About

AFW + NFSA #49:

Alexander Kluge

Thursday 27 June
AFW / Arena Project Space,
2 Kerr St, Fitzroy, 7:30pm.

Six Short films by Alexander Kluge (with English subtitles)

Brutalitat in Stein (12 min.)
Lehrer im Wandel (11 min.)
Portrat einer Bewahrung (10 min.)
Frau Blackburn, geb. 5 Jan. 1872, wird gefilmt (14 min.)
Feuerloscher E.A. Winterstein (11 min.)
Nachrichten von den Staufern (40 min.)

Kluge is a master director of Autorenfilm as well as a great author and theorist who has produced several volumes of social theory, dozens of films, and thousands of short stories and television programs. Influenced by his friend and mentor Theodor Adorno and by his experience as Fritz Lang’s assistant on The Tiger of Eschnapur (1959), Kluge recognized “the necessity of a new politics for the cinema” early in his career. In response to the crisis of German cinema in the 1950s, he led twenty-six West German filmmakers to declare “Papas Kino ist tot!” and to inaugurate a New German Cinema in 1962 with the famous Oberhausen Manifesto.

Describing his style as antagonistic realism or a realism of protest, Kluge once stated, “Realism is not a natural condition. The natural condition is ideology, dreaming. Whenever I protest against the reality principle, i.e., against what reality is doing to me, I’m being realistic. Therefore my motive for being realistic is antirealist.” Opposing the conventional means of filmmaking, he uses an experimental montage to render the constructedness and connectedness (zusammenhang) of reality. At his “construction sites” (also known as his films), he digs through a great variety of ideas and images to discover why events unfold in Germany's past, present, and future.

Source: https://mubi.com/notebook/posts/i-am-a-patriot-of-the-20s-an-interview-with-alexander-kluge

*PLEASE NOTE: DUE TO LATE ARISING CIRCUMSTANCES, THIS FILM PROGRAM WILL REPLACE THE PREVIOUSLY LISTED SCREENING OF Birgit and Wilhelm Hein: X-Screen. WE APOLOGISE FOR ANY DISAPPOINTMENT THIS MAY INCUR.