassbinder wrote a short article for Berlinaletip,
a special issue of the weekly Berlin cultural magazine Tip published
during the Berlin Film Festival. It was entitled “Alexander Kluge is
Supposed to Have Had a Birthday.” It reads as follows:
The rumour that Alexander Kluge is supposed
to have turned fifty recently is as persistent as that other absolutely
ridiculous assertion that this very same Kluge got married sometime
toward the end of the year! It is reported that he actually went ahead
and had a private matter officially institutionalized by an official
state institution. An absurd notion—several hours' worth of stirring
movies by the filmmaker Kluge, as well as a whole lot of illuminating
and stimulating prose by the writer Kluge, do document after all that
it is one of his chief aims to call every kind of institution into
question, particularly those of the state—if I interpret half
way correctly—and if his work is not indeed even more radical,
that is, designed to prove that basically Alexander Kluge is interested
in the destruction of every type of institution. Furthermore—an
anarchist just doesn't go and turn fifty, the age at which people
celebrate you. Categories like that are meaningless to him. I mean,
it is precisely rumors of this sort about one of us, serving the purposes
of cooptation, that make various things clear, and at the very least
remind us of the necessity of continuing to struggle for our cause
and of the eternal danger of growing weary in the face of gray, streamlined
reality. (1)
I was reminded very clearly of Fassbinder's words at the 2002 Berlinale
when, on the 14th February, Alexander Kluge's birthday, it seemed, became
much more than a rumour. Exactly 20 years after Fassbinder's impassioned
article Alexander Kluge's 70th birthday was celebrated with a gala screening
of his film Die Patriotin (The Female Patriot, 1979) at the
Berlinale as part of a tribute to his life-long contribution to German Cinema.
I could picture Fassbinder turning in his grave! Had the anti-authoritarian,
anti-institutional Alexander Kluge himself become an institution? At risk
of offending Fassbinder and answering that question in the affirmative,
I should like to sketch a brief portrait of Kluge, a figure who is not only
a great filmmaker, but an intellectual, a storyteller, and one of the great
cultural critics of our time.
On the subject of birthdays, I should begin by stating
that Kluge was born in the town of Halberstadt in the vicinity of Magdeburg
in 1932, the son of a doctor. After completing his high school education
in Berlin, he studied Law, History and Music at universities in Marburg
and Frankfurt am Main and received his doctorate in Law in 1956. During
his studies in Frankfurt, Kluge became acquainted with Theodore Adorno at
the Institute for Social Research (otherwise known as the Frankfurt School)
where he performed legal services and began to write stories. It is through
his discussions with Adorno in particular that Kluge became interested in
film, despite the fact that Adorno was not himself a lover of film. As Kluge
has recalled in an interview, “[Adorno] sent me to Fritz Lang in order
to protect me from something worse, so that I wouldn't get the idea to write
any books. If I were turned away, then I would ultimately do something more
valuable, which was to continue to be legal counsel to the Institute”.
(2) In 1958 Adorno introduced Kluge to Fritz Lang, who
was filming Der Tiger von Eschnapur and Das Indische Grabmal
(1958-1959) in Berlin. Legend has it that Kluge found the experience rather
tiresome and began to write stories in the studio cafeteria, stories that
would eventually become material for his own films.
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Yesterday
Girl
|
In 1960 Kluge co-directed his first short film with Peter Schamoni entitled
Brutality in Stone, a poetic montage film reflecting on the notion
that the past lives on in architectural ruins; that the ruined structures
of the Nazi period in particular bear silent witness to the atrocities committed.
This film is important for a number of reasons: Brutality
in Stone marks the beginning of a process in which German filmmakers
of the 1960s and 1970s began to overturn the apparent amnesia German cinema
had demonstrated during the 1950s in regard to the Nazi period. In addition,
the film was premiered at the annual Oberhausen short film festival in February
1961. The festival was significant because it functioned as a forum for
young and experimental filmmakers attempting to develop modes of cinematic
practice outside the rigid, commercial framework of the industrial system—modelled
on Hollywood—that had been set up with the assistance of American occupying
forces in the immediate post-war period. A year after the premiere of Brutality
in Stone at the Oberhausen festival, Kluge was one of the authors and
signatories of the “Oberhausen Manifesto”, a document that outlined
the imperatives of bringing a new kind of German cinema into being. (3)
The 26 filmmakers, writers and intellectuals who signed the manifesto declared
the old cinema dead and called for new intellectual, formal and economic
conceptions of cinema to be brought into filmmaking practice, education
and funding so that German cinema could distinguish itself through a new
film language freed from the constraints of commerce. With the intellectual
considerations in mind, Kluge co-founded, along with Edgar Reitz and Detlev
Schleiermacher, the Ulm Institut für Filmgestaltung later in 1962,
an institute not intended as a training ground for practitioners but as
the theoretical arm of the New German Cinema. Kluge thus began his long
career as a filmmaker, activist and spokesperson for what was then called
the Young German Film, which would later develop into the New German Cinema
in the latter half of the 1960s.
