Transcript of a Revolution

Kluge is only credited with the script of Protocol of a Revolution, a simulated television documentary on a revolution in a South American country, but the film is clearly consistent with his emerging aesthetic. Prefaced by and concluding with a distancing tracking shot into and away from a television set, Kluge mimics the T.V. journalism genre’s freedom to move from apparently objective shots of crowds at rallies, tanks in action, and so forth to interviews and “behind the scenes” accounts of torture and the dictator’s private life, often illustrated with an exaggerated pictorial verve and luridly narrated by a reporter’s offscreen voice. Since the docu- mentary shots are often staged (although “authentic” footage from actual documentaries is also used) and the fictionalized sections portray types of events that actually occur in such circumstances, the rigid categories of fiction and documentary, reality and fantasy, public and private begin to blur. The dissolution of these categories would later become a key point in Kluge’s creative and theoretical agenda. —Stuart Liebman