Kluge encourages the spectator not to worry about piecing everything together. Kluge believes that the aesthetic and political possibilities of cinema should and can be based on subjective modes of experience. It is exactly at such a point that information is conveyed. This is what Benjamin meant by the notion of shock. It would be wrong to say that a film should aim to shock the viewers—this would restrict their independence and powers of perception.
The point here is the surprise which occurs when you suddenly—as if by subdominant thought processes—understand something in depth and then, out of this deepened perspective redirect your phantasy to the real course of events. In other words, Phantasie is that which lies beneath the guarded exterior of the stimulus shield, and it is Phantasie that is set free when shock is able to break through the barrier.
Kluge has often invoked the figure of the child as the ideal spectator of his films. Kluge contrasts his cinema with that of conventional narrative cinema with an evocation of two different kinds of landscape. He writes:. At the present time there are enough cultivated entertainment and issue-oriented films, as if cinema were a stroll on walkways in a park…One need not duplicate the cultivated.
In fact children prefer the bushes: they play in the sand or in scrap heaps. That he invokes the figure of the child in this image is important both politically and conceptually. The child is the one who is open to new experiences, who has not yet learnt to raise her or his defences against the shocks that modern life deals us.
This childlike capacity, according to Kluge, is what one must bring to the filmmaking process, from the point of view of the filmmaker and the spectator alike. Kluge has written of his own debt to the history of cinema, particularly the silent cinema of the s, and has articulated his approach to history with this history in mind. Since I have been making films it has been in reference to this classical tradition.
Telling stories, this is precisely my conception of narrative cinema; and what else is the history of a country but the vastest narrative surface of all? Not one story but many stories. Kluge resists the dominant practice of constructing grand historical narratives, but rather conceives of history as a vast collection of stories.
In the context of a film about a history teacher dissatisfied with the poor materials she has to teach history with, this is a double-edged statement. In addition, Kluge advocates a particularly subjective approach to history, evidenced in some of his non-fiction films featuring average individuals.
For example Fire Fighter E. The film consists of a series of documentary and fictional sequences marked at either end by footage of two funerals. At the beginning we see the state funeral of Schleyer and at the end the joint funerals of Baader, Enslin and Raspe. In a large part the film was made in response not so much to the events themselves, but to the selective filtering of information of the events by the media, fuelling and supporting the restraints placed on civil liberties and freedom of information by the government.
It was for this film that Kluge created the character of the history teacher Gabi Teichert who became the protagonist of The Female Patriot. Kluge was particularly concerned with the fact that the new cinema that they hoped to create would be completely ineffectual unless there was a public ready to receive its products.
Miriam Hansen has written most eloquently on this point:. On Adorno's plan to make a film about the cold. Mensch 2. Frankfurter Poetikvorlesungen , Frau Blackburn, geb. Winterstein [Fireman E. Wir verbauen 3 x 27 Milliarden Dollar in einen Angriffschlachter , , 35 mm, col.
Jahrhundert , , TV. These two films were not particularly successful, and with Strongman Ferdinand , Kluge embarked on a new experiment in response: to make a political film with a conventional, realist narrative and a recognizable television star Heinz Schubert in the title role.
Special laws were enacted to combat terrorism, and there was a palpable fear on the left that an older form of authoritarianism might be emerging. Though made as an intervention into an extremely specific political context, the film has held up amazingly well over the past three decades and stands as an example for a potential collaborative political cinema or video practice today.
After The Patriot , Kluge made two further collaborative pieces, The Candidate , about the candidacy of the corrupt, far right Franz Josef Strauss for Chancellor, and War and Peace , a rather moving montage film made in clear opposition to the stationing of Pershing II missiles on German soil by the US. The Power of Emotions , according to Kluge, combines 26 separate stories into a fragmented montage; each story seems to contain a small moral about the capacity of human emotion to fill out our more conceptual, rational understanding of the world.
Many of these small stories demonstrate utopian victories of human emotion: a woman who unwillingly fosters an orphaned girl discovers a love for her equal to any parental love and fights to retain her custody; and two small-time criminals learn the pleasure of cooperation as they rescue a potential murder victim and care for him until he recovers from his wounds. Similarly, The Blind Director confronts the viewers with a variety of narratives with no obvious or apparent connection.
We meet here a perverse historian with a theory of the number 16, in which he dissects history into discrete and wholly arbitrary year periods. There is a scrap metal dealer who thinks history will be good to him since it leads to so much obsolescence—believing, like Kluge, that great things can be done with all the scrap, literal and metaphorical, which history leaves behind including obsolete cinematic forms. Two astronauts, who are not very smart, make their way with shady dealings, smuggling and spaceship wrecking.
Beate Mainka-Jellinghaus. Thomas Mauch Alfred Tichawsky. Lives up to its title for sure. Has it's moments extremely intermittently, and I dig the effects, but god, I wish this was entertaining, engaging, interesting or even just Review by AEC. Une autre fois.
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