Just as the Oberhauseners maintained that German cinema could only be renewed
through both theory and practice, so too Kluge's cinematic practice would
be unthinkable without his very particular and idiosyncratic contribution
to film theory. A discussion of his films, therefore, would be not be possible
without recourse to some of his most important theoretical concepts: montage,
Phantasie, history/story and the development of a counter-public
sphere through film. I shall therefore attempt to chart a way through these
concepts as they are actualised through his filmmaking practice.
Alexander Kluge's Theory of Montage: The Importance of the Interval
Through his writings on film and his films themselves, Kluge has sought
to theorise and put into practice a new conception of montage distinct from
both 'invisible' editing strategies of Hollywood and commercial film practice,
and 'dialectical' montage as theorised and practiced by Sergei Eisenstein
and the Soviet school of filmmakers.
Kluge's theories of the cinema are founded on the conception that mainstream
narrative cinema—not only Hollywood, but also importantly, 'Papa's
Kino' (the post-war German cinema denounced in the Oberhausen manifesto)—works
by a process of closing off the ability for the spectator to engage their
imaginative faculties while watching a film. Kluge does not simply take
for granted the notion of spectator as passive observer. For him, under
the right circumstances—that is, those circumstances created by the
right kind of film—the spectator can assume a much more active role
during the screening of a film.
Kluge aspires consciously in his various roles as filmmaker,
theorist, and activist to develop new modes of constructing films that will
in turn provide the spectator with new and more active ways of engaging
with such films; ways of activating the spectator's own capacity to make
connections between vastly disparate images.
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Artists
Under the Big Top: Disorientated
|
Kluge's theory of montage hinges on his conception of the 'cut'. As Stuart
Liebman has written, this theory “pivots around the break in the flow
of images, the cut between shots, or the cut to a title.” (4)
This emphasis on the cut opens up a space for the spectator to enact her
or his own imagination, or what Kluge calls Phantasie. (5)
Kluge's films are constructed from an array of diverse fragments such as
photographs, archival film footage, illustrations from fairy tales and children's
books as well as paintings, drawings, intertitles and fictional episodes.
In addition, the soundtracks of his films generally consist of a range of
discordant elements including voice-over narration (usually performed by
himself), various pieces of classical and operatic music, and
other sounds such as air-raid sirens, bombing raids and aeroplanes that
are not always necessarily motivated by or synchronised with the images
they accompany. Rather than putting these fragments together with a final
“ideal meaning” in mind, Kluge places the emphasis on the role
of the spectator in the production of meaning. The looser the logical connection,
or wider the gap between consecutive images, the more space is left for
the spectator to activate her or his own Phantasie. Kluge is therefore,
not interested in 'conquering the spectator' or directing them toward a
predetermined series of associations, as was the case with Eisenstein's
dialectical approach, but his theory of montage is interested in involving
the spectator in the production of meaning, effectively making
them “co-producers” of the film. (6) As such
he relies on the spectator's own capacity to make connections between the
diverse fragments. This is what Kluge calls the “film in the mind of
the spectator”, a capacity which he believes has existed for thousands
of years, long before the technological invention of cinema. Kluge writes:
“film takes recourse to the spontaneous workings of the imaginative
faculty which has existed for tens of thousands of years.” (7)
This capacity to make connections is an ability to edit together images
and experiences into something meaningful, to see the hidden correspondences
between diverse things, a capacity that is not unlike Walter Benjamin's
notion of 'involuntary memory'. (8) Montage, for Kluge,
which is certainly not equivalent to the editing of the filmstrip, occurs
between the film and the spectator, and within the spectator's own mind.
Kluge's theory of montage allows the spectator to engage in an act of reading
that requires, as Gilles Deleuze has said of “false continuity”,
“a considerable effort of memory and imagination”. (9)
Rather than 'effort' as such, Kluge advocates the adoption of a rather relaxed
attitude on the part of the spectator. He has written: “Relaxation
means that I myself become alive for a moment, allowing my senses to run
wild: for once not to be on guard with the police-like intention of letting
nothing escape me.” (10)
In a playful episode of The Female Patriot, Kluge
shows his protagonist Gabi Teichert (Hanelore Hoger) confronting a voyeur,
'Der Spanner'. Rather than simply condemning this man for his perverse
activities, she listens to him. He complains that he is unable to relax,
since during the day he is paid by the government to spy on people suspected
of unconstitutional behaviour, and by night he spies on unsuspecting young
women for voyeuristic pleasure. But the possibility of gaining pleasure
from such an activity is inhibited by his inability to relax, as he watches
women with the same 'police-like' concentration that he must adopt in his
day job. The voyeur, therefore, becomes a figural representation of a cinema
spectator who cannot simply relax and allow the images and sounds to wash
over them. Gabi suggests to the voyeur that in order to relax he should
do a number of eye-blinking exercises. These exercises in effect mimic Kluge's
process of montage, creating gaps or black/blank spaces between images,
disrupting continuity and therefore opening a space in which the spectator
can engage her or his imagination. Kluge encourages the spectator not to
worry about piecing everything together. As he says, “If I have understood
everything then something has been emptied out.” (11)
Indeed, the fragmented and non-linear and sometimes cluttered structure
of his films invite the spectator to view them over and over, since a full
appreciation cannot be gained through a single viewing.
