Alexander Kluge | |
|---|---|
 Kluge in 2020 | |
| Born | 14 February 1932 Halberstadt, Province of Saxony, Germany |
| Occupation(s) | Author, film director |
| Website | www.kluge-alexander.de |
Alexander Kluge (born 14 February 1932) is a German author, philosopher, academic and film director. [1]
Kluge was born in Halberstadt, Province of Saxony (now Saxony-Anhalt), Germany.
After growing up during World War II, he studied history, law and music at the University of Marburg Germany, and the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University of Frankfurt am Main in Germany. He received his doctorate in law in 1956.
While studying in Frankfurt, Kluge befriended the philosopher Theodor W. Adorno, who was teaching at the Institute for Social Research, or Frankfurt School. [2] Kluge served as a legal counsel for the Institute, and began writing his earliest stories during this period. At Adorno's suggestion, he also began to investigate filmmaking, and in 1958, Adorno introduced him to German filmmaker Fritz Lang, for whom Kluge worked as an assistant on the making of The Tiger of Eschnapur . [3]
Kluge directed his first film in 1960, Brutality in Stone , a twelve-minute, black and white, lyrical montage work which, against the German commercial ( Papa's Kino ) cinematic amnesia of the prior decade, inaugurated an exploration of the Nazi past. The film premièred in 1961 at what would become the showcase for the new generation of German filmmakers, the Westdeutsche Kurzfilmtage (now known as the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen) in Oberhausen, Germany.
Kluge was one of twenty-six signatories to the Oberhausen Manifesto of 1962, which marked the launch of the New German Cinema. That same year, with filmmakers Edgar Reitz and Detlev Schleiermacher, Kluge established the Ulm Institut für Filmgestaltung at the Hochschule für Gestaltung Ulm, to promote the critical and aesthetic practices of Young German Film and the New German Cinema.
In 1965 he was a member of the jury at the 15th Berlin International Film Festival. [4]
He has gone on to direct a number of films which have an inherent critique of commercial cinema and television through the creation of a counter-public sphere and their deployment of experimental forms, including montage. They include Abschied von Gestern ( Yesterday Girl ) (1966), an adaptation of Kluge's story "Anita G."; Die Artisten in der Zirkuskuppel: Ratlos ( Artists under the Big Top: Perplexed ) (1968); and The Assault of the Present on the Rest of Time (1985).
In 2017, Kluge and his studio are featured in the film Finite and Infinite Games by artist Sarah Morris. The film, which focuses around the Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg, Germany, includes debate between Kluge and Morris on architecture, music, and the religious philosophy of American academic James P. Carse. [5]
In 1987, Kluge founded the television production company Development Company for Television Program mbH (DCTP), which produces late-night and night-time independent television slots on the private channels RTL Television, Sat.1, and VOX.
Much of the DCTP programs consist of television documentaries by Kluge (often characterized by the lack of spoken narration and a heavy reliance upon text as well as graphical montages and image editing) as well as many interviews Kluge leads with various international personalities from the fields of arts, entertainment, science, philosophy, and politics. Some of the interviewed are fictitious characters portrayed by professional actors Helge Schneider and Peter Berling, or factual people parodied by the two, including, but not limited to, Adolf Hitler, historical Roman generals, Napoleon's political advisors, or the lawyer of Michael Jackson.
Beside Kluge's own productions, DCTP also co-produces so-called Magazinsendungen, which are investigatory programs in cooperation with Der Spiegel (SPIEGEL TV), Stern ( stern TV ), Süddeutsche Zeitung (Süddeutsche TV), Neue Zürcher Zeitung (NZZ Format), and the British Broadcasting Corporation.
Kluge is also one of the major German fiction writers of the late-20th century and an important social critic. His fictional works, which tend toward the short story form, are significant for their formal experimentation and insistently critical thematics. Constituting a form of analytical fiction, they utilize techniques of narrative disruption, mixed genres, interpolation of non-literary texts and documents, and perspectival shifts. The texts frequently employ a flat, ironic tone. One frequent effect approximates what Viktor Shklovsky and the Russian formalists identified as defamiliarization or ostranenie. In an interview with 032c magazine, Kluge described his point of view on writing with a quote by Georg Büchner: "I've always wanted to see what my head looks like from above." Kluge explains that when "writing literary texts, you look—if you're going about it correctly—down to yourself, to your head from above. Then you no longer have a relationship with yourself. At the most, you have trust in yourself that a text will emerge from this and that you still have the sovereignty and the strength to throw it away if it amounts to nothing." [6] Kluge has used several of his stories as the bases for his films.
Kluge's major works of social criticism include Öffentlichkeit und Erfahrung. Zur Organisationsanalyse von bürgerlicher und proletarischer Öffentlichkeit, co-written with Oskar Negt and originally published in 1972, and "Geschichte und Eigensinn", also co-authored with Negt. "Öffentlichkeit und Erfahrung" has been translated into English as Public Sphere and Experience: Toward an Analysis of the Bourgeois and Proletarian Public Sphere and "Geschichte und Eigensinn" was translated into English as History and Obstinacy, published in 2014 by Zone Books.
"Public Sphere and Experience" revisits and expands Jürgen Habermas's notion of the public sphere (which he articulated in his book Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere) and calls for the development of a new "proletarian public sphere" grounded in the life experience of the working class. "Geschichte und Eigensinn" continues this project and tries to rethink the very nature of proletarian experience and develops a theory of "living labour" grounded in the work of Karl Marx.
