As a film-maker with a modest but loyal transatlantic following, Alexander Kluge's oeuvre and career are markedly different from those of other European directors venerated by cinéphiles? Celebrating his eightieth birthday he belongs to the same generation as Jean-Luc Godard, Jean Marie Straub and Theo Angelopoulos, but trained as a lawyer before making his first film in 1960. In Germany, he is equally if not more famous as a short story writer and the author of several volumes of sociology To film historians, he is the legal brain and policy-shaper behind the New German Cinema of the 1960s and 1970s, having been the driving force behind the famous Oberhausen Manifesto of 1962 and the government film-funding legislation that followed. In 1964 he co-founded West Germany's first film school (at the Ulm Institute for Design) and in 1972 he published, in his capacity as professor of sociology at the University of Frankfurt, a book with Oskar Negt which became a classic for the student generation of 1968, Public Sphere and Experience, a radicalised rejoinder to Jürgen Habermas's equally classic 1962 The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. Coauthor of other critical and political analyses, including a book-length study of the European film industry, Kluge remained, for more than two decades, the undisputed master strategist of the parliamentary lobby and the chief architect of a state film-subsidy system based around the concept of the Autorenfilm (auteur film) - before becoming, in the 1980s, one of its fiercest critics.

Between 1966 and 1983 he directed some twenty films, of which about six have remained in active memory: YESTERDAY GIRL (1966), ARTISTS UNDER THE BIG TOP: PERPLEXED (1968), OCCASIONAL WORK OF A FEMALE SLAVE (1974), a segment of GERMANY IN AUTUMN (1978), THE PATRIOT (1979) and THE POWER OF FEELINGS (1983). ON these titles rests his reputation as a film-maker, although for his fans, a few more remain to be rediscovered, such as THE MIDDLE OF THE ROAD IS A VERY DEAD END (1974), STRONGMAN FERDINAND (1976) and THE BLIND DIRECTOR (1985).

By 1985 Kluge had changed tack, having entered into what many saw as a Faustian bargain with commercial television to produce late-night cultural magazine shows.