The Concept of Phantasie
Kluge believes that the aesthetic and political possibilities of cinema
should and can be based on subjective modes of experience. A term frequently
used by Kluge in his writings on the notion of spectatorship in the cinema
is that of 'Phantasie,' (literally, 'fantasy') and this term acquires
a very particular meaning in the context of his work. Phantasie is
not like the English term 'fantasy' in the sense described by psychoanalysis,
but is more akin to imagination. It equates with the spectator's ability
to make connections between disparate things and it hinges on Kluge's conception
of montage.
Kluge writes:
…since every cut provokes phantasy, a
storm of phantasy, you can even make a break in the film. It is exactly
at such a point that information is conveyed. This is what Benjamin
meant by the notion of shock. It would be wrong to say that a film
should aim to shock the viewers—this would restrict their independence
and powers of perception. The point here is the surprise which occurs
when you suddenly—as if by subdominant thought processes—understand
something in depth and then, out of this deepened perspective redirect
your phantasy to the real course of events. (12)
In other words, Phantasie is that which lies beneath the guarded
exterior of the stimulus shield, and it is Phantasie that is set
free when shock is able to break through the barrier.
Kluge has often invoked the figure of the child as the ideal spectator of
his films. Kluge contrasts his cinema with that of conventional narrative
cinema with an evocation of two different kinds of landscape. He writes:
At the present time there are enough cultivated
entertainment and issue-oriented films, as if cinema were a stroll
on walkways in a park…One need not duplicate the cultivated.
In fact children prefer the bushes: they play in the sand or in scrap
heaps. (13)
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The
Blind Director
|
That he invokes the figure of the child in this image is important both
politically and conceptually. On one level, it is the child who, for Kluge
and the other 'Young' German filmmakers of the 1960s, represented the hope
for cinema, the antidote to the mass-produced products of 'Papa's Kino,'
those films that simply stuck to the well-worn garden paths. On a conceptual
level, it is the child who is least 'cultivated', least affected by the
teachings of 'cultured' society. The child is the one who is open to new
experiences, who has not yet learnt to raise her or his defences against
the shocks that modern life deals us. It is the child who is able to raise
a 'storm of Phantasie', It is children who play in the sand and on
the scrap heaps; the material result of the effects of time and weather
upon what was once solid stone, and children are today's allegorists, the
ones who are able to pick up a discarded thing—the unwanted junk of
society, the refuse of mass production (the modern form of the ruin in a
'disposable' society)—a bottle top or a paper bag for instance, and
imagine in each scrap an entire universe to be explored. This childlike
capacity, according to Kluge, is what one must bring to the filmmaking process,
from the point of view of the filmmaker and the spectator alike.
Although children rarely appear in Kluge's films, it is perhaps for this
reason that many of his protagonists often exhibit rather child-like traits.
Many of his female protagonists in particular, such as Anita G (Alexandra
Kluge) in Yesterday Girl (1966), Leni Peickert (Hannelore Hoger)
in Artists under the Big Top: Disorientated (1967), Roswitha Bronski
(Alexandra Kluge) in Part-Time Work of a Domestic Slave (1973) and
Gabi Teichert in The Female Patriot, enter situations with a childlike
but never infantile sense of curiosity and inquisitiveness, mimetically
exploring and engaging with the world around them.
History/Story
A certain level of playfulness can also be discerned in Kluge's approach
to history in both his fictional and documentary films. Kluge has written
of his own debt to the history of cinema, particularly the silent cinema
of the 1920s, and has articulated his approach to history with this history
in mind. He writes:
I wouldn't be making films if it weren't for
the cinema of the 1920s, the silent era. Since I have been making
films it has been in reference to this classical tradition. Telling
stories, this is precisely my conception of narrative cinema; and
what else is the history of a country but the vastest narrative surface
of all? Not one story but many stories. (14)
Kluge resists the dominant practice of constructing grand historical narratives,
but rather conceives of history as a vast collection of stories. His model
for such a conception of history is drawn from the Brothers Grimm, who,
as a voice-over in The Female Patriot states, “went digging
into German history and found fairytales”. In the context of a film
about a history teacher dissatisfied with the poor materials she has to
teach history with, this is a double-edged statement. Not only is he suggesting
that History (with a capital 'H') represents the past as a series of stories
that tell only a limited and often fictionalised version of events, but
that, in a more productive way, fictional stories such as fairytales bring
with them living traces of the past into the present, just as ruins served
such a purpose in Brutality in Stone and just as his films ultimately
attempt to do by drawing upon the cinema's own past.
In addition, Kluge advocates a particularly subjective approach to history,
evidenced in some of his non-fiction films featuring average individuals.
For example Fire Fighter E. A. Winterstein (1968) and A Doctor
From Halberstadt (1970) (featuring Kluge's father), which both at times
dwell upon seemingly banal and undramatic moments, moments that would usually
end up on the cutting room floor, moments that my colleague, the historian
Judith Keene might call the “dandruff of history”.
