October journal No.46 Autumn (1988) Alexander Kluge: Theoretical Writings, Stories, and an Interview

232 Pages·1988·13.22 MB·English

by  editors Rosalind Krauss

Art I Theory | Criticism I Politics
OCTOBER
46
ALEXAKNLUDGEE R
TheoreticalW ritings,S tories,
and an Interview
edited by Stuart Liebman
essays by Miriam Hansen,
Andreas Huyssen, Fredric
Jameson, Stuart Liebman, and
Heide Schlipmann
filmography, videography,
and
bibliography
$10.00/Fall 1988 Published by the MIT Press
OCTOBER
editors OCTOBER (ISSN 0162-2870) (ISBN 0-262-75196-8)
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Laura
Mulvey
Allan Sekula
Jennifer Stone
46
Stuart Liebman Why Kluge? 5
Stuart Liebman On New German Cinema, Art,
Enlightenment, and the Public
Sphere: An Interview with
Alexander Kluge 23
Oskar and
Negt
Alexander The Public and
Kluge Sphere
Selections 60
Experience:
Edgar Reitz, Alexander Kluge,
and Wilfried Reinke Word and Film 83
Alexander Kluge Why Should Film and Television
Cooperate? 96
Selectionsfrom New Stories,
Notebooks 1-18: "The
Uncanniness of Time" 103
Andreas Huyssen An Analytic Storytelleri n the
Course of Time 117
Back cover:A lexander Kluge. Artists under the Big
Top: Perplexed 1967.
Heide Schlipmann "What is Different is Good":
Womena nd Femininity in the
Films of Alexander Kluge 129
Fredric Jameson On Negt and Kluge 151
Miriam Hansen Reinventing the Nickelodeon:N otes
on Kluge and Early Cinema 179
Stuart Liebman Alexander Kluge: Filmography 199
Alexander Selected
Kluge:
Videography 206
Alexander Kluge: Selected
Publications in ChronologicalO rder 208
Select Bibliographyo f Writings
About Alexander Kluge 213
Acknowledgments 217
MIRIAM HANSEN, Associate Professor of English at Rutgers
University, is an editor of New German Critique. Her book
Babel and Babylon: Spectatorshipi n the American Silent Film
is forthcoming from Harvard University Press, and she is
currently working on a study of Frankfurt School film
theory.
ANDREAS HUYSSEN is Professor of German at Columbia
University, an editor of New German Critique, and the
author of books on romantic poetics and the Sturm und
Drang. His latest book is After the Great Divide: Modernism,
Mass Culture, Postmodernism( Indiana University Press,
1987).
FREDRIC JAMESON is the William A. Lane, Jr., Professor
of Comparative Literature and director of the Graduate
Program in Literature and Theory at Duke University.
Two volumes of his essays dating from 1971 to 1986
have recently been published by the University of
Minnesota Press under the title The Ideologies of Theory,
and his Messages of the Visible will be published next year
by Methuen.
STUART LIEBMAN, Associate Professor of Communication
Arts and Sciences at Queens College, CUNY, is the
organizer of the retrospective exhibition of Alexander
Kluge's films that will tour the US and Canada in 1988-
89. He has also written about early French film theory
and American avant-garde cinema.
HEIDE SCHLUPMANN is Assistant Professor of German and
Film at the University of Frankfurt and an editor of the
West German feminist film journal Frauen und Film. Her
most recent book is FropdrichN ietzsches Asthetische
Opposition( Stuttgart, Metzler, 1977); she is currently
writing on early cinema and the development of critical
film theory.
Why Kluge?
STUART LIEBMAN
At the beginning of the fifth section of Alexander Kluge's film Artists under
the Big Top: Perplexed (1967), we see a troop of circus elephants rolling around in
the mud, taking their morning bath. Their delightful play is cut short, however,
by a gruesome story, "The Fire in the Elephant House in Chicago," announced
and read in voice-over. As the elephants' horror and disbelief is recounted, shots
from a familiar film-Eisenstein's October-appear on the screen, and a slow,
scratchy recording of a tango is added to the sound track. The images are from
several unrelated sections of the film: three shots of carefully composed rows of
glassware in Kerenski's office; four of armed revolutionaries creeping down
stairways in the Winter Palace; three almost abstract close-ups of the glittering
chandeliers in the Tsarina's quarters; and finally, a low-angle shot of guns firing
from a balcony, presumably from the "storming of the Winter Palace" section.
Midway through the sequence, the music changes to a lilting violin melody and
continues over a cut back to the elephants, which are now shown contentedly
munching hay as they seem to sway in time to the rhythm. A female voice
replaces that of the first narrator: "Freedom," she says, quoting one of the
elephants, "means risking one's life, not because it means freedom from slavery,
but because the essence of human freedom is defined by the reciprocal, negative
relationship to another." A note in the published film script refers the reader to
Hegel's The Phenomenologyo f Mind.
