Alexander Kluge | Senses of Cinema http://www.sensesofcinema.

com/2003/great-directors/kluge/

senses of cinema

Filed under Great Directors in Issue 27

Alexander Kluge
by Michelle Langford
Michelle 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 for Berlinaletip, a
special issue of the weekly Berlin cultural magazine Tip published 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 notion—several 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 of
his chief aims to call every kind of institution into question, particularly those
of the state—if I interpret half way correctly—and 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. Furthermore—an
anarchist just doesn’t 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 Fassbinder’s words at the 2002 Berlinale when, on the

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14th February, Alexander Kluge’s birthday, it seemed, became much more than a
rumour. Exactly 20 years after Fassbinder’s impassioned article Alexander Kluge’s
70th birthday was celebrated with a gala screening of his film Die 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 wouldn’t 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 filming Der Tiger von Eschnapur and Das 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 entitled Brutality
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 and
experimental filmmakers attempting to develop modes of cinematic practice outside

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the rigid, commercial framework of the industrial system—modelled on

Hollywood—that had been set up with the assistance of American occupying forces
in the immediate post-war period. A year after the premiere of Brutality in Stone at
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 für 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 Kluge’s 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 Kluge’s Theory of Montage: The Importance of the Interval

Through 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.

Kluge’s theories of the cinema are founded on the conception that mainstream
narrative cinema—not only Hollywood, but also importantly, ‘Papa’s 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 circumstances—that is, those
circumstances created by the right kind of film—the 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
spectator’s own capacity to make connections between vastly disparate images.

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Kluge’s 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 calls Phantasie.
(5) Kluge’s films are constructed from an array of diverse fragments such as
photographs, archival film footage, illustrations from fairy tales and children’s 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 own Phantasie. Kluge is therefore, not interested in ‘conquering the spectator’ or
directing them toward a predetermined series of associations, as was the case with
Eisenstein’s 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 spectator’s 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
Benjamin’s 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 spectator’s own mind.

Kluge’s 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 Kluge’s 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 Phantasie

Kluge 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.
Phantasie is not like the English term ‘fantasy’ in the sense described by
psychoanalysis, but is more akin to imagination. It equates with the spectator’s
ability to make connections between disparate things and it hinges on Kluge’s
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 viewers—this would restrict their
independence and powers of perception. The point here is the surprise which
occurs when you suddenly—as 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, Phantasie is that which lies beneath the guarded exterior of the
stimulus shield, and it is Phantasie that 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 park…One 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 ‘Papa’s 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 the
shocks 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 today’s allegorists, the ones who are able to pick up a discarded
thing—the 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 Kluge’s films, it is perhaps for this reason that
many 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) in Artists under the Big Top: Disorientated
(1967), Roswitha Bronski (Alexandra Kluge) in Part-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/Story
A certain level of playfulness can also be discerned in Kluge’s approach to history in
both his fictional and documentary films. Kluge has written of his own debt to the
history of cinema, particularly the silent cinema of the 1920s, and has articulated his
approach to history with this history in mind. He writes:

I wouldn’t be making films if it weren’t 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 in Brutality in Stone and just as his
films ultimately attempt to do by drawing upon the cinema’s own past.

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

in some of his non-fiction films featuring average individuals. For example Fire
Fighter E. A. Winterstein (1968) and A Doctor From Halberstadt (1970) (featuring
Kluge’s 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 collaborative
film Germany in Autumn (1977–78), 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 RAF’s 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 film’s collaborators have said: “It is
something seemingly simple which roused us: the lack of memory…For 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 Germany’s 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

Kluge’s films are very much an expression of many of the tenets addressed in the

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Oberhausen manifesto, as well as of Kluge’s 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, Kluge’s films can be seen as an attempt to educate the
audience in ways of seeing, appropriate not only to Kluge’s own films, but to those of
his colleagues as well. Many of Kluge’s films show the 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 people’s 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 cinema’s intervention
aims not only at the systematic non- or misrepresentation of specific
issues—eg. family, factory, security, war and Nazism—but 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 in Part-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 (Kluge’s 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, women’s bodies and desires. (18) Kluge’s theorisation of a female
productive force and his female protagonists, I believe, serve as a refreshing antidote
to the dominant cinema’s representation of active, desiring women as evil femmes
fatales simultaneously desired and feared by men. Kluge’s women possess agency as
they playfully negotiate their own way through the public sphere on their own terms.