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Germany
in Autumn
|
This subjective approach can also be seen in the impulse behind the collaborative
film Germany in Autumn (1977–78), a film made in response to
the events of the Autumn of 1977 when a leading German industrialist Hans-Martin
Schleyer was kidnapped and killed by RAF terrorists attempting to secure
the release of three prominent leaders of the RAF's Baader-Meinhof group,
Andreas Baader, Gudrun Enslin, and Jean-Carl Raspe, who subsequently committed
suicide (or, some believe were murdered) in prison. The
film consists of a series of documentary and fictional sequences marked
at either end by footage of two funerals. At the beginning we see the state
funeral of Schleyer and at the end the joint funerals of Baader, Enslin
and Raspe. In a large part the film was made in response not so much to
the events themselves, but to the selective filtering of information of
the events by the media, fuelling and supporting the restraints placed on
civil liberties and freedom of information by the government. As several
of the film's collaborators have said: “It is something seemingly simple
which roused us: the lack of memory…For two hours of film we are trying
to hold onto memory in the form of a subjective momentary impression.”
(15) The film is not, therefore a documentary detailing
the events that took place, but rather the collection of divergent impressions
about a particularly volatile and emotive moment in Germany's political
and social history. It was for this film that Kluge created the character
of the history teacher Gabi Teichert who became the protagonist of The
Female Patriot.
Counter-Public
Sphere and Alternative Modes of Production
Kluge's films are very much an expression of many of the
tenets addressed in the Oberhausen manifesto, as well as of Kluge's own
writings, particularly regarding the role film should play in the public
sphere of the Federal Republic. Kluge was particularly concerned with the
fact that the new cinema that they hoped to create would be completely ineffectual
unless there was a public ready to receive its products. To a certain extent,
Kluge's films can be seen as an attempt to educate the audience in ways
of seeing, appropriate not only to Kluge's own films, but to those of his
colleagues as well. Many of Kluge's films show the allegorical system
at work in them, sometimes by the use of a voice-over narrator, or by the
confused or disoriented characters that often inhabit his films, and in
whom we, the confused and disoriented spectators, can see ourselves. (16)
Kluge advocates the development of a kind of counter-cinema in order to
generate an alternative public sphere. Miriam Hansen has written most eloquently
on this point:
As a medium that organizes human needs and
qualities in a social form, the existing public sphere maintains a
claim to be representative while excluding large areas of people's
experience. Among the media that increasingly constitute the public
sphere, the cinema lags behind on account of its primarily artisanal
mode of production (in Germany, at least), preserving a certain degree
of independence thanks to state and television funding. This ironic
constellation provides the cinema with a potential for creating an
alternative, oppositional public sphere within the larger one, addressing
itself primarily to the kinds of experience repressed by the latter.
Thus the cinema's intervention aims not only at the systematic non-
or misrepresentation of specific issues—eg. family, factory,
security, war and Nazism—but also the structure of the public
sphere itself. (17)
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Part-Time
Work of a Domestic Slave
|
In some cases, therefore Kluge even advocates a kind of cinematic understanding
of the world through his female protagonists, such as Roswitha Bronski in
Part-Time Work of a Domestic Slave, a character who performs illegal
abortions in her kitchen, so that women may have the chance to choose their
own way in life, rather than have their lives and their reproductive systems
presided over by the male-dominated legal system and dictated to them by
the conventional structures of the dominant public sphere. In the opening
image of the film, a voice-over introduces us to Roswitha, who looks directly
into the camera. The voice (Kluge's own) says: “Roswitha
feels an enormous power within her, and films have taught her that this
power really exists.” This is the power of subjective experience and
what Kluge refers to as female modes of production. Through the presentation
of women in his films, Kluge hopes to present an alternative mode of production.
This is based not on rationalised modes of industrial production that have
come to govern our lives since the advent of the industrial and technological
revolutions, but on a female productive force (not to be equated with pure
biological reproduction). He believes this force is manifested by women
in their constant struggle against patriarchal social and political structures
such as archaic laws that effectively maintain control over, and attempt
to contain and limit, women's bodies and desires. (18)
Kluge's theorisation of a female productive force and his female protagonists,
I believe, serve as a refreshing antidote to the dominant cinema's representation
of active, desiring women as evil femmes fatales simultaneously desired
and feared by men. Kluge's women possess agency as they playfully negotiate
their own way through the public sphere on their own terms.
Conclusion
Since 1988, Kluge has primarily worked in television,
and has not made a film since 1986. His work in television consists of cultural,
magazine and interview programs for various German television stations,
including 10 vor 11 and Primetime/Spätausgabe for RTL,
News & Stories for SAT.1, and Mitternachtsmagazin for VOX.
These programs are produced in a small studio in Munich by his own production
company, and began with the aim of securing ten percent of airtime for independent
productions. Not unlike his films, these programs employ a diverse variety
of image and sound fragments intended to give the television viewer a multi-sensory
and multi-dimensional experience. At a discussion following the screening
of a new documentary on Kluge's work in television, Kluge stressed the fact
that the opportunity for working collaboratively is one thing that attracts
him to the medium of television. In fact, when asked why he has not made
any films since 1986, he simply replied, “if anyone out there wishes
to make a film with me, collaboratively, then I would make films again,
but I no longer have the desire to be an auteur, I want to work collaboratively.”
