Artists Under the Big Top: Perplexed

Alexander Kluge (born 14 February 1932, Halberstadt, Saxony-Anhalt) is a noted film director and author.

After growing up during the Second World War, he studied law, history and music at the universities of Marburg and Frankfurt am Main, receiving his doctorate in law in 1956. While studying in Frankfurt, Kluge befriended the philosopher Theodor Adorno, who had returned to Germany and was teaching at the Institute for Social Research, or Frankfurt School. 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.

Kluge directed his first film in 1960, Brutalität im Stein (Brutality in Stone), a 12-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 premiered in 1961 at what would become the premiere showcase for the new generation of German filmmakers, the Oberhausen Festival. Kluge was one of 27 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, to promote the critical and aesthetic practices of Young German Film and the New German Cinema.

He has gone on to direct a number of important 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 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).

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. Kluge has used several of the stories as the bases for his films.

His awards include the Italian Literature Prize Isola d’Elba in 1967, and almost every major German-language literary prize, including the Heinrich von Kleist Prize in 1985 and the Heinrich-Böll-Preis in 1993. In 2003, he received Germany’s highest literary award, the Georg-Büchner-Preis.

Kluge’s major work of social criticism is Öffentlichkeit und Erfahrung. Zur Organisationsanalyse von bürgerlicher und proletarischer Öffentlichkeit, co-written with Oskar Negt and originally published in 1972. It has been translated into English as Public Sphere and Experience: Toward an Analysis of the Bourgeois and Proletarian Public Sphere. He has also published numerous texts on literary, film and television criticism, and received the Hanns-Joachim-Friedrich Prize for TV Journalism in 2001. —Wikipedia