Nachrichten Aus Der Ideologischen Antike – Marx/Eisenstein/Das Kapital (2010) (News From Ideological Antiquity – Marx/Eisenstein/Capital) – THE THEATRICAL VERSION
Alexander Kluge
German
The theatrical cut of Alexander Kluge’s epic length video work News from Ideological Antiquity – Marx/Eisenstein/Capital (2008) could be considered as notes from notes from notes on Das Kapital. This inheritance of texts, across media and languages, is what informs the central discourse of Kluge’s 83-minute collage work. After the completion of October (1928), which he mostly edited partially-blind and under the influence, Eisenstein set out to adapt Karl Marx’s Das Kapital as filtered through James Joyce’s Ulysses. The project was, of course, not realized and this is precisely the fact from which Kluge’s launches his investigation as to whether the book can be adapted at all. Using archival footage, (seemingly endless amount of) on-screen text, reading sessions accompanied by piano scores, interviews with historians, agit-poetry by Bert Brecht based on The Communist Manifesto and even an overstaying, outsourced short film directed by Tom Tykwer, Kluge examines the possible ways in which the gargantuan socioeconomic text can be realized in popular art forms. Such an effort, as Kluge illustrates, becomes especially challenging in film since it would mean attempting to capture the abstract nature of capital in the concrete events and things around us. Kluge, it appears, likes to see this as an ever evolving process, driven by the development of technology (At least, unlike Eisenstein, Kluge doesn’t have to worry about film stock), in which he is but only a connecting link. (His film is, after all, far removed from the source: Marx-Engels-Eisenstein-Kluge). But there is a more fundamental question if one is to believe in such long-ranged projects: How much of Marx is still relevant today? Was Marx, like Kluge, a part of a longer chain, the beginning or the end of it? Kluge, like Godard, sums up the predicament in a poignant image: the debris of Karl Marx’s real tombstone in London being overshadowed by a lionizing token monument nearby.
December 27, 2010 at 10:50 am
[…] Just Another Film Buff at The Seventh Art has penned a brilliant capsule on an epic work of Alexander Kluge: https://theseventhart.info/2010/12/26/ellipsis-25/ […]
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January 1, 2011 at 12:31 am
Hey dude, Happy New Year, hope your astute and intelligent cinephile habits continue to enlighten me and the rest of us in the way that they do. Oh yes, Kluge, well, I gotta start watching more world cinema. Here’s looking forward to another exciting year at the movies!
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January 1, 2011 at 12:33 am
Yes, Omar. For a change, let 2011 be the year of cinema!!!
Wish you a glorious new year, my friend…
Cheers!
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January 1, 2011 at 4:13 pm
Hi Srikanth
Happy New Year!
You shame all of us with the breadth of your investigations. I wasn’t aware of this work and it sounds fascinating. Does Kluge refer to Rossellini’s plans to make one of his historical films about Marx?
To answer your fundamental question, I can’t imagine a world in which Marx is no longer relevant. The problem is to get younger writers and political thinkers engaged with his ideas and to develop new ways of interpreting the contemporary world. A BBC discussion last night came up with a startling observation – that in Beijing the cost of buying a house is now 22 times the average annual earnings of a Chinese worker. That’s a higher ratio than in New York or London. Something’s gotta give in the next few years!
I guess we are looking for filmmakers who add to our understanding of how the world might be changing. And of course that needn’t mean ‘political films’ as such.
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January 1, 2011 at 4:40 pm
Thank you so much, Roy, and wish you the same.
No, he doesn’t. At least not in this theatrical cut. Perhaps he does in the 570 minute version.
That’s a sad statistic indeed, and one, I must say, that doesn’t look much different from the situation in the Indian cities.
I’m currently reading (if current means one darn year!) Mike Wayne’s Marxist Media Studies book which attempts to bring back Marxism into current media landscape. I’ve come across lots of great points already, but I also have the feeling that it’s more a battle against postmodernism than an updating of Marx. Will have to finish the book first to make up my mind.
Cheers!
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September 17, 2011 at 2:51 pm
[…] by Benjamin – onscreen as well as vocalized, reminiscent of Alexander Kluge’s attempts at adaptation of Marx, This ‘unclassifiability’ of the film finds an echo in the seeming malleability of Benjamin’s […]
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