Alexander Kluge is best known as a founding member of the New German Cinema. His work, however, spans a diverse range of fields and, over the last fifty years, he has been active as a filmmaker, writer and television producer. This book—the first of its kind in English—comprises a wide selection of texts, including articles and stories by Kluge, television transcripts, critical essays by renowned international scholars, and interviews with Kluge himself. It will be a valuable resource for students and scholars in the fields of film, television, and literary studies, as well as those interested in exploring the intersections ...

Where is the present when the computer pulses at the wrist every day, when we’re globally inter-connected in real time but don’t take in our selves for a single moment, just bits and pieces, just snatching a few intensities, when neurons plus communication already makes a consciousness? Is it nothing but a hallucination, in permanent crisis? Does it stand still, get wider, poorer? How does the past change when systems record every second, saving them for the right moment or for all eternity, when contacts, mails, and calendar and movement data evaporate like spam in the cloud? Is it forgotten, does ...

Art cannot solve the problems of 2017, Alexander Kluge says to Hans Ulrich Obrist in this issue, but it can start solving the problems of 2036. Though it may begin in the affective work of mourning, art moves towards a rational archeology and a realistic anticipation. We could call this “futurist realism,” a vision of the coming decades as a series of problems to be solved, rather than as a source for transcendent salvations or damnations of whatever fashion. Unlike the ecstatic or dispirited futurisms we are accustomed to, futurist realism looks forward with no false regrets. Bad-faith futurism, by ...

I’ve just returned from comforting my best friend, Gesine. In the meantime I’m sure that she won’t kill herself. The storm has not been weathered. I saw how he trashed her, then slammed the apartment door behind him. He has the delicacy to continue living with her to avoid hotel costs. He leaves her apartment and goes about his business, visiting his new mistress, a married woman for whom Gesine has been demoted. I have to take care that my words of comfort (although I usually just gather her silently in my arms and put her to bed) don’t fuel her ...

News from Ideological Antiquity Directed by Alexander Kluge, Germany, 2010, (84 mins) Alexander Kluge’s film is a discursive essay about and around Eisenstein’s notes on a film of Marx’s Capital—written shortly after the release of October in 1927 and connected to his ideas for conceiving a film of Joyce’s Ulysses. According to Helmet Merker writing on the 570 minute version, “Eighty years on, Alexander Kluge joins the party and takes up where Eisenstein failed, because neither Hollywood’s capitalists nor Moscow’s Communists were prepared to send the necessary funds his way… Scholarly stuff, wide and deep in scope, yet bold and playful. But ...

‘Alexander Kluge. Raw Materials: Present Impressions, Past Wishes and Future Fulfillment’ presents a selection of the filmmaker’s eclectic collection of ‘raw materials’, a series of television programmes assembling photographs, drawings, diagrams and diverse footage construed to ‘strengthen the muscles of [our] power of imagination’. Alexander Kluge, a central figure of the German cultural landscape – as a film-maker, writer and television producer – has been tackling for the past fifty years with the capacity of fantasy to organise individual experience otherwise concealed by structures of consciousness and the screens capturing our attention.