Month: May 2025 (Page 1 of 13)

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Dontyoudare, 19
Since early childhood I fantasized about becoming a full time, 24/7 dog. Completely regress to an animal state. Be kept in a cage, locked in chastity, eat and drink from a bowl, pee in the garden. In the end my thought about that damaged every normal gay relationship I’ve ever had. Today I know more than ever I know deep down if I don’t get the chance to be a dog it’s going to be something I’ll regret on my Deathbed looking back on life.

Comments

2guysinnorfolk – May 25, 2025
In due time.

Dontyoudare (Owner) – May 16, 2025
Also can still have sex normally I think.

redzone – May 13, 2025
I think dog boys have One of the Saddest Constant Mortality reminding Kinks.

 

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UnassumingType, 21
Damned if I do, damned if I don’t. Goddamn us all if you won’t.

Just a young eunuch exploring the world. I started the journey from a young age and have lost quite a few things along the way, including my gag reflex and any resistance in my second sphincter. Maybe you’d like a souvenir.

TELL ME HOW MUCH YOU WISH YOU COULD SNUFF ME, I LOVE THAT 🔥

Selfies…before and after

Comments

stonedpervert – May 21, 2025
Let’s meet by the big tree.

UnassumingType (Owner) – May 21, 2025
I’m newly in out patient drug rehab and I might be a little argumentative and antsy.

Whosnext – May 9, 2025
WOOF! Your dead body would be HOT! Craving It!

UnassumingType (Owner) – May 7, 2025
Just shaved what used to be my balls.

 

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Heterofuck18, 18
Do you like it when he screams and cries?

Straight boy offered for deflowering the hard way

02-04/05 Central Hotel Hamburg Hbf

1. He signs a consent form

2. You tie and gag him

3. You pin him down, rape him like the stupid straight bitch he is as you beat him black and blue and unconscious.

4. You leave, I’ll untie him

If you want to be alone with him, I need proof

Photos & videos possible

Comments

Heterofuck18 (Owner) – May 22, 2025
After 8 June I will sell him as is (no refunds) to any other master who is interested in having him 24/7. Only for TPE. He can get buyed as SM slave, whore or longpig.

Heterofuck18 (Owner) – May 18, 2025
He’s extremely sick right now and won’t be available for the foreseeable future, I’m sorry it’s been so long, I thought he would’ve gotten better by now.

Heterofuck18 (Owner) – May 16, 2025
I’m sorry for being MIA these past couple weeks, he got pretty sick and has been recovering, he will start being available again soon!

Heterofuck18 (Owner) – May 5, 2025
I’m sorry for going MIA last week, I swear every time I get him back on track his body decides to get sick haha.

Heterofuck18 (Owner) – April 28, 2025
I’m sorry for not getting back to you this past week my phone got stolen, I’m still trying to get a new one.

 

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TheDoctor, 18
Some straight boys I’ve fucked. Drunk and full of pills.

Comments

TheDoctor (Owner) – May 9, 2025
They all had really tight cunts and I always feel guilty when I have to struggle to get in. Although it’s amazing when the sphincters give way and accept that they have lost the battle.

IknowIrathernotsay – May 8, 2025
Heads up bro. I recently dosed my best friend until he was human meat and it was heaven on fucking earth.

TheDoctor (Owner) – May 4, 2025
His parts were my parts. No, that touch wasn’t too inappropriate, he didn’t give a shit! He was my friend and then he was my naked sex toy! I stripped him, I made out with him! I randomly approached him as he snored and grabbed those special places without asking! It’s what I wanted & he couldn’t stop me!

LetsFuckNow – May 4, 2025
Anything you care to say about the yummy boy in the purple shirt?

 

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DaddyIssues, 20
tina calls you i had it

Comments

DaddyIssues (Owner) – May 23, 2025
i ready for ga she kick me out

PIGGYFKR – May 20, 2025
i had tina and pissing in you mouth licking you ass a experience in ohio we live together damm i own you all night my cock shootin load in you every 20 min it got

freshscatthug – May 14, 2025
aye im looking for them logs out yo ass and piss thank you

MasterViciousLord – May 13, 2025
sorry dint check this b4 parade but still want you to giv you my black babies punk

DaddyIssues (Owner) – May 11, 2025
are you going to parade

MasterViciousLord – May 7, 2025
near k & A holler back

 

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Faded, 18
I am Sebastion newly 20yr fag cum slut from Las Vegas who’s allergic to surface-level shit. Therapy’s working, but I’m still a mess.

