Alexander Kluge Creator of Forms (iv)*
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| Alexander Kluge |
By 1966 the young filmmakers’ offensive begun at Oberhausen had achieved some success due in no small measure to Kluge. The Kuratorium and the Film Insitute at Ulm had been established and a group of feature films had been favourably received at home and abroad.
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| Yesterday Girl |
Kluge's debut feature Abschied von gestern was released as Yesterday Girl (1966). The original German title, meant to be ironic, translates literally as “Farewell to Yesterday” referring to the inseparability of the relationship between past and present. For Kluge,“the past is a precondition of the present, and its weight is by definition inescapable” (Sandford 21). The narrative is based on the biography of a young woman of Jewish descent who arrives in West Germany from the GDR with virtually no possessions. The film is structured as a series of discontinuous ‘stories', interweaving fictional and semi-documentary sequences in following Anita G (played by Kluge's sister Alexandra) through encounters encapsulating something of the reality of life in the West. Chapter headings and titles have the effect of interrupting the dramatic unfolding of the story with scenes not causally connected. As a non-commercial art film - the fragmented narrative of Yesterday Girl is often compared to Godard's Vivre sa Vie (Kluge acknowledged Godard’s influence). Whereas Godard reveals Nana’s reaction to the world, in Kluge’s film what we see is not Anita’s reaction to other people but other people’s lack of reaction to her. Kluge described it as an “open work” which does not attempt to mask contradictions and points of rupture. “Variance from classical continuity style is attributable partly to an improvisatory style of shooting and partly to indifference or antipathy to smooth continuities” (Lutze 112).Kluge’s second major feature, Die Artisten in der Zirkuskuppel:Ratlos / Artists at the Top of the Big Top - Disorientated(1967), could be regarded as “a kind of manifesto” on Kluge's part, a response to attacks from the left by students at the 1967 Berlin Film Festival on what they saw as Kluge and Reitz's elitism; the students' “conception of political films extended only to those thought to possess immediate political utility. It also became apparent in the next few months that the Federal government unaccountably wished to reverse its more enlightened film policies which had only just begun to produce results. Both events helped shape Kluge’s second feature, “a historically situated parable on art, politics, the artist/intellectual, and the public under contemporary capitalism” (Fiedler 212).
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| Artists at the Top of the Big Top - Disorientated |
Artists at the Top, Sandford suggests, is about the very difficulties it presents to its audience, a film that both exemplifies and discusses the problems of ‘re-functioning’ in an established and heavily commercialised art form, something radical and subversive. A film, in other words, “about the problems of the New German Cinema” (22). Leni Peickert, the daughter of a circus performer who died trying to perfect his art, is determined to create a circus worthy of her father's memory. Leni's story is the vehicle for presenting the internal (artistic) dilemmas and the external (financial and political) obstacles, confronting the contemporary artist presented without any preconceived plan or script.
“The difficulty of the plot is, in fact, a vital feature of [Kluge’s] very conception of cinema” (Liebman ‘October’ p.16) . Kluge's continuing theme of the past and our memory of it, is also present. By rejecting traditional narrative and formal conventions, Kluge, in a film like Artists, creates difficulties for his audiences. Helke Sander, as a practising filmmaker, on feminist grounds was a critic of meaning in Occasional Work of a Female Slave. She was also critical of Kluge’s montage style loosely tied to an episodic narrative most evident in a densely allegorical film such as Artists where Kluge, in her view, jumps too rapidly from point to point. She acknowledged that this can be intellectually stimulating and of genuine entertainment value but can quickly become overwhelming (quoted Lutz 158). By the later Kluge films there are no central characters and finally disintegrating narratives, a radically ‘impure cinema’ in opposition not only to mass cultural film practices but even to the strategies of modernist art forms.
Lutz points out that in 1968 Kluge began efforts to remedy this particular problem in Artists, even to the point of arranging with a theatre manager for patrons to view the film a second time by presenting used ticket stubs. Most of his strategies for furthering spectator comprehension involved his direct and personal intervention. While on one hand Kluge’s political modernism promotes a program of social change and “he has been unusually active in organising [intended] meaning,” on the other hand he is “aesthetically and politically committed to maximum ambiguity of meaning and audience freedom of interpretation” (ibid 158).
The narrative in Artists is fragmented, approached from many different angles, and with a wide range of techniques leaving the viewer groping for connection, a product of Kluge’s despair in the face of a full range of historical events. A difficulty is that the film fails to make clear what Leni’s plan, at one point called ‘Reformzirkus’, actually is beyond a vague ideal rather than a practical proposition and the cause of Leni’s disorientation (Sandford 22-3). She comes up against reality in all its forms including capitalists with the power but not the will to change. The failure of Leni's efforts leads to an unmotivated decision to work in mass media. She ends up studying television techniques (a denouement prophetic of Kluge's own career), the first uncertain step in a “long march through the institutions […] The difficulty of the plot is, in fact, a vital feature of [Kluge’s] very conception of cinema […] To summarize it in this way is to lend coherence and a linearity that the film refuses” (Liebman 16).
