Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- INTRODUCTION
- FILM, POLITICS AND THE PUBLIC SPHERE
- RETHINKING HISTORY
- REALISM AS PROTEST
- OPERA AS A TOWER PLANT OF EMOTION'
- STORYTELLING AND POLITICS
- TELEVISION AND COUNTER-PUBLIC SPHERES
- TELEVISION INTERVIEWS
- EARLY CINEMA/RECENT WORK
- Selected Bibliography of English-Language Texts
- Acknowledgments
- Notes on Contributors
- Index of Names
- Index of Works
- Film Culture in Transition
Reinventing the Nickelodeon: Notes on Kluge and Early Cinema
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 February 2021
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- INTRODUCTION
- FILM, POLITICS AND THE PUBLIC SPHERE
- RETHINKING HISTORY
- REALISM AS PROTEST
- OPERA AS A TOWER PLANT OF EMOTION'
- STORYTELLING AND POLITICS
- TELEVISION AND COUNTER-PUBLIC SPHERES
- TELEVISION INTERVIEWS
- EARLY CINEMA/RECENT WORK
- Selected Bibliography of English-Language Texts
- Acknowledgments
- Notes on Contributors
- Index of Names
- Index of Works
- Film Culture in Transition
Summary
Images from Griffith's INTOLERANCE, the French story, the rape of Brown Eyes, tinted blue, projected in cinemascope onto the background of an opera stage, under a ceiling painted with purple sky and palm trees; on the soundtrack, Giacomo Meyerbeer's Les Huguenots; all this on a television screen. Uptown music video, nostalgic modernism, or postmodern collage? Kluge's recent work for television continues the eclectic juxtaposition of found materials familiar from his films - montage clusters combining old footage, still photographs, magic lantern slides, popular illustrations, written titles, second-hand music, and occasional voice-over. While these nondiegetic clusters suspend the flow of the narrative (to which they usually relate in more or less oblique ways), they are often what persist in the viewer's memory: the fire in the elephant house in ARTISTS UNDER THE BIG TOP: PERPLEXED (1967); the suicide montage in GERMANY IN AUTUMN (1978); images of Babylon, Paradise Lost, the London World Exposition of 1851, and the opera sequences in THE POWER of EMOTION (1983).
As in Kluge's films, some of the found material assembled in the television miniatures has been manipulated in some way, even prior to its placement in the montage. What has changed, however, is both method and context. In the films, the materiality of old footage might have been emphasised by primitive devices like fast motion, rephotographing images off the editing table, angling the camera, tinting, masking, not to mention the deliberately dilettante trick photography of his science-fiction films. Now similar effects are achieved through computer graphics, for instance, by matting (an anachronistic expression) one set of images onto a different - and at times varying - background, such as the screen of a 1920s picture palace or urban shop windows. Even more surprising than his sudden leap into the electronic age is the context of exhibition for which Kluge is producing this work - a culture show called 10 vor 11(10 to 11), which is allotted about thirty minutes of air time per week. The format of this show, so far largely under Kluge's editorial control, seems to be guided by principles of brevity and variety.
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- Alexander KlugeRaw Materials for the Imagination, pp. 389 - 408Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2012