The knocks of present
"This is my idea of narrative cinema: to tell stories, and what is the story of a country but the wider area of narratives? ... Not just a history but many.” Alexander Kluge has told so many stories, mostly the less graceful, simultaneously from different prisms, always turning the social and artistic patterns and making clear that artistic freedom is necessary in order to avoid a social conventionality that is just a hungry beast. The horizon is devastating when figures such as Kluge are little appreciated by the public. There’s nothing new under the sun, but some exceptions such as his work.
He was born in Halberstadt, Germany, in 1932. Kluge has developed a career in literature, cinema and television which is deeply respected because its risks and unquestionable lucidity. He studied laws but after making some short films he became one of the signers of the Oberhausen Manifest in 1966. They were 25 young German film makers with names than became as important as Volker Schlöndorff, Werner Herzog, Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Wim Wenders. Their starting point was the standstill of German cinema at that time after the great creators emigration because the Nazism, but also the economic crisis after the war and the recent presence of television at German homes. Their ideas were focused in need to create a favorable condition for the production and distribution of films, non-belief in period films, the treatment of youth issues, a review of German history, etc.
Within this movement, Alexander Kluge directed his first feature film A girl with no history (Abschied von gestern, 1966) for which he received the Silver Lion at the Mostra of Venice. The story of a girl in her search for a new life ends up in jail.
Despite this bright start in terms of recognition, the subsequent work of Kluge has circulated very small environments. Artists under the tent of a circus: Desperate (Artist in der Zirkuskuppel: Ratlos, 1968), discusses the artistic independence in the metaphor of change in a circus tent by a walled enclosure. Adaptation in order to create art, but is it possible to believe in an adapted art? This question has only one answer in the Kluge’s films: no.
His brilliant work went on until one of his creative peaks, Occasional work of a slave (Gelegenheitsarbeit einer Sklavin, 1973), a deep critique of social conventions ranging from the repressive role of the family as a social unit to the subservient role awarded to women. The female protagonist's struggle against all these walls is the Kluge own fight against any formal and content limitation in artistic creation.
Kluge has mixed genres, formats and story structures from his early works to our days, not forgetting his important work in television where he has reached creative heights which unfortunately are far from the public. He always says that his film is too literary and his literature is too filmic. Fortunately he has a great prestige in his own country, where in 2003 received the Georg Büchner Prize, the most important in German literature. His art is a real Attack of present to the rest of times (Der Angriff der Gegenwart auf die Zeit übrig, 1985).
ALEXANDER KLUGE VIDEO SÈRIES here
ALEXANDER KLUGE VIDEO SÈRIES here
Text by Juan Carlos Romero
Photos courtesy of L'Alternativa