Alexander Kluge
b. 1932
Writer, theorist, filmmaker, and television pioneer, Alexander Kluge is one of the intellectual giants of post-war Germany. Despite the scope of his achievements, his reputation in the United States rests largely on his contribution to the Oberhausen Manifesto, one of film history's seminal documents. In 1962, at the Oberhausen Film Festival, a group of twenty-six filmmakers, including future luminaries Wim Wenders, Werner Herzog, and Rainer Werner Fassbinder, signed a well-publicized declaration that "the old film is dead, we believe in the new," thereby kicking off the cinematic Golden Age now known as Das Neue Kino: "the New German Cinema." Kluge is often seen as the group's intellectual father figure. Slightly older than the others, he had already trained as a lawyer and worked as an assistant to Fritz Lang. Perhaps more importantly, Kluge was the artist among them whose pursuit of the new most closely hewed to the revolutionary mandate; he consistently shunned commercial, narrative filmmaking, and employed political lobbying as well as avant-garde techniques. It may be that the calls-to-arms of the soixante-huitards were foreshadowed by the Manifesto's upstart rhetoric, but…
Films