October 46: Alexander Kluge: Theoretical Writings, Stories and an Interview (1988)

“This special issue of October, which serves as the catalogue of the retrospective exhibition of Kluge’s films I have organized for Anthology Film Archives and Goethe House, New York, has been prepared with the conviction that Kluge’s “cinematic variety show”–tied as it is to a much larger project encompassing his fiction, social theory, film theory, television programs, and political action on various cultural fronts–constitutes a unique venture in the annals of postwar German culture. Kluge’s is a radical cinéma impur, situated at the farthest possible remove from that conception of an autonomous, “pure” cinema which defines itself in opposition both to mass cultural film practices and to the terms and strategies of other modernist art forms developed since the 1920s. The motives, themes, and formal strategies of Kluge’s project raise questions in diverse areas of concern to us: about representation and gender, about history and memory, about theory in its relation to practice, about the ongoing vitality of one of his great modernism. Moreover, the work of Kluge is formulated–as one of his great precursors Walter Benjamin would have hoped–with an acute awareness of the most advanced “technical” means of production available as well as of the social circumstances in which production takes place in advanced industrial societies today.” (Stuart Liebman in the introductory essay)

Contains Liebman’s interview with Kluge conducted in 1986-87, selections from Oskar Negt and Kluge’s The Public Sphere and Experience (published in German in 1972), the essay “Word and Film” by Edgar Reitz, Kluge, and Wilfried Reinke (1965), “Why Should Film and Television Cooperate?” (1987), selections from New Stories, Notebooks 1-18 (1977), and the essays by Andreas Huyssen, Heide Schlüpmann, Fredric Jameson, Miriam Hansen, Stuart Liebman, filmography, videography, and bibliography.

Edited by Stuart Liebman
Publisher MIT Press, Fall 1988
ISSN 0162-2870
ISBN 0262751968
218 pages

PDF (13 MB, updated 2015-5-10)

See also New German Critique 49: Special Issue on Alexander Kluge, 1990.
Kluge at Monoskop wiki