I am looking for a severely alpha man who will drug me, throw me in a trunk, drive to the middle of nowhere then rape me while strangling my neck until I become unconscious and limp. Rape me while I’m unconscious and limp, too. Hit me in the face, kick my ribs, stomp on my cock, crush my balls, whip my back to shreds, piss down my gaping throat, ram huge toys down my throat and up my motionless cunt, show the unconscious me no mercy.

I want to stay a sexy unconscious body for the rest of my life woken up occasionally and told what I missed and only be given piss intravenously to survive.

If you’re the right kind of person, there’s a lot going on in here.

Comments

Faded (Owner) – May 23, 2025
This fag cum slut is now Fully Owned For Life By MASTER CARL. MASTER CARL Is The Epitome Of Superior Perfection And This rape slut Loves, Worships, And Thanks MASTER CARL For Forcing it To stay Awake.

BodyPainHunter – May 19, 2025
Having been the caretaker for my comatose husband for two years I can tell you that having an unconsciousness body around 24/7 that you can fuck whenever you want gets uninteresting pretty quickly not to mention it gets flabby.

Faded (Owner) – May 14, 2025
Please be a psychopath and stay out of the gay scene.

Mafioso – May 13, 2025
If you don’t want to strangle him put a pair of headphones on him and hit play—He’s gone, dude. Hypno loops, weed clouds make his brain melt. The more he drools, the harder he throbs.

Faded (Owner) – May 9, 2025
I play guitar (heavy metal) to a competent standard.

 

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Twink2breed, 19
Hey, I am Tony 45 years old. I am obsessed with the thought of my 18 year old boyfriend being married. So I am looking for instant marriage to him. If you don’t want that don’t even bother. I want him to be the perfect wife for eternity. Locked up in basement, never get out, no food, just eating shit, never see daylight or another person than you or me, animal sex, torture, choke, aggressive, knife, needle, shit, fire, gun. screaming, crying, no limits or rights, no phone, no escape, FOREVER. I am dead serious.

Comments

Twink2breed (Owner) – May 19, 2025
He smokes 420 all day everyday. He can finish off 14g in one week easily and would smoke even more if I let him dip into my stash.

Twink2breed (Owner) – May 17, 2025
He listens to lots of K-pop: TAEMIN, SUPER JUNIOR, NU’EST, SHINee, ATEEZ, MONSTA X, GOT7, f(x), EXO, BTS, and BIGBANG.

 

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Justdontcare, 19
🐷 slut 👀 for Slam rn

Only for guys in Idaho for now

Fry my brain if you can

Comments

YourCageAwaits – May 17, 2025
Can you make me feel something?

Love_on_tour – May 14, 2025
Are you tired of trading sex for the drugs you need?
Then you’ve come to the right man.
Have psychosocial problems?
Have HIV, STIs, AIDS?
Having trouble with the police or authorities?
ARE YOU PIRATICALLY INTO EVERY KINK?
I’ll take you.

Justdontcare (Owner) – May 12, 2025
I’ve been asked is what’s the round disc on my ankle bracelet? Well it’s a GPS tag so my parole office knows EXACTLY where I am 24/7.

Oink🐷Oink🐷Oink🐷 – May 10, 2025
In his OnlyFans fem twink utility bottom era

make_me_hot – May 8, 2025
Buddy and I ministered the needle. Jeans to his knees then … rawr. Never cummed so much like that, endless jets in and on his ass, and my buddy also put a quart of juice in him. We couldn’t see his ass anymore, so much cum.

Justdontcare (Owner) – May 6, 2025
I also sometimes do porn but would be genuinely be surprised if anyone here knew me

 

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knifeboy, 19
I like sharp things shoved up my hole. Cut me deep. Yeah I know. It can only happen once. Whatevs.

Comments

knifeboy (Owner) – May 11, 2025
Once you’ve shoved it in just go ahead and keep slicing north.

 

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Silva, 22
I can do everything scat uro anal deep throat bondage torture blood all the craziest things that come into your head when you look at my pictures.

