Starry Skies and Frozen Lakes: Alexander Kluge's Digital Constellations

Abstract

Since its beginnings in cinema and literature, the work of Alexander Kluge has manifested itself in increasingly diverse formats and media environments, including television and, more recently, the digital realm. Kluge’s cinematic debut was the 1960 Brutality in Stone (Brutalitat in Stein), co-directed with Peter Schamoni, the first in an extended sequence of short films, most of them executed according to a montage principle in which documentary segments are juxtaposed with static visual material (including illustrations and printed pages) in combination with often asynchronous sound samples and commenting voice-overs. Subsequently, Kluge also began to experiment with longer durat ions in his cinematic work, start ing with Yesterday Girl (Abschied von Gestern) of 1965, in which he introduced acted sequences that can be read as nuclei for potential filmic plots, though these often unfold only in a fragmented manner. These elements are interspersed with fields of onscreen lettering. Reminiscent of silent film’s intertitles, these written-word screen projections provide commentary and punctuation, and have become a visual trademark of his work. Like his films, Kluge’s literary texts emerge from an aesthetic commitment to brevity. His 1962 short-story collection Lebenslaufe (Case Histories) was the first in what has become a sequence of volumes constructed out of brief core components and presented in sequential, non-narrative order. Kluge’s subsequent literary works include the 2007 Geschichten vom Kino (Cinema Stories), his chronicle of both the history of cinema and his own history as a filmmaker; and the slender volume Dezember (2010), a collaboration with the artist Gerhard Richter, whose photographs of the snowed-in woods surrounding the Swiss Alpine resort town of Sils Maria are juxtaposed with Klugean tales