alexander kluge | senses of cinema

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enses o cinema

iled under Great DirectorsinIssue 27

lexander Kluge

byMichelle LangfordMichelle Langford is a lecturer in Film Studies at the University of New South Wales.

She has published on Iranian and German cinema and is the author of Allegorical

Images: Tableau, Time and Gesture in the Cinema of Werner Schroeter(Intellect,

2006).

b. February 14, 1932, Halberstadt, Germany

filmography

bibliography

web resources

In February 1982 Rainer Werner Fassbinder wrote a short article forBerlinaletip, a

special issue of the weekly Berlin cultural magazine Tippublished 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 notionseveral 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 ofhis chief aims to call every kind of institution into question, particularly those

of the stateif I interpret half way correctlyand 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. Furthermorean

anarchist just doesnt 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 Fassbinders words at the 2002 Berlinale when, on the

Alexander Kluge | Senses of Cinema http://www.sensesofcinema.com/2003/great-directors/kluge/

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14th February, Alexander Kluges birthday, it seemed, became much more than a

rumour. Exactly 20 years after Fassbinders impassioned article Alexander Kluges

70th birthday was celebrated with a gala screening of his filmDie 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 wouldnt 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 filmingDer Tiger von EschnapurandDas 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.

In 1960 Kluge co-directed his first short film with Peter Schamoni entitledBrutality

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 andexperimental filmmakers attempting to develop modes of cinematic practice outside


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the rigid, commercial framework of the industrial systemmodelled on

Hollywoodthat had been set up with the assistance of American occupying forces

in the immediate post-war period. A year after the premiere ofBrutality in Stoneat

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 fr 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 Kluges 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 Kluges Theory of Montage: The Importance of the IntervalThrough 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.

Kluges theories of the cinema are founded on the conception that mainstream

narrative cinemanot only Hollywood, but also importantly, Papas 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 circumstancesthat is, those

circumstances created by the right kind of filmthe 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

spectators own capacity to make connections between vastly disparate images.


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Kluges 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 callsPhantasie.

(5)Kluges films are constructed from an array of diverse fragments such as

photographs, archival film footage, illustrations from fairy tales and childrens 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 ownPhantasie. Kluge is therefore, not interested in conquering the spectator or

directing them toward a predetermined series of associations, as was the case with

Eisensteins 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 spectators 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

Benjamins 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 spectators own mind.

Kluges 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


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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 Kluges 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 PhantasieKluge 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.

Phantasieis not like the English term fantasy in the sense described by

psychoanalysis, but is more akin to imagination. It equates with the spectators

ability to make connections between disparate things and it hinges on Kluges

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 viewersthis would restrict their

independence and powers of perception. The point here is the surprise which

occurs when you suddenlyas 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,Phantasieis that which lies beneath the guarded exterior of thestimulus shield, and it isPhantasiethat 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 parkOne 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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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 Papas 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 theshocks 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 todays allegorists, the ones who are able to pick up a discarded

thingthe 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 Kluges films, it is perhaps for this reason thatmany 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) inArtists under the Big Top: Disorientated

(1967), Roswitha Bronski (Alexandra Kluge) inPart-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/StoryA certain level of playfulness can also be discerned in Kluges approach to history in

both his fictional and documentary films. Kluge has written of his own debt to thehistory of cinema, particularly the silent cinema of the 1920s, and has articulated his

approach to history with this history in mind. He writes:

I wouldnt be making films if it werent 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


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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 inBrutality in Stoneand just as his

films ultimately attempt to do by drawing upon the cinemas own past.

In addition, Kluge advocates a particularly subjective approach to history, evidenced

in some of his non-fiction films featuring average individuals. For exampleFire

Fighter E. A. Winterstein(1968) andA Doctor From Halberstadt(1970) (featuring

Kluges 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.