It makes me so fucking pumped.

Maybe fist me too but if your arm is like Popeye’s it’s a definite NO sorry.

I have a unused butt.

I am despicable.

Comments

FunsizeDriller – May 18, 2025
I know this guy, he’s really hot, Spanish, straight, and doesn’t know his pictures are being used on this site.

DarkHorse – May 14, 2025
Bury you alive sealed up in an inner wall bricked up forever chained stretched out tight and concealed up for ever.
But before use you beat you up spit roast fuck you gang bang then once fully half dead drag you via the neck to final destination resting place hung up nailed up tight brick by brick up in front to last brick goes in gone for ever.
Ideal for all despicable bitches raped knocked out taken away bricked up in wall never heard of ever again.

 

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forevernotyours, 18
Haircuts get me hot. The sound of clippers, the weight of the cape, the surrender to the chair—it’s filthy in all the right ways.

Sit me down for a humiliating head shave or a slow, degrading buzz. Exhibitionist? Absolutely. Let them watch as the hair falls. Got a mirror? Even better—I love looking at myself.

There’s no safe word between barber and degradee when I’m in the chair—just breathy moans, fresh cuts, and filthy control.

Comments

TinyDinkyDaffy – May 10, 2025
I’m 20 years old and live thousands of miles away from you tragically but I thought I should tell you I would kill my entire family to cut your hair. If I could sit you down and cut away for hours and hours I would kill my extended family. And I’m Hispanic so I have a giant family.

forevernotyours (Owner) – May 7, 2025
My dick got amputated because I slammed too much chems in it.

SleazySam – May 7, 2025
Didn’t you used to be in porn?

crueltwink – May 5, 2025
I live for the earthy, lingering smell of well shaved teen head — that tart, primal stink after his hair’s been offloaded, a smell that speaks before words. His made me leak like a fountain.

 

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likelynot, 22
There is a surgeon in Mexico who specializes in surgery to achieve both urine and fecal incontinence. It’s permanent, no reconstructive surgeries possible. It involves separation/removal of the levator Ani (especially the puborectalis). It will result in the inability to contract the external anal sphincter. It will remove the muscle “sling” internally so everything “flows” all the time as well as being unable to contract/clench. I want that beyond measure and I seek an extreme Daddy who’ll drive me there for the surgery and back in return for … whatever. I’m sure you can think of something. I live in Bristol Va, off exit 7, about 5 minutes or so from Walmart and Sams Club.

Comments

Dessert-is-served – May 21, 2025
Cmere boy

Robby234 – May 20, 2025
Wow, he is somehow like Jack Dawson (Leonardo DiCaprio) in the film Titanic – his face and his movements; not here on the pics but in reality.

likelynot (Owner) – May 18, 2025
I do not have any tattoos, I do not drink alcohol, I have never tried any kind of drugs, and I do not want to.

 

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BeatAndDelete, 18
I am Pepe. My Master Carlos has some bad shit going on and needs to offload me. I need some macho bastard who’ll use me, subjugate me, humiliate me, and either screw me all the time or traffic me. I’m already a brainless fucking whore.

Comments

HoosierMVP – May 2, 2025
Needs to have his balls ruptured, his ballsac obliterated, fucked with a hair brush and pozzed.

BeatAndDelete (Owner) – May 2, 2025
To Whoever kept reporting Pepe for being underage, he is of age and I have the ID to prove it. He’s just blessed to look this young.

Dadnotdaddy – May 2, 2025
I am brand new in this world but I would like to fingerfuck you again. Your asshole’s so hot it cooked my fingers like mozzarella sticks. I did it 2 times and I liked it.

 

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Sammy, 21
I don’t like my chances.

Comments

BeMyWallet – May 19, 2025
If you aren’t already in extreme pain, please find me.

MrHasItAll – May 16, 2025
My name is Dylan and he doesn’t agree with me but he needs to be turned into a no limit no escape total object gimp permanently sealed in rubber except for the nostrils. I know that this will be a long journey and it will be very boring and depressing for him, but I do truly believe deep down that this is what he was meant for.

Piir4te – May 13, 2025
His anxiety level is so freaking hot!

hairygreg – May 9, 2025
I was in a relationship with Sam in high school. Decided to part ways as I wanted something more extreme or how ever you want to put it. Jumped the gun I guess.

