Thursday, October 8, 2009
Herr Kluge Ringsum Ein
My indulgence this summer was the purchase of the Filmmuseum Edition set of the works of filmmaker and postwar cultural intellectual figure Alexander Kluge. I first read about this set a year earlier in a lenghty article in Flim Comment by ubiquitous German film scholar/writer Thomas Thomas Elsaesser, It spoke of a vast box set, thirty disks spanning forty years of film and television work. I kind of assumed I would never get hold of it. It seemed destined to be the kind of thing that college libraries and museums would purchase. Well, after an extended wait and a second shipment. (US mail did not come through this time, I'm saddened to report. On the other hand, FedEx had it here in about three days at the second try to get it from Munich to my doorstep)
Kluge is hard to describe to someone who has not been exposed to him. He is compared frequently to Godard, and in some ways it may be an apt comparison in regards to their unblinking uncompromising vision. Their approach to form also is sometimes similar. I can't think of any other major filmmakers who fuse text intertitles in their films in the post silent era. These titles sometimes connect or heighten the characters and stories, at other times create a counterpoint or commentary.
Each of the five sets I have worked through so far basically consist of a themed double feature, a brief "eye opener" short he created for television that links up with the content of the set somehow as well as another short or two that were selected thematically. And many of the sets include notes, scripts, and full-text books by Kluge in digital format, but, alas, only in German.
I began with Deutschland im Herbst & Die Patriotin & Die Patriotin. Deutschland im Herbst is a collaborative film by a wide swath of New German filmmakers. It isn't an anthology or portmanteau film as much as an intense collaborative statement by nearly a dozen filmmakers including Fassbinder, Heinrich Boll, and Volker Schlöndorff. The film reflects their passion about events of Autumn 1977 involving the murder of an industrialist, a failed hijacking attempt and the in prison "suicides" of Red Army radicals in October and November of that year.
One of Kluge's contributions to Herbst is the character of Gabi Teichart, a teacher looking to understand and teach German history with a kind of truth and fidelity. Teichart is played by a wonderful actress, Hannelore Hoger who is sometimes placed in real government meeetings and other circumstances. Hoger also plays Lenni Peickert, an heir to a circus who wants to create a kind of fourth wall Brechtian performance experience (with animals even!) in two films in another set Die Artisten in der Zirkuskuppel: ratlos & Die unbezähmbare Leni Peickert ( Artists in the Big Top: Perplexed and the The Indomitable Leni Peickert). Hoger is convincing as these characters in Kluge's reality bending world which mixes documentary settings and filming techniques with characters and narrative, sometimes very subtly.
Kluge's earlier features are combined in the set had him looking at the role of women in the modern Germany of the late sixties and early seventies in Abschied von gestern & Gelegenheitsarbeit einer Sklavin (Yesterday Girl and Part-time work of a Domestic Slave.) Both of these star his sister, Alexandra Kluge. Yesterday Girl is about a grown up war orphan with roots in East Germany. Domestic Slave is about an abortionist mother trying to get ahead who gets connected with labor politics and kind of goes Norma Rae on the world.
In Gefahr und größter Not bringt der Mittelweg den Tod & Der starke Ferdinand aka Edition Filmmuseum 23 aka In Danger and Deep Distress, the Middleway Spells Certain Death & Strongman Ferdinand also are interesting cultural documents of the mid-seventies. In Danger follows a prostitute/spy in the midst of campus riots and other signs of the times. It feels a bit like a German version of Wexler's Medium Cool Strongman Ferdinand is a kind of cautionary tale exploring what happens if one takes security too literally and too expansively. In our post 9/11, post bastardization of freedoms by Bush and Cheney, it feels quite contemporary.
Der große Verhau & Willi Tobler und der Untergang der 6. Flotte (The Big Mess & Willi Tobler and the Decline of the 6th Fleet) are Lo-fi Science Fiction films with Ed Wood like special effects and all sorts of improbabilities in situation and anachronism. Tobler features Kluge regular Alfred Edel, who has a kind of Klaus Kinski quality to him, but not nearly as weird and sometimes scary.
Like Godard, Kluge can sometimes be heard on the soundtrack of his films. His voice is clear polite and articulate, not droning and sometimes imposing like Godard's. One of my favorite shorts so far in the set is a 1999 television film Ich war Hitler's Bodyguard where Kluge and German cinema actor and writer Peter Berling create a fictional interview that comes off as a bit of a strange conterpart to the interviews of Traudl Junge in Blindspot where she recounts her experiences as Hitler's secretary.
I am at an interesting fork in the road as I work my through Kluge's work. I've caught up to Deutschland im Herbst again and I think I'm going to check it out again and then view again some of the films in this first round of films in the Kluge collection. I'll probably pass on the Science Fiction ones again for now though. Regardless, buffet readers will be hearing more about Kluge in the not-too-distant.
posted by well-executed buffet at 10:58 PM
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