Perhaps Kluge did take heed of Fassbinder's words after all, and to this
day still resists the temptation to submit to the rules of the institution,
continuing to mount what he once called a “revolution from below”.
(19)
© Michelle Langford, June 2003
Endnotes:
- Rainer Werner Fassbinder, “Alexander Kluge is
Supposed to Have Had a Birthday” in Michael Töteberg & Leo
A. Lensing (eds.), The Anarchy of the Imagination, Baltimore
& London, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992
- Alexander Kluge in Stuart Liebman, “On New German
Cinema, Art, Enlightenment, and the Public Sphere: An Interview with
Alexander Kluge”, October, n. 46, 1988, p. 36
- The manifesto is reprinted in English translation
in Eric Rentschler (ed.), West German Filmmakers on Film: Voices
and Visions, New York & London, Holmes & Meier, 1988
- Stuart Liebman, “Why Kluge?”, October,
n. 46, 1988, p. 14
- I will discuss the notion of Phantasie in more
detail below.
- See Kluge, “On Film and the Public Sphere”,
New German Critique, 25/26, Fall/Winter 1981–1982, in particular
the section entitled “The Spectator as Entrepreneur”, pp.
210–211
- Ibid., “Utopian Cinema”, p. 209
- Walter Benjamin, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire”
and “The Image of Proust” in Illuminations, London,
Fontana Press, 1992. In contrast to 'voluntary memory', which involves
experiences being mediated by the intellect or consciousness and seeks
to give information about the past rather than retain a trace of past
experiences, 'involuntary memory' involves the spontaneous evocation
of past experience and the ability to make connections between disparate
things.
- Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time–Image,
Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1989, p. 245
- Kluge, “On Film and the Public Sphere”,
p. 211
- Ibid.
- Alexander Kluge, “The Significance of Phantasy”,
New German Critique, n. 24/25, Fall/Winter 1981–1982, p.
216
- Alexander Kluge, Die Patriotin: Texte/Bilder,
1–6, quoted in Theodore Fiedler, “Alexander Kluge, Mediating
History and Consciousness” in Klaus Phillips (ed.), New West
German Filmmakers: From Oberhausen Through the 1970s, Frederick
Ungar, 1984, p. 225
- Kluge, “On Film and the Public Sphere”,
p. 206
- Alf Brustellin, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Alexander
Kluge, Volker Schlöndorff, Bernhard Sinkel, “Germany in
Autumn: What is the Film's Bias” in Eric Rentschler (ed.),
West German Filmmakers on Film: Visions and Voices, New York
& London, Holmes & Meier, 1988, p. 132
- A good example of both of these devices can be found
in Die Patriotin where the voice-over narrator is nothing but
a fragment itself, a knee, and the female protagonist, Gabi Teichert,
is engaged in the task of gathering the diverse fragments that make
up the history of her country. She is often puzzled as to the significance
of those fragments.
- Miriam Hansen, “Alexander Kluge, Cinema and
the Public Sphere: The Construction Site of Counter-History”, Discourse,
n. 4, Winter 1981/82, pp. 57–58
- Kluge discusses the concept of female productive
forces at length in his book Gelegenheitsarbeit einer Sklavin. Zur
realistischen Methode, Frankfurt am Main, Surkamp Verlag, 1975
- Kluge in Stewart Liebman, 1988, p. 34
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Alexander
Kluge
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Filmography
The filmography contains
the following information about the films where known:
Screenplay (S), Cinematography (C), Editor (E), Producer (P), Principle
actors or subjects if a documentary (A), film format and running time.
I have included the English title only where the film has been released
under an English title.
Brutalität in Stein (Brutality in Stone, 1960)
Co-directed with Peter Schamoni. S. & P. Alexander Kluge, Peter Schamoni.
C. Wolf Wirth. 35 mm. B & W. 12 min.
Rennen (1961) Co-directed with Paul Kruntorad. P. Rolf A.
Klug, Alexander Kluge. E. Bessi Lemmer. 35 mm. B & W. 9 min.
Lehrer im Wandel (1962–63) Co-directed with Karen Kluge.
P. Alexander Kluge. C. Alfred Tichawsky. E. Alexander Kluge. 35 mm. B
& W. 11 min.
Porträt einer Bewährung (1964) S. Alexander Kluge.
P. Kairos-Film. C Winfried E. Reinke, Günter Hörmann. E. Beate
Mainka. A. Polizeihauptwachtmeister Müller-Seegeberg. 35 mm. B &
W. 13 min.
Abschied von Gestern (Yesterday Girl, 1965–66)
S. Buch: Alexander Kluge, Based on his short story “Anita G.”
P. Kairos-Film, München, Independent-Film, Berlin. C. Edgar Reitz,
Thomas Mauch. E. Beate Mainka. A. Alexandra Kluge, Günther Mack,
Hans Korte, Alfred Edel. Voice-over. Alexander Kluge. 35 mm. B & W. 88
min.
Frau Blackburn, geb. 5. Jan. 1872, wird gefilmt (1967) S.