This subjective approach can also be seen in the impulse behind the collaborativefilm Germany in Autumn(197778), 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 RAFs 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 films collaborators have said: It is

something seemingly simple which roused us: the lack of memoryFor 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 Germanys 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

Kluges films are very much an expression of many of the tenets addressed in the


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Oberhausen manifesto, as well as of Kluges 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, Kluges films can be seen as an attempt to educate the

audience in ways of seeing, appropriate not only to Kluges own films, but to those of

his colleagues as well. Many of Kluges films showthe 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 peoples 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 cinemas intervention

aims not only at the systematic non- or misrepresentation of specific

issueseg. family, factory, security, war and Nazismbut also the structure

of the public sphere itself.(17)

In some cases, therefore Kluge even advocates a kind of cinematic understanding of

the world through his female protagonists, such as Roswitha Bronski inPart-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 (Kluges 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


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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, womens bodies and desires. (18)Kluges theorisation of a female

productive force and his female protagonists, I believe, serve as a refreshing antidote

to the dominant cinemas representation of active, desiring women as evilfemmes

atalessimultaneously desired and feared by men. Kluges women possess agency as

they playfully negotiate their own way through the public sphere on their own terms.

ConclusionSince 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 11and

Primetime/Sptausgabefor RTL,News & Storiesfor SAT.1, and

Mitternachtsmagazinfor 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 Kluges 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 Fassbinders 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)

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.

Brutalitt 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.


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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(196263) Co-directed with Karen Kluge. P. Alexander Kluge.

C. Alfred Tichawsky. E. Alexander Kluge. 35 mm. B & W. 11 min.

Portrt einer Bewhrung(1964) S. Alexander Kluge. P. Kairos-Film. C Winfried

E. Reinke, Gnter Hrmann. E. Beate Mainka. A. Polizeihauptwachtmeister Mller-Seegeberg. 35 mm. B & W. 13 min.

bschied von Gestern(Yesterday Girl, 196566) S. Buch: Alexander Kluge,

Based on his short story Anita G. P. Kairos-Film, Mnchen, Independent-Film,

Berlin. C. Edgar Reitz, Thomas Mauch. E. Beate Mainka. A. Alexandra Kluge,

Gnther 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. Gnter Hrmann,

Thomas Mauch. E. Beate Mainka-Jellinghaus. A. Hannelore Hoger, Alfred Edel,

Siegfried Gaue, Bernd Hoeltz, Kurt Jrgens. Voice-over Alexandra Kluge, Hannelore

Hoger, Herr Hollenbeck. 35 mm. B & W and Colour. 103 min.

Feuerlscher 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 unbezhmbare Leni Peickert(The Indomitable Leni Peickert, 196769) S.

Alexander Kluge. P. Kairos-Film. C. Gnter Hrmann, Thomas Mauch. E. Beate

Mainka-Jellinghaus. A. Hannelore Hoger. 35 mm. B & W. 60 min.

Der grosse Verhau(The Big Mess, 196970) S. Alexander Kluge. P. Kairos Film.

C. Thomas Mauch, Alfred Tichawsky; Extra Footage: Gnter Hrmann, 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, 196970) S. Alexander

Kluge. P. Kairos-Film. C. Alfred Tichawsky, Gnter Hrmann. 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, Gnter Hrmann, Hannelore Hoger, Thomas

Mauch. E. Maximiliane Mainka, Beate Mainka-Jellinghaus. A. Hark Bohm, Kurt

Jrgens, 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 Jrgens, Hannelore Hoger. 35 mm. B & W and


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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 Gefhle, Volume 1: Basisgeschichten, Volume 2: Lebenslufe,

Frankfurt am Main, Suhrkamp Verlag, 2000

Facts & Fakes,Heft 1: Verbrechen.Christian Schulte and Reinald Gumann (eds.),

Berlin, Verlag-Vorwerk 8, 2000

Facts & Fakes,Heft 2/3: Herzblut trifft KunstblutChristian Schulte and Reinald

Gumann (eds.), Berlin, Verlag-Vorwerk 8, 2001

Facts & Fakes,Heft 4: Der Eiffelturm, King Kong und die weie Frau Christian

Schulte and Reinald Gumann (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.

Click hereto search for Alexander Kluge DVDs, videos and books at

Endnotes

Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Alexander Kluge is Supposed to Have Had a Birthday

in Michael Tteberg & 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.

36The 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 ofPhantasiein more detail below.

See Kluge, On Film and the Public Sphere,New German Critique, 25/26,

Fall/Winter 19811982, in particular the section entitled The Spectator as

Entrepreneur, pp. 210211

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,


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