Conclusion
Since 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 11 and
Primetime/Spätausgabe for RTL, News & Stories for SAT.1, and
Mitternachtsmagazin for 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 Kluge’s 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 Fassbinder’s 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.

Brutalität 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 (1962–63) Co-directed with Karen Kluge. P. Alexander Kluge.

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

Porträt einer Bewährung (1964) S. Alexander Kluge. P. Kairos-Film. C Winfried

E. Reinke, Günter Hörmann. E. Beate Mainka. A. Polizeihauptwachtmeister Müller-
Seegeberg. 35 mm. B & W. 13 min.

Abschied von Gestern (Yesterday Girl, 1965–66) S. Buch: Alexander Kluge,

Based on his short story “Anita G.” P. Kairos-Film, München, Independent-Film,
Berlin. C. Edgar Reitz, Thomas Mauch. E. Beate Mainka. A. Alexandra Kluge,
Günther 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. Günter Hörmann,
Thomas Mauch. E. Beate Mainka-Jellinghaus. A. Hannelore Hoger, Alfred Edel,
Siegfried Gaue, Bernd Hoeltz, Kurt Jürgens. Voice-over Alexandra Kluge, Hannelore
Hoger, Herr Hollenbeck. 35 mm. B & W and Colour. 103 min.

Feuerlöscher 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 unbezähmbare Leni Peickert (The Indomitable Leni Peickert, 1967–69) S.

Alexander Kluge. P. Kairos-Film. C. Günter Hörmann, Thomas Mauch. E. Beate
Mainka-Jellinghaus. A. Hannelore Hoger. 35 mm. B & W. 60 min.

Der grosse Verhau (The Big Mess, 1969–70) S. Alexander Kluge. P. Kairos Film.
C. Thomas Mauch, Alfred Tichawsky; Extra Footage: Günter Hörmann, 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, 1969–70) S. Alexander

Kluge. P. Kairos-Film. C. Alfred Tichawsky, Günter Hörmann. 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, Günter Hörmann, Hannelore Hoger, Thomas
Mauch. E. Maximiliane Mainka, Beate Mainka-Jellinghaus. A. Hark Bohm, Kurt
Jürgens, 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 Jürgens, Hannelore Hoger. 35 mm. B & W and

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colour. 96 min.

Besitzbürgerin, Jahrgang 1908 (1973) S. Alexander Kluge. P. Kairos-Film. C.

Thomas Mauch. E. Beate Mainka-Jellinghaus. A. Alice Schneider, Herr Guhl. 35 mm.
B & W. 11 min.

Gelegenheitsarbeit einer Sklavin (Part-Time Work of a Domestic Slave, 1973)

S. Alexander Kluge. P. Kairos-Film. C. Thomas Mauch. E. Beate Mainka-Jellinghaus.
A. Alexandra Kluge, Franz Bronski (Bion Steinborn), Sylvia Gartmann, Traugott
Buhre, Alfred Edel. 35 mm. B & W. 91 min.

In Gefahr und größter Not bringt der Mittelweg den Tod (In Danger and
Deep Distress, the Middle Way Spells Certain Death, 1974) Co-directed with Edgar
Reitz. S. Alexander Kluge, Edgar Reitz. P. RK-Film (Reitz-Film, Kairos-Film). C.
Edgar Reitz, Alfred Hürmer, Günter Hörmann. E. Beate Mainka-Jellinghaus. A.
Dagmar Bödderich, Jutta Winkelmann, Norbert Kentrup, Alfred Edel, Kurt Jürgens.
35 mm, B & W. 90 min.

Der starke Ferdinand (Strongman Ferdinand, 1975–76) S. Alexander Kluge,

based on his story “Ein Bolschewist des Kapitals” P. Kairos-Film, Reitz-Film,
München. C. Thomas Mauch, Martin Schäfer. E. Heidi Genée, Agape von Dorstewitz.
A. Heinz Schubert, Verena Rudolph, Gert Günther Hoffmann, Heinz
Schimmelpfennig. 35 mm. Colour. 97 min.