Alexander Kluge. P. Kairos-Film. C. Thomas Mauch. E. Beate Mainka-Jellinghaus.
A. Martha Blackburn, Herr Guhl. 35 mm. B & W. 14 min.
Die Artisten in der Zirkuskuppel: Ratlos (Artists Under
the Big Top: Disorientated, 1967). S. Alexander Kluge. P. Kairos-Film.
C. Günter Hörmann, Thomas Mauch. E. Beate Mainka-Jellinghaus.
A. Hannelore Hoger, Alfred Edel, Siegfried Gaue, Bernd Hoeltz, Kurt Jürgens.
Voice-over Alexandra Kluge, Hannelore Hoger, Herr Hollenbeck. 35 mm. B
& W and Colour. 103 min.
Feuerlöscher E. A. Winterstein (Fire Fighter E.
A. Winterstein, 1968) S. Alexander Kluge. P. Kairos-Film. C. Edgar
Reitz, Thomas Mauch. E. Beate Mainka-Jellinghaus. A. Alexandra Kluge,
Hans Korte, Peter Staimmer, Bernd Hoeltz. 35 mm. B & W. 11 min.
Die unbezähmbare Leni Peickert (The Indomitable
Leni Peickert, 1967–69) S. Alexander Kluge. P. Kairos-Film. C.
Günter Hörmann, Thomas Mauch. E. Beate Mainka-Jellinghaus. A.
Hannelore Hoger. 35 mm. B & W. 60 min.
Der grosse Verhau (The Big Mess, 1969–70) S.
Alexander Kluge. P. Kairos Film. C. Thomas Mauch, Alfred Tichawsky; Extra
Footage: Günter Hörmann, Hannelore Hoger, Joachim Heimbucher.
E. Maximiliane Mainka, Beate Mainka-Jellinghaus. A. Vinzenz und Maria
Sterr, Hannelore Hoger, Hark Bohm. 35 mm. B & W and Colour. 86 min.
Ein Arzt aus Halberstadt (A Doctor from Halberstadt,
1969–70) S. Alexander Kluge. P. Kairos-Film. C. Alfred Tichawsky,
Günter Hörmann. E. Maximiliane Mainka. A. Dr. Ernst Kluge. 35
mm. B & W. 29 min.
Wir verbauen 3 x 27 Milliarden Dollar in einen Angriffschlachter
(1971) S. Alexander Kluge, based on his story “Angriffsschlachter
En Cascade”. P. Kairos-Film. C. Alfred Tichawsky, Günter Hörmann,
Hannelore Hoger, Thomas Mauch. E. Maximiliane Mainka, Beate Mainka-Jellinghaus.
A. Hark Bohm, Kurt Jürgens, Hannelore Hoger, Ian Bodenham. 35 mm.
Colour and B & W. 18 min.
Willi Tobler und der Untergang der 6. Flotte (Willi Tobler
and the Sinking of the Sixth Fleet, 1971). P. Kairos-Film. C. Dietrich
Lohmann, Alfred Tichawsky, Thomas Mauch. E. Maximiliane Mainka, Beate
Mainka-Jellinghaus. A. Alfred Edel, Helga Skalla, Hark Bohm, Kurt Jürgens,
Hannelore Hoger. 35 mm. B & W and colour. 96 min.
Besitzbürgerin, Jahrgang 1908 (1973) S. Alexander Kluge.
P. Kairos-Film. C. Thomas Mauch. E. Beate Mainka-Jellinghaus. A. Alice
Schneider, Herr Guhl. 35 mm. B & W. 11 min.
Gelegenheitsarbeit einer Sklavin (Part-Time Work of a
Domestic Slave, 1973) S. Alexander Kluge. P. Kairos-Film. C. Thomas
Mauch. E. Beate Mainka-Jellinghaus. A. Alexandra Kluge, Franz Bronski
(Bion Steinborn), Sylvia Gartmann, Traugott Buhre, Alfred Edel. 35 mm.
B & W. 91 min.
In Gefahr und größter Not bringt der Mittelweg den Tod
(In Danger and Deep Distress, the Middle Way Spells Certain Death,
1974) Co-directed with Edgar Reitz. S. Alexander Kluge, Edgar Reitz. P.
RK-Film (Reitz-Film, Kairos-Film). C. Edgar Reitz, Alfred Hürmer,
Günter Hörmann. E. Beate Mainka-Jellinghaus. A. Dagmar Bödderich,
Jutta Winkelmann, Norbert Kentrup, Alfred Edel, Kurt Jürgens. 35
mm, B & W. 90 min.
Der starke Ferdinand (Strongman Ferdinand, 1975–76)
S. Alexander Kluge, based on his story “Ein Bolschewist des Kapitals”
P. Kairos-Film, Reitz-Film, München. C. Thomas Mauch, Martin Schäfer.
E. Heidi Genée, Agape von Dorstewitz. A. Heinz Schubert, Verena
Rudolph, Gert Günther Hoffmann, Heinz Schimmelpfennig. 35 mm. Colour.
97 min.
