R.i.P. ALEXANDER KLUGE – Master of Metamorphoses

The tireless machine ran for 94 years, without interruption, before coming to a halt. Forever. The scope of his legacy makes any attempt to come to terms with it—for instance, by biographers—almost impossible: Alexander Kluge worked across media: he directed films, wrote books, and was active on TV and the internet. Both themes and modes of expression are linked by countless threads of association. An endless network, a total work of art. Kluge’s role models: the ancient poet Ovid, who compiled some 250 myths in his “Metamorphoses.” And the Brothers Grimm, whose collection of fairy tales and etymological dictionaries achieved something similar.

Accordingly, the style of thinking of this lawyer with a doctorate was not probing or analytically dissecting, but rather free-associative and synthetic. His film essays blend fact and fiction, images and quotations. For example: An episode from THE POWER OF EMOTIONS (1983) shows a woman attempting suicide who is saved by a passerby but then raped by him. In court, she is emotionally torn. Kluge connects the episode to opera, the “powerhouse of emotions,” where insoluble entanglements are heightened into pathos, into gigantic bombast.

In the 1960s, Pier Paolo Pasolini had declared German cinema dead. He allowed for only a few exceptions. Among them: Alexander Kluge. The Munich-based media maverick remained active right up until his death. Always at the cutting edge of knowledge. His final subjects: AI and the future of humanity in space. Kluge even handed over his own director’s chair to artificial intelligence, letting it create films. Will it continue Kluge’s work beyond his death?

The Filmkunst video library offers several of the director’s works on DVD for hire. To discover and revisit. In addition to the aforementioned The Power of Emotions, there is also Kluge’s contribution to the RAF anthology film Germany in Autumn (1978), as well as the film essay News from Ideological Antiquity: MARX, EISENSTEIN, DAS KAPITAL. The reconstruction of a project that film director Sergei Eisenstein planned in 1927 but never realised: the film adaptation of Karl Marx’s ‘Das Kapital’.

Our staff will be happy to provide you with information about other works by Kluge available at the Filmkunst video library.