Zu böser Schlacht schleich ich heut Nacht so bang (1977) S. Alexander

Kluge, Maximiliane Mainka. P. Kairos-Film. C. Dieter Lohmann, Alfred Tichawsky,
Thomas Mauch. E. Maximiliane Mainka. A. Alfred Edel, Helga Skalla, Hark Bohm,
Kurt Jürgens, Hannelore Hoger. 35 mm. Colour. 81 min.

Die Menschen, die das Stauffer-Jahr vorbereiten (1977) Co-directed with

Maxamiliane Mainka. S. Maximiliane Mainka, Alexander Kluge. P. Kairos-Film;
Institut für Filmgestaltung, Ulm. C. Jörg Schmidt-Reitwein, Alfred Tichawsky. E.
Maximiliane Mainka. 35 mm. Colour and B & W. 40 min.

Nachrichten von den Stauffern I und II (1977) Co-directed with Maximiliane

Mainka. S. Maximiliane Mainka, Alexander Kluge. P. Kairos-Film; Institut für
Filmgestaltung, Ulm. C. Jörg Schmidt-Reitwein, Alfred Tichawsky. E. Maximiliane
Mainka. 35 mm. B & W. Part I, 13 Min. Part II, 11 min.

Deutschland im Herbst (Germany in Autumn, 1978) Co-directed with Volker

Schlöndorff, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Alf Brustellin, Bernhard Sinkel, Katja Rupe,
Hans Peter Cloos, Edgar Reitz, Maximiliane Mainka, Peter Schubert. S. Heinrich
Böll, Peter Steinbach and the directors. P. Pro-ject Filmproduktion im Filmverlag der
Autoren, Kairos-Film, Hallelujah-Film. C. Jörg Schmidt-Reitwein, Michael Ballhaus,
Günter Hörmann, Werner Lüring, Jürgen Jürges, Bodo Kessler, Dietrich Lohmann,
Colin Mounier. E. Heidi Genée, Mulle Goetz-Dickopp, Tanja Schmidbauer, Beate
Mainka-Jellinghaus, Christine Warnck, Juliane Lorenz. A. Rainer Werner
Fassbinder, Armin Meier, Liselotte Eder, Hannelore Hoger, Helmut Griem, Wolf
Biermann, Horst Mahler, Vadim Glowna, Angelika Winkler, Franziska Walser.
Voice-over, Alexander Kluge. 35 mm, Colour and B & W. 123 min.

Die Patriotin (The Female Patriot, 1979) S. Alexander Kluge. P. Kairos-Film. C.

Jörg Schmidt-Reitwein, Petra Hiller, Thomas Mauch, Werner Lüring. E. Beate
Mainka-Jellinghaus. “Bundeswehrlied” directed by Margarethe von Trotta. A.

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Hannelore Hoger, Alfred Edel, Dieter Mainka, Kurt Jürgens, Alexander von
Eschwege, Beate Holle, Willi Münch. 35 mm, Colour and B & W. 121 min.

Der Kandidat (The Candidate, 1980) Co-directed and S. Stefan Aust, Alexander
von Eschwege, Alexander Kluge, Volker Schlöndorff. P. Pro-jekt Filmproduktion im
Filmverlag der Autoren, Bioskop-Film, Kairos-Film. C. Igor Luther, Werner Lüring,
Thomas Mauch, Jörg Schmidt-Reitwein, Bodo Kessler. E. Inge Behrens, Beate
Mainka-Jellinghaus, Jane Sperr, Mulle Goetz Dickopp. 35 mm. Colour and B & W.
129 min.

Krieg und Frieden (War and Peace, 1982–83) Co-directed with Stefan Aust, Axel
Engstfeld, Volker Schlöndorff. S. Heinrich Böll and the directors. P. Pro-jekt
Filmproduktion im Filmverlag der Autoren, Bioskop-Film, Kairos-Film. C. Igor
Luther, Werner Lüring, Thomas Mauch, Bernd Mosblech, Franz Rath. E. Dagmar
Hirtz, Beate Meinka-Jellinghaus, Carola Mai, Barbara von Weitershausen. 35 mm.
Colour. 120 min.