Zu böser Schlacht schleich ich heut Nacht so bang (1977)
S. Alexander Kluge, Maximiliane Mainka. P. Kairos-Film. C. Dieter Lohmann,
Alfred Tichawsky, Thomas Mauch. E. Maximiliane Mainka. A. Alfred Edel,
Helga Skalla, Hark Bohm, Kurt Jürgens, Hannelore Hoger. 35 mm. Colour.
81 min.
Die Menschen, die das Stauffer-Jahr vorbereiten (1977) Co-directed
with Maxamiliane Mainka. S. Maximiliane Mainka, Alexander Kluge. P. Kairos-Film;
Institut für Filmgestaltung, Ulm. C. Jörg Schmidt-Reitwein,
Alfred Tichawsky. E. Maximiliane Mainka. 35 mm. Colour and B & W. 40 min.
Nachrichten von den Stauffern I und II (1977) Co-directed
with Maximiliane Mainka. S. Maximiliane Mainka, Alexander Kluge. P. Kairos-Film;
Institut für Filmgestaltung, Ulm. C. Jörg Schmidt-Reitwein,
Alfred Tichawsky. E. Maximiliane Mainka. 35 mm. B & W. Part I, 13 Min.
Part II, 11 min.
Deutschland im Herbst (Germany in Autumn, 1978) Co-directed
with Volker Schlöndorff, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Alf Brustellin,
Bernhard Sinkel, Katja Rupe, Hans Peter Cloos, Edgar Reitz, Maximiliane
Mainka, Peter Schubert. S. Heinrich Böll, Peter Steinbach and the
directors. P. Pro-ject Filmproduktion im Filmverlag der Autoren, Kairos-Film,
Hallelujah-Film. C. Jörg Schmidt-Reitwein, Michael Ballhaus, Günter
Hörmann, Werner Lüring, Jürgen Jürges, Bodo Kessler,
Dietrich Lohmann, Colin Mounier. E. Heidi Genée, Mulle Goetz-Dickopp,
Tanja Schmidbauer, Beate Mainka-Jellinghaus, Christine Warnck, Juliane
Lorenz. A. Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Armin Meier, Liselotte Eder, Hannelore
Hoger, Helmut Griem, Wolf Biermann, Horst Mahler, Vadim Glowna, Angelika
Winkler, Franziska Walser. Voice-over, Alexander Kluge. 35 mm, Colour
and B & W. 123 min.
Die Patriotin (The Female Patriot, 1979) S. Alexander
Kluge. P. Kairos-Film. C. Jörg Schmidt-Reitwein, Petra Hiller, Thomas
Mauch, Werner Lüring. E. Beate Mainka-Jellinghaus. “Bundeswehrlied”
directed by Margarethe von Trotta. A. Hannelore Hoger, Alfred Edel, Dieter
Mainka, Kurt Jürgens, Alexander von Eschwege, Beate Holle, Willi
Münch. 35 mm, Colour and B & W. 121 min.
Der Kandidat (The Candidate, 1980) Co-directed and
S. Stefan Aust, Alexander von Eschwege, Alexander Kluge, Volker Schlöndorff.
P. Pro-jekt Filmproduktion im Filmverlag der Autoren, Bioskop-Film, Kairos-Film.
C. Igor Luther, Werner Lüring, Thomas Mauch, Jörg Schmidt-Reitwein,
Bodo Kessler. E. Inge Behrens, Beate Mainka-Jellinghaus, Jane Sperr, Mulle
Goetz Dickopp. 35 mm. Colour and B & W. 129 min.
Krieg und Frieden (War and Peace, 1982–83) Co-directed
with Stefan Aust, Axel Engstfeld, Volker Schlöndorff. S. Heinrich
Böll and the directors. P. Pro-jekt Filmproduktion im Filmverlag
der Autoren, Bioskop-Film, Kairos-Film. C. Igor Luther, Werner Lüring,
Thomas Mauch, Bernd Mosblech, Franz Rath. E. Dagmar Hirtz, Beate Meinka-Jellinghaus,
Carola Mai, Barbara von Weitershausen. 35 mm. Colour. 120 min.
Biermann-Film (1983) Co-directed with Edgar Reitz. P. Kairos-Film.
C. Edgar Reitz, Vit Martinek. E. Beate Mainka-Jellinghaus. 35 mm. B &
W. 3 min.
Auf der Suche nach einer praktisch-realistischen Haltung
(1983) P. Kairos-Film. C. Thomas Mauch. E. Beate Mainka-Jellinghaus. 35
mm, B & W. 12 min.
Die Macht der Gefühle (The Power of Feelings,
1983) P. Kairos-Film. C. Werner Lüring, Thomas Mauch. E. Beate Mainka-Jellinghaus,
Carola Mai. A. Hannelore Hoger, Alexandra Kluge, Edgar Boehlke, Suzanne
von Borsody, Barbara Auer. 35 mm. B & W and colour. 115 min.
Der Angriff der Gegenwart auf die übrige Zeit (The
Blind Director, 1985) S. Alexander Kluge. P. Kairos-Film in co-operation
with ZDF. C. Thomas Mauch, Werner Lüring, Hermann Fahr, Judith Kaufmann.