He has also published numerous texts on literary, film and television criticism. In discussing his literary technique of blending fiction and reality with author Gary Indiana, Kluge also offers a critique of the media industry's presentation of "reality", which he asserts is intrinsically false:
...Human beings are not interested in reality. They can't be; it's the human essence. They have wishes. These wishes are strictly opposed to any ugly form of reality. They prefer to lie than to become divorced from their wishes...[they] forget everything and can give up everything except this principle of misunderstanding reality, the subjective... If this is real, then the media industry is realistic in telling fiction, and the construction of reality founded on this basis can only lie. This is one of the reasons why history isn't realistic: it's not documentary, it's not genuine, and it's not necessary. [7]
Learning Processes with a Deadly Outcome (1973) is one of Kluge's original contributions to the science-fiction genre.
In 2000, he published Chronik der Gefühle (Chronicle of Feelings), which critic Matthew D. Miller describes as a "modern epic". [8]
Since 2016 Kluge has been collaborating with the American writer Ben Lerner. Their collaborations are collected in The Snows of Venice, published in 2018 by Spector Books.
His sister, Alexandra Kluge, was a film actress.
His awards include the Italian Literature Prize Isola d'Elba (1967), and almost every major German-language literary prize, including the Heinrich von Kleist Prize (1985), the Heinrich-Böll-Preis (1993) and the Schiller Memorial Prize (2001). Kluge received the Hanns-Joachim-Friedrichs-Award for TV Journalism (2001). He has also received the Georg Büchner Prize (2003), Germany's highest literary award. In recent years Kluge received the triennial Theodor W. Adorno Award of 2009. [9] In 2010 Kluge received the Grimme Award, one of the most important German television awards, in the category "Special mention" in honour of his lifetime achievements. [10]
Jürgen Habermas is a German philosopher and social theorist in the tradition of critical theory and pragmatism. His work addresses communicative rationality and the public sphere.
Patrick Süskind is a German writer and screenwriter, known best for his novel Perfume: The Story of a Murderer, first published in 1985.
Franz Carl Heimito, Ritter von Doderer, known as Heimito von Doderer, was an Austrian writer.
Siegfried Lenz was a German writer of novels, short stories and essays, as well as dramas for radio and the theatre. In 2000 he received the Goethe Prize on the 250th Anniversary of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's birth. He won the 2010 International Nonino Prize in Italy.
Oskar Reinhard Negt was a German philosopher and critical social theorist. He was a professor of sociology in Hanover from 1972 to 2002, regarded as one of Germany's most prominent social scientists.
The Children of Golzow is a documentary by the German filmmaker Winfried Junge that was started in 1961 and lasted until 2007, when the series concluded. The film is a prolonged observation of the lives of several people in the Brandenburg village of Golzow.
Erwin Geschonneck was a German actor. His biggest success occurred in the German Democratic Republic, where he was considered one of the most famous actors of the time.
Erika Pluhar is an actress, singer and author from Austria and was born on 28 February 1939 in Vienna.
Franz Peter Wirth was a German film director and screenwriter. His film Helden was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 1958.
Henny Koch was a translator and a German children's author. She was born in Alsfeld, Grand Duchy of Hesse. From 1898 on, she lived in Jugenheim an der Bergstraße in Hessia, Germany, where she died in 1925. She produced the first German translation of Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in 1890. Henny Koch wrote 29 books, primarily targeting a young female audience. Her books were often serialized in the bourgeois illustrated girls' magazine "Das Kränzchen". Some titles were published in eight countries. Her most successful work was a series of novels, beginning with Papas Junge, in which you can accompany the protagonist through her life as a young girl, a mother and grandmother. A film has been made based on this novel Il birichino di papà, Italy, 1943, directed by Raffaello Matarazzo with music by Nino Rota.
Ludwig Berger was a German-Jewish film director, screenwriter and theatre director. He directed more than 30 films between 1920 and 1969. Berger began working in the German film industry during the Weimar Republic. At Decla-Bioscop and later UFA he established a reputation as a leading director of silent films. He emigrated to Hollywood, but was unable to establish himself and returned to Europe. He subsequently worked both in France and Germany. He was a member of the jury at the 6th Berlin International Film Festival.
Andreas Steinhöfel is a German author for children and young adult books, and a translator.
The Bremen Literature Prize is a German literary award. The prize money is €25,000.
Berlin School is a term used for a new movement in German films that has emerged in the early 21st century. The German term Berliner Schule has been applied to a number of intimate German films that received critical acknowledgement, first in France.
Erwin Moser was an Austrian children's and young adult books' author and illustrator. He is best known for his children's book series Manuel & Didi, which he illustrated himself, using a text comics format.
Leila Vennewitz was a Canadian-English translator of German literature. She was born Leila Croot in Hampshire, England and grew up in Portsmouth. Her brother was the surgeon Sir John Croot.
Martin Chalmers was a British translator, particularly of works in German. He was awarded the Schlegel-Tieck Prize by the Society of Authors. He was married to the German author Esther Kinsky.
Peter Handke is an Austrian novelist, playwright, translator, poet, film director, and screenwriter.
Peter Uwe Hohendahl is an American literary and intellectual historian and theorist. He served as the Jacob Gould Schurman Professor of German Studies at Cornell University, where he is now a professor emeritus.
Public opposition describes a form of social activity that deliberately opposes establishment opinion in the public sphere in order to raise public awareness of topics, problems or social groups that appear to be neglected or oppressed. As with the public sphere, public opposition is in direct opposition to the private sphere — at its core, it is about occupying public spaces where people can gather and get informed. The development of various means of communication has decisively influenced the forms and possibilities of informational transfer.
| International | |
|---|---|
| National | |
| Academics | |
| Artists | |
| People | |
| Other | |