Biermann-Film (1983) Co-directed with Edgar Reitz. P. Kairos-Film. C. Edgar

Reitz, Vit Martinek. E. Beate Mainka-Jellinghaus. 35 mm. B & W. 3 min.

Auf der Suche nach einer praktisch-realistischen Haltung (1983) P.

Kairos-Film. C. Thomas Mauch. E. Beate Mainka-Jellinghaus. 35 mm, B & W. 12
min.

Die Macht der Gefühle (The Power of Feelings, 1983) P. Kairos-Film. C. Werner
Lüring, Thomas Mauch. E. Beate Mainka-Jellinghaus, Carola Mai. A. Hannelore
Hoger, Alexandra Kluge, Edgar Boehlke, Suzanne von Borsody, Barbara Auer. 35
mm. B & W and colour. 115 min.

Der Angriff der Gegenwart auf die übrige Zeit (The Blind Director, 1985) S.
Alexander Kluge. P. Kairos-Film in co-operation with ZDF. C. Thomas Mauch,
Werner Lüring, Hermann Fahr, Judith Kaufmann. E. Jane Seitz. A. Jutta Hoffmann,
Armin Mueller-Stahl, Michael Rehberg, Rosel Zech. 35 mm. Colour. 113 min.

Vermischte Nachrichten (Odds and Ends, 1986). S. Alexander Kluge. P.

Kairos-Film in co-operation with ZDF. C. Wernder Lüring, Thomas Mauch, Michael
Christ, Hermann Fahr. E. Beate Mainka-Jellinghaus. A. Marita Breuer, Rosel Zech,
Sabine Wegner, André Jung, Sabine Trooger. Voice-over, Alexander Kluge. 35 mm. B
& W and colour. 103 min.

Bibliography
Jan Bruck, “Brecht’s and Kluge’s Aesthetics of Realism”, Poetics, n. 17, 1988

Roger F. Cook, “Film Images and Reality: Alexander Kluge’s Aesthetics of Cinema”,
Colloquia Germanica, vol. 18, n. 4, 1985

Thomas Elsaesser, New German Cinema: A History, New Brunswick, New Jersey,
Rutgers University Press, 1989

Miriam Hansen, “Alexander Kluge, Cinema and the Public Sphere: The Construction
Site of Counter-History”, Discourse, n. 4, Winter 1981–82

Anton Kaes, From Hitler to Heimat: The Return of History as Film, Cambridge,

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

Massachusetts & London, Harvard University Press, 1989

Michelle Langford, “Film Figures: Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s The Marriage of

Maria Braun and Alexander Kluge’s The Female Patriot” in Laleen Jayamanne (ed.),
Kiss Me Deadly: Feminism and Cinema for the Moment, Sydney, Power
Publications, 1995

Rainer Lewandowski, Die Filme von Alexander Kluge, Hildesheim & New York,
Olms Presse, 1980

Stuart Liebman, “Why Kluge?”, “On New German Cinema, Art, Enlightenment, and
the Public Sphere: An Interview with Alexander Kluge”, October, n. 46, 1988

Eric Rentschler, “Kluge, Film History, and Eigensinn: A Taking of Stock from the
Distance”, New German Critique, n. 31, Winter 1984

Eric Rentschler, (ed.), West German Filmmakers on Film: Visions and Voices, New
York & London: Holmes & Meier, 1988

B. Ruby Rich, “She Says, He Says: The Power of the Narrator in Modernist Film
Politics”, Discourse, n. 4 Winter, 1981–82

David Roberts, “Alexander Kluge and History”, On the Beach, n. 7–8, Summer–
Autumn, 1985

John Sandford, The New German Cinema, London, Oswald Wolff, 1980

Christian Schulte & Winfried Sibers (eds.), Kluges Fernsehen: Alexander Kluges
Kulturmagazine, Frankfurt am Main, Suhrkamp, 2002

October, Special Issue on Alexander Kluge, n. 49, Winter, 1990

Selected Writings by Alexander Kluge:

Gelegenheitsarbeit einer Sklavin. Zur realistischen Methode, Frankfurt am Main,

Surkamp Verlag, 1975

Neue Geschichten. Hefte 1–18 “Unheimlichkeit der Zeit”, Frankfurt am Main 1977

(with Oskar Negt) Geschichte und Eigensinn volumes 1–3, Frankfurt am Main:
Suhrkamp Verlag, 1981

“On Film and the Public Sphere”, New German Critique, n. 24–25, Fall/Winter,
1981–82

Bestandsaufnahme: Die Utopie Film, Frankfurt am Main, 1983

“The sharpest ideology: that reality appeals to its realistic character”, On the Beach,
n. 3–4, Summer, 1984

Case Histories, New York, Holmes & Meier, 1988

“Why Should Film and Television Cooperate?”, October, n. 46, 1988

Edgar Reitz, Alexander Kluge & Wilfried Reinke, “Word and Film”, October, n. 46,
1988

Oskar Negt & Alexander Kluge, Public Sphere and Experience: Toward an Analysis

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

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 Gefühle, Volume 1: “Basisgeschichten”, Volume 2: “Lebensläufe”,

Frankfurt am Main, Suhrkamp Verlag, 2000

Facts & Fakes, Heft 1: Verbrechen. Christian Schulte and Reinald Gußmann (eds.),
Berlin, Verlag-Vorwerk 8, 2000

Facts & Fakes, Heft 2/3: Herzblut trifft Kunstblut Christian Schulte and Reinald
Gußmann (eds.), Berlin, Verlag-Vorwerk 8, 2001

Facts & Fakes, Heft 4: Der Eiffelturm, King Kong und die weiße Frau Christian
Schulte and Reinald Gußmann (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 here to search for Alexander Kluge DVDs, videos and books at

Endnotes
Rainer Werner Fassbinder, “Alexander Kluge is Supposed to Have Had a Birthday”
in Michael Töteberg & 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.
36
The 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 of Phantasie in more detail below.
See Kluge, “On Film and the Public Sphere”, New German Critique, 25/26,
Fall/Winter 1981–1982, in particular the section entitled “The Spectator as
Entrepreneur”, pp. 210–211
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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which involves experiences being mediated by the intellect or consciousness and

seeks to give information about the past rather than retain a trace of past
experiences, ‘involuntary memory’ involves the spontaneous evocation of past
experience and the ability to make connections between disparate things.
Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time–Image, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota
Press, 1989, p. 245
Kluge, “On Film and the Public Sphere”, p. 211
Ibid.
Alexander Kluge, “The Significance of Phantasy”, New German Critique, n. 24/25,
Fall/Winter 1981–1982, p. 216
Alexander Kluge, Die Patriotin: Texte/Bilder, 1–6, quoted in Theodore Fiedler,
“Alexander Kluge, Mediating History and Consciousness” in Klaus Phillips (ed.),
New West German Filmmakers: From Oberhausen Through the 1970s, Frederick
Ungar, 1984, p. 225
Kluge, “On Film and the Public Sphere”, p. 206
Alf Brustellin, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Alexander Kluge, Volker Schlöndorff,
Bernhard Sinkel, “Germany in Autumn: What is the Film’s Bias” in Eric Rentschler
(ed.), West German Filmmakers on Film: Visions and Voices, New York & London,
Holmes & Meier, 1988, p. 132
A good example of both of these devices can be found in Die Patriotin where the
voice-over narrator is nothing but a fragment itself, a knee, and the female
protagonist, Gabi Teichert, is engaged in the task of gathering the diverse fragments
that make up the history of her country. She is often puzzled as to the significance of
those fragments.
Miriam Hansen, “Alexander Kluge, Cinema and the Public Sphere: The Construction
Site of Counter-History”, Discourse, n. 4, Winter 1981/82, pp. 57–58
Kluge discusses the concept of female productive forces at length in his book
Gelegenheitsarbeit einer Sklavin. Zur realistischen Methode, Frankfurt am Main,
Surkamp Verlag, 1975
Kluge in Stewart Liebman, 1988, p. 34
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