E. Jane Seitz. A. Jutta Hoffmann, Armin Mueller-Stahl, Michael Rehberg,
Rosel Zech. 35 mm. Colour. 113 min.
Vermischte Nachrichten (Odds and Ends, 1986). S.
Alexander Kluge. P. Kairos-Film in co-operation with ZDF. C. Wernder Lüring,
Thomas Mauch, Michael Christ, Hermann Fahr. E. Beate Mainka-Jellinghaus.
A. Marita Breuer, Rosel Zech, Sabine Wegner, André Jung, Sabine
Trooger. Voice-over, Alexander Kluge. 35 mm. B & W and colour. 103 min.
Bibliography
Jan
Bruck, “Brecht's and Kluge's Aesthetics of Realism”, Poetics,
n. 17, 1988
Roger F. Cook, “Film Images and Reality: Alexander Kluge's Aesthetics
of Cinema”, Colloquia Germanica, vol. 18, n. 4, 1985
Thomas Elsaesser, New German Cinema: A History, New Brunswick,
New Jersey, Rutgers University Press, 1989
Miriam Hansen, “Alexander Kluge, Cinema and the Public Sphere: The
Construction Site of Counter-History”, Discourse, n. 4, Winter
1981–82
Anton Kaes, From Hitler to Heimat: The Return of History as Film,
Cambridge, Massachusetts & London, Harvard University Press, 1989
Michelle Langford, “Film Figures: Rainer Werner Fassbinder's The
Marriage of Maria Braun and Alexander Kluge's The Female Patriot”
in Laleen Jayamanne (ed.), Kiss Me Deadly: Feminism and Cinema for
the Moment, Sydney, Power Publications, 1995
Rainer Lewandowski, Die Filme von Alexander Kluge, Hildesheim &
New York, Olms Presse, 1980
Stuart Liebman, “Why Kluge?”, “On New German Cinema, Art,
Enlightenment, and the Public Sphere: An Interview with Alexander Kluge”,
October, n. 46, 1988
Eric Rentschler, “Kluge, Film History, and Eigensinn: A Taking
of Stock from the Distance”, New German Critique, n. 31, Winter
1984
Eric Rentschler, (ed.), West German Filmmakers on Film: Visions and
Voices, New York & London: Holmes & Meier, 1988
B. Ruby Rich, “She Says, He Says: The Power of the Narrator in Modernist
Film Politics”, Discourse, n. 4 Winter, 1981–82
David Roberts, “Alexander Kluge and History”, On the Beach,
n. 7–8, Summer–Autumn, 1985
John Sandford, The New German Cinema, London, Oswald Wolff, 1980
Christian Schulte & Winfried Sibers (eds.), Kluges Fernsehen: Alexander
Kluges Kulturmagazine, Frankfurt am Main, Suhrkamp, 2002
October, Special Issue on Alexander Kluge, n. 49, Winter, 1990
Selected Writings by Alexander Kluge:
Gelegenheitsarbeit einer Sklavin. Zur realistischen Methode, Frankfurt
am Main, Surkamp Verlag, 1975
Neue Geschichten. Hefte 1–18 “Unheimlichkeit der Zeit”,
Frankfurt am Main 1977
(with Oskar Negt) Geschichte und Eigensinn volumes 1–3, Frankfurt
am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1981
“On Film and the Public Sphere”, New German Critique,
n. 24–25, Fall/Winter, 1981–82
Bestandsaufnahme: Die Utopie Film, Frankfurt am Main, 1983
“The sharpest ideology: that reality appeals to its realistic character”,
On the Beach, n. 3–4, Summer, 1984
Case Histories, New York, Holmes & Meier, 1988
“Why Should Film and Television Cooperate?”, October,
n. 46, 1988
Edgar Reitz, Alexander Kluge & Wilfried Reinke, “Word and Film”,
October, n. 46, 1988
Oskar Negt & Alexander Kluge, Public Sphere and Experience: Toward
an Analysis of the Bourgeois and Proletarian Public Sphere, Minneapolis,
University of Minnesota Press, 1993
Learning Processes with a Deadly Outcome, Durham & London, Duke
University Press, 1996
Chronik der Gefühle, Volume 1: “Basisgeschichten”,
Volume 2: “Lebensläufe”, Frankfurt am Main, Suhrkamp Verlag,
2000
Facts & Fakes, Heft 1: Verbrechen. Christian Schulte and
Reinald Gußmann (eds.), Berlin, Verlag-Vorwerk 8, 2000
Facts & Fakes, Heft 2/3: Herzblut trifft Kunstblut Christian
Schulte and Reinald Gußmann (eds.), Berlin, Verlag-Vorwerk 8, 2001
Facts & Fakes, Heft 4: Der Eiffelturm, King Kong und die weiße
Frau Christian Schulte and Reinald Gußmann (eds.), Berlin, Verlag-Vorwerk
8, 2002
Web
Resources
Alexander
Kluge
Expositions
of several films from the Goethe Institut.
Alexander
Kluge
Official website (in German)
Alexander
Kluge
Biography from Spanish film journal Otrocampo.
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