Alexander Kluge: The Last Modernist

Abstract

Through his films and theoretical writings, and as a television producer, teacher, political lobbyist, lawyer and public spokesman, has played a substantial role in creating New German Cinema, as well as in German cultural politics. Since 1961 has produced amlost thirty films and hundreds of television programmes, written four volumes of fiction, coauthored three major works of sociocultural theory, and won almost every major literary and film prize in Germany. After split between East and West Germany, postwar film industry began producing optimistic, nostalgic recreations of imaginary pasts or romantic comedies set in an idealized present to appease German public's need to forget its recent traumatic past. With West German cinema desperately in need of revitalization, a group of young energetic filmmakers began creating relevant, contemporary films that played a more active role in culture and society. took a central role in nurturing, unifying and defending his new cinema while continuing his own prodigious output. Alexander Kluge provides in-depth analyses of Kluge's work but also devotes attention to his political activities, which are discussed extensively in chapter two. Alexander Kluge examines many important contemporary aesthetic issues that Kluge's films and television programmes confront: autonomous art and social function, relation of author to text, collective versus individual action, radical form and spectatorship, making of meaning and taking of pleasure, dynamic symbiosis of high and low culture, and chaos and purity of forms. Peter C. Lutze critically interrogates relationship between Kluge's theory and his media work, looking at how accidents, improvizations, economic constraints and particular nature of film medium inflect his theory. The central chapters of this book concentrate primarily on Kluge's film and television programmes as intriguing and exemplary combinations of politics and aesthetics, of radical theory and innovative practice. Alexander Kluge explores Kluge's narrational strategies, stylistic techniques, and thematic elements, as well as modes of reception that all of these encourage, what calls the film in spectator's head. In raising issues that have become key questions in contemporary debates about modernism and postmodernism, Kluge's films and pronouncements demonstrate his modernist sensibility and an appropriation of modernist formal strategies for purpose of social critique. Alexander Kluge also documents Kluge's striking deflection from cinema to television production in past decade, which has taken his work to brink of postmodernism.