This complex, overdetermined passage took shape during a period of
looming crisis in the Federal Republic, in its film community, and in Kluge's
cinematic career. Today, twenty years after the "events" leading up to 1968, the
passage provides a kind of window onto these crises; then it served as an arena-
perhaps, following Freud, one could call it a "playground" -in which the crises'
multifaceted symptoms could be "worked through."2 In its theme, structure, and
1. Alexander Kluge, Die Artisten in der Zirkuskuppel:r atios, Munich, Piper, 1968, p. 15.
2. Sigmund Freud, "Further Recommendations in the Technique of Psychoanalysis: Recollec-
tion, Repetition and Working Through" (1914), in Therapy and Technique, ed. Philip Rieff, New
York, Collier Books, 1963, pp. 157-166.
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6 OCTOBER
purpose, which I would argue centrally involves a radical questioning of Eisen-
stein's cinema and its theoretical rationale, lie crucial clues to the nature of
Kluge's aspirations and the strategies through which they are realized.3 Why
during the ferment of the Tendenzwende of the mid-'60s Kluge should have
selected Eisenstein as a subject, and how Kluge's practice may be regarded as a
species of critique, will be the subject of this essay. I will return to it shortly. For
now, it is enough to observe that this section of Artists is typical of Kluge's
cinema: a montage (at best loosely tied to an episodic narrative) composed of
images appropriated from other films (or paintings, or news photos, and so
forth), set off by a title (here spoken, but more often written, as intertitles were in
the silent film era), while the distinctive voice of a narrator (or perhaps, as here,
more than one) speaks over strains of a forgotten piece of popular music or
fragments from an opera, a text punctuated by some bit of aphoristic wisdom
(lifted, as here, from a famous philosopher's treatise or, elsewhere, from the
despairing cry of an anonymous charwoman). A range of possible implications
hovers over the weave of images and sounds, but the point remains elusive, more
felt than comprehended. Meanings proliferate and radiate out toward other
sequences, producing, as the film's title itself acknowledges, as much perplexity
as illumination. The films might be characterized as a string of digressions,
woven into a picaresque plot-although the word plot implies causally related
actions more emphatic than those normally encountered in Kluge's later work.
In many of the films, the characters are allegorical ciphers, not "three-dimen-
sional" figures; it is their (or rather Kluge's) projects, rather than any psychologi-
cal motivation or causal logic, that provide the fragile, tentative links between
incidents. In the most recent films, in fact, there are no central characters, no
continuous narratives at all. The whole is a shifting and unstable assemblage of
small, complexly interrelated units, each offering a different sort of attraction:
a cinematic variety show, as it were.
This special issue of October,w hich serves as the catalogue of the retrospec-
tive exhibition of Kluge's films I have organized for Anthology Film Archives
and Goethe House, New York, has been prepared with the conviction that
Kluge's "cinematic variety show" -tied as it is to a much larger project encom-
passing his fiction, social theory, film theory, television programs, and political
action on various cultural fronts-constitutes a unique venture in the annals of
3. The insertion of four other shots from Octoberd evelops this critique further. In these shots,
the placement of a close-up image of an officer next to an image of a statue of Napoleon creates a
false point-of-view structure. In the interview published in this issue, Kluge comments on this kind of
manipulation: "If you speak of the influence of Eisenstein, you must look at what he did in Strike, in
October.Y ou remember in Artisten in der Zirkuskuppel:r atios the quotation from October?I used the
sequence with Bonaparte. I wanted to indicate that I hate Bonapartism in film, in all art. There are
two characters in art. One character you could compare with a dompteur who forces animals to
change their attitudes. The other would be the jardinibre, the agricultura. The second type is my
ideal." Kluge's terms are different from but entirely consistent with the reading I offer in this essay.
Why Kluge? 7
postwar German culture. Kluge's is a radical cinema impur, situated at the farthest
possible remove from that conception of an autonomous, "pure" cinema which
defines itself in opposition both to mass cultural film practices and to the terms
and strategies of other modernist art forms developed since the 1920s.4 The
motives, themes, andformal strategieso f Kluge's project raise questions in diverse
areas of concern to us: about representation and gender, about history and
memory, about theory in its relation to practice, about the ongoing vitality of
modernism. Moreover, the work of Kluge is formulated-as one of his great
precursors Walter Benjamin would have hoped -with an acute awareness of the
most advanced "technical" means of production available as well as of the social
circumstances in which production takes place in advanced industrial societies
today.5 The range of his concerns is visible both in the texts by Kluge published
here and in the critical essays that follow.
