The Goethe Institut, German Current Film Festival, Human Resources, and Los Angeles Filmforum present
Alexander Kluge’s News from Ideological Antiquity
Sunday, December 2, 2018, 12:00 pm – 9:30 pm
At Human Resources, 410 Cottage Home Street, Los Angeles, California 90012
Free admission, tickets via the Facebook page
https://www.facebook.com/events/288411515125840/?active_tab=about
Presented in its entirety as a 9.5 hour “marathon” screening / Installation.
Guests are encouraged to bring pillows/cushions for extra comfort.
Refreshments will be served throughout the event.
Germany, 2008, 570 minutes. Documentary/essay anthology film. German with English subtitles
Writer/Director: Alexander Kluge, Cinematography: Michael Christ, Erich Harandt, Werner Lüring, Claudia Marcell, Heribert Kansy, Thomas Mauch, Thomas Willke, Walter Lennertz, Editor: Kajetan Forstner, Andreas Kern
Presumably the LA Premiere!
Over the course of 570 minutes (three DVDs), Alexander Kluge works his way through the “ideological antiquity”, inspired by Sergei Eisenstein’s unfulfilled plan to film Marx’s “Das Kapital“. Eisenstein’s art of montage and Marx’s critique of the trade in commodities are fundamental bases of modernity – yet we have lost touch with modernity just as we have lost touch with antiquity. What can Marx and Eisenstein tell us about our current cultural and social production, Kluge wonders, but because it’s Kluge asking, there are many answers and even more new questions.
Alexander Kluge’s film, News From Ideological Antiquity: Marx-Eisenstein-Capital, begins with Eisenstein’s ambitious but unrealized plan to combine Capital and Ulysses. For over nine hours, the film expands in concentric circles as Kluge, his guests, interlocutors and monologists make associative links on a range of topics that starts from a filmic discussion of Eisenstein’s notes. Kluge’s film is divided into three parts: I. Marx and Eisenstein in the Same House; II. All Things are Bewitched People; III. Paradoxes of Exchange Society. At several points in the film we get a sense of what Eisenstein had in mind with his project. In one scene, we see that a “pot of soup has become a water kettle, boiling away and whistling: the image recurs at several moments in the exposition (Eisenstein’s notes projected in graphics on the intertitles), in such a way that this plain object is ‘abstracted’ into the very symbol of energy. It boils impatiently, vehemently it demands to be used, to be harnessed, it is either the whistling signal for work, for work stoppage, for strikes, or else the motor-power of a whole factory, a machine for future production …” (Frederic Jameson in the New Left Review, July/August 2009). By insistence and repetition this banal object, a commodity, transforms into a larger-than-life symbol, and we start to get a sense of the full range of cognitive and material links this commodity has to the web of life that surrounds it. (Marty Kirchner)
News from Ideological Antiquity, is perhaps Alexander Kluge’s most ambitious film. Surpassing nine hours of viewing, News is a strange total work of art, rare in our century. The idea that foments the screening of this film is, in many ways, to analyze the status of the political in our present condition. Under the heading “Critical material on Eisenstein Project”, the viewers will find secondary material on the film in order to facilitate the viewing and engage in critical discussion. At first sight one could read Kluge’s film as a reworking of Soviet director Sergei Eisenstein’s project of filming, vis-à-vis James Joyce’s Ulysses, into reality of the twentieth-first century. At another level, Kluge’s film, like Godard’s Historie(s) du Cinema, is the total culmination, not only of his work, but of modern cinema as such. Monumental in scope, and avant-garde in its form, Kluge’s cinematic essay speaks to our contemporary world today more than ever. It is with pleasure that that we delve into the world of Kluge, along with this platform, in hopes that will enhance the critical viewing experience and understanding of cinema. — https://klugedaskapital.weebly.com/
Presented in cooperation with Human Resources LA and Los Angeles Filmforum within the context of the Goethe-Institut project MARX NOW
On October 12, 1927, Sergei Eisenstein finished production on October. How could he possibly continue working after that colossal film? He writes in his notes: “I have decided to adapt CAPITAL based on K. Marx’s scenario.” But how could one ‘cinematize’ (Eisenstein) money, commodity, profit, and capital, when what is at stake is not content, but the abstract forms of all manner of things, human beings, and relationships? That is why Eisenstein, over the course of his project, would not allow himself to film the stock exchange. What is there to see there, without simultaneously filming the famines caused by commodity future transactions, the poverty, the child labor, and the global drug trade? It would only present the glamour of a beautifully organized administration that capital itself wants to believe in. To film the stock exchange means to represent the ideology (the false consciousness) of capital, not its reality.
Eisenstein was preoccupied with the question of how to capture capital on screen. His notes for the Capital project – accessible only in recent years – also allow us to discover a director completely different from the maker of Battleship Potemkin. Eisenstein positions his Capital project as a wholly new kind of film, set off from the previous history of cinema, which he calls ‘ancient cinema.’ Where ‘ancient cinema’ has a linear narrative, he wants to develop a ‘spherical dramaturgy’: “In ancient film, a plot was told from different perspectives. New cinema uses montage to develop one perspective from several plots.” For Eisenstein, this perspective was presumably capital itself. Multiple plots, assembled in constellation, in relationship and in opposition to each other, were supposed to reflect on the central theme of capital, which is abstract and indifferent toward substance. —
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This program is supported by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors through the Los Angeles County Arts Commission and the Department of Cultural Affairs, City of Los Angeles. We also depend on our members, ticket buyers, and individual donors.
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