Although Kluge’s films and writings seem to endorse the notions of play and pleasure, of openness to and celebration of a variety of cultural stimuli, his images always point to more serious purposes and meanings below this surface (Lutze 137).
Particularly in the politicised 70s, many German filmmakers retreated into adaptations from canonised literature rendering social criticism in more oblique forms, Lutze notes that all of Kluge’s films are set in the present. His films have all taken on subjects such as abortion (Occasional Work…), student/police confrontations (Middle of the Road), the national mania for security (Strongman Ferdinand), revolution and reaction (Germany in Autumn), nationalism (The Patriot), resurgent conservative politics (The Candidate), and nuclear armaments (War and Peace). While in his later films fictional and montage sequences deal with historical subjects, the underlying thread always remains engagement with the conditions of contemporary everyday life (ibid 144).
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| Occasional Work of a Female Slave |
Although closer to comedy than tragedy, Occasional Work of a Female Slave (1973) is a companion piece to Yesterday Girl in sharing concern with a young woman’s efforts to make her way in a more or less hostile Federal Republic. Although also fragmented with a range of distancing devices, Yesterday Girl and Occasional Work are within the bounds of international art house cinema’s range of narrative innovation.Kluge’s sister Alexandra again plays the lead, this time as a Frankfurt housewife, Roswitha Bronski, who runs an illegal abortion practice not only so that she can keep herself, her children, and her offensively selfish husband but ironically also that they can afford to have more children. When the police close her abortion practice and her husband finally gets a job as a chemist in a factory, Roswitha rethinks her position and decides to become more politically aware. She discovers that her husband’s firm has secret plans to transfer its operations to Portugal, laying off its Frankfurt employees. Roswitha’s attempts to agitate among the threatened workers is of little avail. When the firm decides not to close the Frankfurt plant, her husband is fired because of her activities. Roswitha ends up selling sausages wrapped in political pamphlets outside the factory gates.
For Karyn Kay, the most striking and perhaps the most radical feature of Occasional Work of a Female Slave is its structure, a farce which subverts the essential form and theme of screwball comedy that Kay suggests can be traced as far back as the now obscure medieval cycle of ‘Noah’ plays in the locking of horns between Noah and his aggressive wife. In its modern form, the screwball narrative “inevitably unwinds to a reiteration of the man-above-woman world order of the Noah comedies.” In Occasional Work “ Kluge, whether consciously or unconsciously,” Kay further suggests, “sabotages the basic Noah screwball mold […] of reasserting the male-dominated family order. […] Roswitha never reforms and never again functions as Franz’s humbled, dutiful wife.” Tony Rayns noted in ‘Time Out’ that everything is informed by a kind of wry humour that keeps the plot in perspective, concluding that “it’s hard to think of another film that is as honest and yet not disillusioned as this.” While Occasional Work was a critical and art house success, it was subject to feminist criticism on political and aesthetic grounds for trivialisation as the woman’s efforts is shown to come to nothing.
In both Yesterday Girl and Occasional Work, Kluge displaces plot with episodic and cyclical elements within a quest narrative yet lacking any clear sense of a specific goal. The introduction of non-dramatic elements, outside the story or diegesis, breaks down the sense of causality and chronology although not so radical as to place these films outside the ambit of the art film and festival success. That he followed Occasional Work with Middle of the Road, Strongman Ferdinand, the collective work Germany in Autumn, and The Patriot is indicative of disinterest, on Kluge’s part, in acting as an accomplice of festival juries and distributors in fulfilling their institutional roles. Instead there is the challenge to engagement against meaning imposed from above, issuing that challenge to members of a receptive audience, not least is the appeal to the individual viewer to engage in “the process of selection and engagement,” in an open invitation to discover “the film in the head of the spectator” (see Lutze 207-8).
Modernist Collage model
Kluge wrote and directed 12 feature films for cinema release, collaborating on three more with other filmmakers in fragmented narratives combining staged and documentary material beginning with Die Patriotin/ The Patriot (1979). In the two features with Alexandra in the lead, Kluge retains a fragmented narrative but, as already noted, still more or less within the conventions of international art cinema. As Kaes acknowledges in Hitler to Heimat, with very few exceptions, none of Kluge's films tells a continuous, coherent story. In the later films, The Power of Emotion (1983) and The Blind Director(1985), he increasingly adopts a (post)modernist collage model. Two features in the middle-to-late 70s, In Danger and Distress the Middle of the Road is a Very Dead End (1974) - see forthcoming part 4 - and The Patriot, fall between the two extremes.