Constructed in and through different disciplines, different discourses, these
texts by Kluge are, we might say, "oriented toward the contemporary limits of
the necessary," to borrow Foucault's reformulation of the aims of enlighten-
ment.6 Nevertheless, another overarching question or preoccupation, implied if
not always directly stated, also animates Kluge's work, and it is one whose
ongoing vitality the texts themselves-pace Foucault-demonstrate. Attentive
(but critical) student of Marx and Adorno that he is, Kluge assumes the consider-
able burden of reflecting on the complex heritage of the Enlightenment, a period
and a concept to which he often alludes in his writings and interviews. His work
in all its forms reassesses the utopian promise immanent in reason's ambiguous
legacy to the history of modernity as well as in the late eighteenth-century origins
of both the Enlightenment and bourgeois capitalism in Germany. His (provi-
sional) conclusion: enlightenment today depends on two crucial efforts. First,
substantive reason must be reconstructed as a modality of sensory, imaginative
experience; and second, a "public sphere" which could serve as a forum for
individual imagination and unconstrained public debate must be created to
respond to the contemporary threats of media concentration and the "industrial-
ization of consciousness."7 These are the larger goals toward which he works and
4. For an early and by no means isolated statement of these concerns, see Germaine Dulac, "Les
Esthetiques. Les Entraves. La Cinegraphie Integrale," L'Art Cinematographique, II (1927), trans.
Stuart Liebman in Framework, 19 (1982), pp. 6-9. Although they explore and experiment with film
form and technique, Kluge's films do not seek to articulate cinema's autonomy as an artistic medium,
as the films of orthodox modernists such as Paul Sharits, Malcolm LeGrice, or Wilhelm and Birgit
Hein do. The films of Kluge might be more usefully compared to Godard's Two or Three Things I
Know AboutH er (1967), or Makaveyev's InnocenceU nprotected( 1968) and WR: Mysterieso f the Organism
(1971)-which bear a closer resemblance to his own.
5. I refer, of course, to Benjamin's positions in "The Author as Producer" (1934), trans. Anna
Bostock, in Understanding Brecht, London, New Left Books, 1973, pp. 85-104.
6. Michel Foucault, "What is Enlightenment?," in Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow, New York,
Pantheon, 1984, p. 43.
7. Kluge and Oskar Negt borrow the term from Jiirgen Habermas's Strukturwandeld erOffentlich-
keit, Neuwied, Luchterhand, 1962, but they interpret it very differently. See translator's note to the
8 OCTOBER
the "red thread" woven through the themes and strategies of his artistic practice
and his political initiatives. Although it was formulated in response to the specific
historical and artistic conditions obtaining in West Germany, Kluge's project
deserves our careful study, for our situation as intellectuals is different only in
degree, not in kind, from that facing our counterparts in the Federal Republic.
His efforts at resisting the seemingly relentless extension of private corporate
control of our media should be of vital concern both to American filmmakers
and to those attempting to understand the only apparently inchoate, uneasy
pluralism that prevails today as "postmodernism."
Pessimism of the intelligence, optimism of
the will.
-Antonio Gramsci
For those who came to maturity in Germany in the 1950s, the idea that the
cinema might be a vehicle for artistic expression or social enlightenment would
have seemed absurd. At the end of the war, the Allies, eager to reeducate their
former foes, dismantled the centralized German film industry, while powerful
American production and distribution companies, interested in securing a new
market for their products, spurred them on. The Federal Republic's inadequate
efforts during the '50s to stimulate the redevelopment of an indigenous film
industry foundered again and again as a result of inadequate capitalization,
ill-conceived subsidy statutes, and, by the end of the decade, the rapid diffusion
of television into homes across Germany. A misguided policy of cultural insular-
ity and economic autarky for the film industry, two dismal legacies of the Nazi
period, dominated the thinking of German producers. The so-called Heimat film,
sentimental and xenophobic depictions of bucolic regions of the country, became
the most popular genre. Movie attendance dropped precipitously. The number
of movie theaters began to plummet. The prospect of change seemed remote; by
several accounts, more than half of all production personnel active in 1960 had
been Nazi party members during the war.8
selections from The Public Sphere and Experience presented in this issue. Also see Alexander Kluge,
"Die Macht der Bewusstseinsindustrie und das Schicksal unserer Offentlichkeit. Zum Unterschied
von machbar und gewalttatig," in Industrialisierung des Bewusstseins, Munich, Piper, 1985,
pp. 51-129.
8. General background on this period is found in Thomas Elsaesser, "The Postwar German
Cinema," in Fassbinder, second edition, ed. Tony Rayns, London, BFI, 1980, pp. 1-16; Eric
Rentschler, West German Film in the Course of Time, Bedford Hills, New York, Redgrave, 1984, pp.
31-63, 101-108; James Franklin, New German Cinema, Boston, Twayne, 1983, pp. 21-34; and
John Sandford, The New German Cinema, New York, DaCapo, 1980, pp. 9-16. See also Rainer
Lewandowski, Die Oberhausener,D iekholzen, Verlag fir Biihne und Film, 1982.