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Alexander Kluge

“Cinema will still surprise us!”

Filmmaker and writer Alexander Kluge belongs to the same generation of names like Fassbinder, Herzog and Schlöndorff, but he is perhaps the least known veteran of New German Cinema around the world. He is an eager defender of cinema, as he argues in an interview to German magazine EPD Film – Das Kino-Magazin. Among other statements, he says that the “non-filmed criticizes the filmed”.

His last name has always foreseen his career: “klug” means “smart”. One of his academic masters, and friend till the end of his life, was philosopher and musician Theodor Adorno (1903-69), from the Frankfurt School. It was the latter who introduced him to Fritz Lang, to start his career in the cinema. And, among other relevant facts, Kluge was one of the 27 subscribers of the treaty that established, at the 1962 Oberhausen Festival, the New German Cinema. He was one of its mentors.

Kluge, 75 years old, conceded an interview to journalist Mario Scalla for the monthly magazine EPD Film – Das Kinomagazin, at which he remembers parts of his career and evaluates his cinema views. The filmmaker presents a work that stands outside the borders of commercial circuit, with critical and restless films that covered a wide scope of subjects. At the beginning of his career, he made two curious science fiction works, Willi Tobler und der Untergang der 6. Flotte (Willi Tobler and the Decline of the 6th Fleet), 1971, and Der grosse Verhau (The Big Mess), 1970. Also stand out The Artists in the Big Top: Perplexed , 1967; Die Patriotin (The Patriotic Woman), 1979; The Power of Emotion, 1983; and Der Angriff der Gegenwart auf die übrige Zeit (The Assault of the Present on the Rest of Time), 1985. Since the late 1980’s, he dedicates himself intensively to TV.

All these years, Kluge has never stopped exercising his writer side. With his first publishing in 1962, he is the author, among others, of Learning Processes with a Deadly Outcome , 1973, one of his numerous contributions to the science-fiction gender. The interview with Scalla was motivated by the launching of the new book by the director, Geschichten vom Kino (Cinema Histories), a collection of texts and testimonies of his early works and theoretical considerations about the cinema of the 1920’s and 30’s.

“Cinema history will still surprise us. In my most certain opinion, cinema is something man carries in his mind since Stone Age. When its art was discovered, in the end of the 19th century, it was only a reunion. Cinema is previous to cinema art.” That said, Kluge states that it flourishes in unexpected places. A strong defender of short films since the Oberhausen manifesto, the director argues that, as in nature, “where small animals are the ones to survive, I keep on believing in shorts, it’s a survivor format”. He argues, then, that one of the strongest ways of current cinema are the one-minute films, spread by the internet.

One must still consider the interactivity that Kluge extracts from his own work. Not seldom his TV production goes back to scenes in his previous works. He finds it fascinating to cut a sequence, concentrate himself on it, forget about the 90 other minutes and take it out of the context. Kluge remembered a class-lecture he gave at the Berlinale this year, in which he commented scenes picked from his career. “This is a totally different film, not formed by only one film. I don’t believe in the whole of the work, but in the practical use of the work. In the use of sequences.”

The director also says that what attracts him to cinema is films being non-schematic, for all pieces are arranged during editing, but not with a style purpose, but because they have free-will and react as living beings. “This, I learned with Godard and Truffaut. Fritz Lang would say the same, if we could only make him really talk!”, he remembers. For him, film, the 20th century opera, is a young art that, as television, depends a lot on chance and luck. These are themes in the foreword of his last book. “If a filmmaker takes no chances, he will never make extraordinary films. He must be allowed to make mistakes”, he reckons.

Right afterwards, Kluge makes considerations around his two ways of expression: “A book is something extraordinary. But a book has no music, neither is it young – nor is it conceived collectively. A very pleasant film was, for example, Deutschland im Herbst (Germany in Autumn), 1978, in which the crew was gathered during only one weekend. Fassbinder’s episode was ready right on the following Monday. This is the moment in which, together, we created something. This could have been a new step to authorial cinema, with new resources. After all, the only thing I regret is that off-Hollywood directors have never acted really together.” And thus much hasn’t been filmed, and, according to Kluge, “the non-filmed criticizes the filmed”.

Going further on his concepts of cinema, he relates film to a popular German saying: “Utopia gets better, the more one waits for it”. According to him, “the Earth is magically beautiful, but it is certainly not a song by Schubert. Living with this and not becoming melancholic, this is one of the expressions and one of the functions of cinema”. Kluge concludes, in accordance with his friend Godard, that the film is related to invisible images or to images that are not in the frame, which are apprehended. “We need to destroy images too. But this can only be made with many spectators.”

For more information: www.kluge-alexander.de /// www.dctp.de

English version: Laura Rebessi