Reinventing the Nickelodeon: Notes on Kluge and Early Cinema

Abstract

Images from Griffith's Intolerance, the French story, the rape of Brown Eyes, tinted blue, projected in cinemascope onto the background of an opera stage, under a ceiling painted with purple sky and palm trees; on the soundtrack, Giacomo Meyerbeer's Les Huguenots; all this on a television screen. Uptown music video, nostalgic modernism, or postmodern collage? Kluge's recent work for television continues the eclectic juxtaposition of found materials familiar from his films montage clusters combining old footage, still photographs, magic lantern slides, popular illustrations, written titles, second-hand music, and occasional voice-over. While these nondiegetic clusters suspend the flow of the narrative (to which they usually relate in more or less oblique ways), they are often what persist in the viewer's memory: the fire in the elephant house in Artists under the Big Top: Perplexed (1967); the suicide montage in Germany in Autumn (1978); images of Babylon, Paradise Lost, the London World Exposition of 1851, and the opera sequences in The Power of Emotion (1983). As in Kluge's films, some of the found material assembled in the television miniatures has been manipulated in some way, even prior to its placement in the montage. What has changed, however, is both method and context. In the films, the materiality of old footage might have been emphasized by primitive devices like fast motion, rephotographing images off the editing table, angling the camera, tinting, masking, not to mention the deliberately dilettante trick photography of his science fiction films. Now similar effects are achieved through computer graphics, for instance, by matting (an anachronistic expression) one set of images onto a different and at times varying background, such as the screen of a 1920s picture palace or urban shop windows. Even more surprising than his sudden leap into the electronic age is the context of exhibition for which Kluge is producing this work -a culture show called Zehn vor elf (Ten to Eleven), which is alloted about thirty minutes of air time per week. The format of this show, so far largely under Kluge's editorial control, seems to be guided by principles of brevity and variety. Thus, at the beginning of one program, a female announcer promises the viewer that no item will last more than five minutes; in the same spirit, composer Luigi Nono has supplied the series with forty two-minute operas