There’s something very special about interviewing a person who is well-educated in so many topics that the conversation can go in any number of directions. When I spoke to filmmaker Alexander Kluge for the Funhouse TV show back in October 2016 on the occasion of a festival of his work at the Anthology Film Archives, I had that feeling. But I did want to stick to my chronologically-arranged questions, since there was so much about Kluge’s film career that needed his commentary for American viewers.
Kluge, who died on March 25 of this year, had a simply amazing career. He began his professional life as a lawyer, but through his friendship with philosopher Theodor Adorno he got the chance to work as an assistant to the great Fritz Lang on the two-part 1959 cliffhanger The Tiger of Eschnapur/The Indian Tomb. That led to him becoming a filmmaker on his own, creating a vibrant blend of fiction and documentary in a series of shorts and then feature films.
But that was far from Kluge’s only path. He also wrote many books, both fiction and theoretical works that touched on politics as well as well as social theory. Thus, merely probing his career in cinema explored only one of his talents, but that talent produced a bunch of terrific films that are unfortunately underseen in the U.S. (The few releases on disc of his Sixties and early Seventies features from Facets have now gone out of print.)
I knew I had a limited amount of time with Kluge, though, so I stuck to a discussion of his journeys in cinema, from the Sixties down to the videos he made for his own television company DCTP. He created a range of items in that area, from lengthy, multi-part documentaries to shorter comedy videos. Also, a must for any discussion with the man was his presence as one of the key signatories to the Oberhausen Manifesto back in 1962. The document is considered to have set the New German Cinema in motion by declaring the desires of a new generation of independent German filmmakers.
I was able to make three episodes out of my conversation with Kluge — and, yes, as the thumbnails indicate, we were shooting in an exceptionally dark area of Anthology. (I now have decent lights for location shoots.) I’ve posted on YouTube one clip from each of the episodes, but before I link to those I wanted to include one of Kluge’s short-short stories.
He wrote several books of these, and luckily a bunch of them are now available in translation. (He kept writing steadily through the last years of his life.) I’ve chosen just one very short tale to include here; I recommend you get the book it comes from (where Kluge’s stories are “illustrated” by photos by renowned German photographer Gerhard Richter) and also investigate Kluge’s other works, both fiction and nonfiction (but especially the micro-fiction!).
From Dispatches From Moments of Calm (2010; U.S. translation published by Seagull Books, 2016):
In 1946, the Russian astrophysicist Gamov, transported in a US Air Force plane from California to Canada, from there to Washington, and from there to Florida, on each occasion to deliver a lecture, saw WITH HIS OWN EYES — while waiting in a noisy cafe on New York’s Fifth Avenue during one of the few quiet moments he’d had to himself — the rotation of atoms and subatomic particles, their spin, the constant revolution of molecules and planets, the rapidly turning stars, galaxies and superclusters. This SNAPSHOT appeared to him as a uniform movement, divisible by the spin numbers one-and-a-half and one, similar to an extremely complex clock or a piece of music, like the one he heard in Venice Cathedral during a visit Stalin had allowed him to make there in the 1930s. On the back of the cafe bill he noted down this observation as a mathematical formula, which initially seemed no more than a visual aberration, like the movement of blood corpuscles in front of the pupil when one gets up too quickly with the sun in one’s eyes. Later he was unable to read the scrawl he had quickly jotted down. Never again did he see the world with such precision.
[pp. 10–11]
One more item to pass on before we get to the Funhouse interview clips. Here’s a list of complete features by Kluge that are available with subtitles on YouTube. All of them are good, but if you have limited time and are curious where to dip a toe into his work, you can’t go wrong with Yesterday Girl and Part-time Work of a Female Slave (both of which star his sister, Alexandra Kluge).
Yesterday Girl (1966)
Artists in the Big Top: Perplexed (1968)
Part-time work of a Female Slave (1973)
Miscellaneous News (1986)
Now, onto the clips. The first is a short segment from the first episode, the moment where I got to ask Kluge about his experience working as an assistant to Lang, an icon of cinema. He tells me about Theodore Adorno opposing his (Kluge’s) desire to be a writer — he felt that lawyers were “more valuable” in society (and to his organization at the time), so he introduced young Kluge to Der Grosse Fritz. (As a kind of cinematic “vaccination” against writing!)
Anyone who has seen Lang’s “Indian epic” will realize it is somewhat shoddy-looking. Kluge addresses this by discussing the mindset of German producers at the time the film was made (1959).
The third person seen in the videos is Margaret Keppler, who was serving as Kluge’s translator.
From the second episode: Kluge talks philosophically about his Big Top and Female Slave films. In a few short minutes he moves from discussing the youth revolution of the Sixties to observations on an ideal society (uttering the quote that gave this piece its title), to the female protagonists in his Sixties films, and finally conflicting notions of reality.
From the third episode: Kluge answers a question I had about the humor in his films going from subtle satire to broader comedy. He also is not dogmatic about people watching his films on small device screens. And finally, he speaks about the version of each film that is inside the viewer’s head.