Alexander Kluge: The Last Modernist(Contemporary Film & Television S.)

Through his films and theoretical writings, and as a television producer, teacher, political lobbyist, lawyer and public spokesman, Alexander Kluge has played a substantial role in creating the New German Cinema, as well as in German cultural politics. Since 1961 Kluge 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 the split between East and West Germany, the postwar film industry began producing optimistic, nostalgic recreations of imaginary pasts or romantic comedies set in an idealized present to appease the 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. Kluge 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 the many important contemporary aesthetic issues that Kluge's films and television programmes confront: autonomous art and social function, the relation of author to text, collective versus individual action, radical form and spectatorship, the making of meaning and the taking of pleasure, the dynamic symbiosis of high and low culture, and chaos and purity of forms. Peter C. Lutze critically interrogates the relationship between Kluge's theory and his media work, looking at how accidents, improvizations, economic constraints and the particular nature of the 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 the modes of reception that all of these encourage, what Kluge calls "the film in the 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 the purpose of the social critique. "Alexander Kluge" also documents Kluge's striking deflection from cinema to television production in the past decade, which has taken his work to the brink of postmodernism.