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| The Patriot |
“The splintering and disintegration of the narrative continuum in The Patriot follows from Kluge's conviction that two thousand years of German history cannot be grasped from a single perspective of a psychological, causal story” (ibid. 118). By initially violating the conventions of representation prevailing in traditional feature films, Kluge sought to enable viewers' resistance to the seductions of visual pleasure by maintaining critical distance, so enabling a more reflective experience. At the same time for Kluge, experiencing art can constitute among other things, sensuous pleasure […] films must have an experiential content and they must satisfy the spectator’s interest in entertainment” (ibid 207).In Der starke Ferdinand/ Strongman Ferdinand (1975) the model of a Hollywood style causal narrative structure was deliberately but temporarily adopted by Kluge in response to criticism of his collage - assembled, quasi-narratives. Based on a great deal of research for a book Kluge co-authored, the fictional character of Ferdinand Rieche, an individualistic plant security chief, a tragicomic “Bolshevik of Capitalism,” is portrayed as being “at odds with the contradictory and contingent world in which he moves” (Fiedler 218 ed. Phillips). Kluge, in a “remarkable coda,” returns the deadpan fable to its beginning, “albeit with a greatly enlarged frame of reference encompassing West German terrorism and the reaction to it in the mid-1970s” (ibid). Strongman Ferdinand was released at about the same time as the hugely successful Schlondorff/von Trotta film version of Boll’s book, The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum (q.v. part 4) expressing similar concern with the excessive growth of the law and order mentality in West Germany in the 70s. Kluge’s film, in exploring private police operations, opens up new ground and had the hallmarks of a popular success but made little headway with conservative cinema owners despite good attendances (Sandford 260).
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| Strongman Ferdinand |
The title of Kluge's final feature for cinema, Vermischete Nachrichten / Odds and Ends (1986) refers to the last page of a newspaper where assorted tidbits of news and human interest are gathered together. His most atomised film consists of 5 documentary pieces, 3 condensed old movies, parts of a civil defence instructional film, 8 short montage sequences and an on-screen announcer who introduces many of the segments. Only two of the dramatised pieces totalling 20 mins. contain the same characters (Lutze 81).In his book “Alexander Kluge The Last Modernist,” Peter Lutze identifies Kluge's modernism as rejecting the notion of an avant-garde with the primary concern being the preservation of cinema's autonomy as an artistic medium. The work of avant-garde filmmakers such as Malcolm Le Grice, Paul Sharits and Birgit Hein is given as examples of “orthodox modernists” who sought “a pure cinema,” pure in the sense it is confined to doing only what cinema uniquely can do.
Kluge believes in pushing cinema as far as possible in the opposite direction so that whatever the eye sees – “the reflex camera in the human head” - are images on the screen with no aesthetic rules. “Whatever the eye sees can be incorporated into the cinema. There are no purely cinematic images because there are no non-cinematic images” (ibid 99). This theoretical emphasis,” writes Lutze, “reflects Kluge's aesthetic practice” linking him historically to other montage/collage filmmakers such as Dziga Vertov, Eisenstein and Godard (100). Kluge goes further, however, in using an extremely wide range of materials, both fictional and documentary, as noted in the radically extreme form of Odds and Ends.Kluge does not see documentary and fictional sequences as antithetical - he sees them as two interrelated modes, each critiquing and containing the other (103). The variety of found materials in his work - often excerpts from old feature films - lends diversity, particularly when juxtaposed with the diverse material that he himself directs. Found footage is not completely subsumed into the film thus retaining its own texture which would not be the case if it was recreated. “A consistent determination to create an anti-illusionistic cinema is carried out through a frequent but unsystematic breaking of cinematic conventions in both image and sound” (104). As a a stylistic device for unifying the heterogenous material, voice-over narration (his own voice) is rarely absent from his films for more than a few minutes.
“The juxtaposition of these contrasting visual textures emphasises the materiality of Kluge's films” (ibid 99-101). The mid-eighties marked a significant change in his work. His film aesthetic had gradually evolved into the extremely fragmented films whose theatrical distribution had significantly shrunk. New interest in the aesthetic and political possibilities of television induced him to abandon […] the big screen for the small one” (ibid 135). “Many of the issues raised by his practice have become key terms of the modernist/postmodernist debate” (ibid 11).
Kluge embraces montage “to fracture the fetishistic illusionism of classical narrative drama […} Latent in the cut is a third image that is immaterial, which for Kluge marks the entry point for the “film in the viewer’s head” (Miriam Hansen ‘Cinema and Experience’ 225) referred to by Kluge (quoted, Kluge1). Or, as Lutze puts it, “the space between the shots belongs to the viewer, to make associations not only with other parts of the film, but with his or her own life experience. Reality is not just relational and contextual but shaped by human perceptions” (162).
Lutze notes that Kluge’s media work after 1985 has utilised postmodern technology, much of it addressing postmodern social conditions. However, his aesthetic and theoretical approach has apparently remained remarkably consistent with his earlier work. “Kluge continued to utilise montage in a purposeful non-playful way, creating a broad range of polarities between which the viewer’s attention can move: polarities of aesthetic material, polarities of visual texture, historical polarities, contrast of theme and style, juxtapositions of interviewer and interviewee. Kluge’s social critique remained anchored in a Frankfurt School rejection of mass produced consciousness and affirmation of autonomy and individual experience” (140).
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Editor's Note: In this essay Bruce adds Kluge to those film-makers he dubbed "Creators of Forms". Previous directors so credited can be viewed at these links
6(14) France Part 6 - Creator of Forms - Bresson
6 (15) France Part 6 - Creator of Forms - Jacques Tati
6 (16) - Part 6 - Creator of Forms - Carl Th Dreyer
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