 

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SnowCold, 19
I’m a sicko gaymer fag, looking for extremely mean, selfish, Sadistic old (50+) pervs who want to torture a fag as we play games together, but I’m into anyone who wants to abuse and torture me whether you play games or just watch me play the game and torture me it doesn’t matter.

I unfortunately don’t it at my place anymore due to past stalking issues.

For those of you who are interested in gaming I’m currently obsessed with marvel rivals and would love to be tortured as I play it. Besides that I also mainly play Nintendo games like splatoon and smash bros, but I’m also willing to play any game you want.

Comments

Loosegoose – May 20, 2025
Mission accomplished, and while he played Marvel Rivals to his initial delight. I used a Cruel Condom. It has a pointed sharp end and rough mesh. Its primary purpose is to permanently destroy the hole. Sensation-wise, it is a weird one like having hundreds of pulsing pin pricks in your cock head with each thrust). It leaves my cock with very fine scratch lines and looking generally beat-up (but not bleeding). It takes a couple of days for the redness and scratches to disappear. As for the boy, as twisted as he may have been, he was in absolute screaming agony as his hole was torn completely apart.

SnowCold (Owner) – May 14, 2025
Look I get that I’m cute but if I just wanted to get fucked I’ve got plenty of friends for that.

SnowCold (Owner) – May 7, 2025
Well I hate to be back on here, but my regular got too old and had to go into a nursing home with alzheimer.

 

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Palimpsest, 23
When you just want some trick to put a gun in your mouth and blow your brains out but have to act all mysterious and nonchalant.

Comments

ChunkeeMonkee – May 14, 2025
Warning, left-winger!

Palimpsest (Owner) – May 7, 2025
I’m not really into puppy play cos I don’t understand that.

willthejerk – May 3, 2025
Don’t ask him why, it kills the vibe.

 

 

*

p.s. Hey. ** James Bennett, Hi, James. Great about the successful event and your shining there. Yeah, it seems like a really nice scene they have going on there. Strange how cats are so suave but they lack propriety. Only one night left now, right? You can do it. Week’s been ok. Lots of film stuff, of course. Meeting with ‘RT’s’ French distributor tonight, which should be exciting. Saw the new Wes Anderson film which I loved. Temperate, still cooler than not weather. All in all, highly doable so far. xo, moi ** horatio. Cool. Glad Kluge might’ve snagged you. That is your real name! Amazing! Big luck with the submission. We just submitted ‘RT’ to a third Chicago area film festival, so it’s starting to seem like one of them should take it, if that’s how odds work. Yeah, I’d love to see your film once its surface is polished to your satisfaction. Forced Exposure was key, for sure. Always read it. Learned so much there, and bought so many records due to them. Amazing you get to stockpile them, and, yeah, they should assist with your project. I don’t know that Athens festival. I think Ryan Trecartin is an incredible genius. I’m totally in awe of his work. He and I had a rambling Zoom conversation for Artforum a few years ago. Let’s see … here. He invited Zac and me to come visit his compound, and that festival could be the excuse. I’ll look into it. It sounds like must try. Thank you! Great day to you and yours. ** Jeff J, Hi, Jeff! Great to see you! My total pleasure on the Kluge shebang, of course. ‘News from Ideological Antiquity’ is amazing. I saw ‘Nachrichten vom Großen Krieg’ at a museum, and it was wonderful. Nice you’re hitting LA. Let’s see … you just missed a really good Alice Coltrane show at the Hammer unfortunately. Marciano is worth visiting. Building’s great and their permanent collection is top notch. For galleries, use the Artforum Artguide app. It’s good. Sure, re: Zooming. I’ll be here until mid-June, then we go show ‘RT’ in SF. Yes, I’ve been very happy with the response to the film so far. Things look good. I’m doing well and I’ll pass your love onto Zac. ‘RT’ is getting a theater release in France, amazingly enough, and we’re meeting with the distributor tonight, so I’ll see him then. Hugs and love! ** Misanthrope, Sorry about the ‘hot’ dad question, haha. Of course over here in mighty France even your average person has a high chance of knowing those writers. ** _Black_Acrylic, Cool, so glad it interested you. As is often the case, sadly the ‘Twin Peaks’ marathon is not available on French MUBI. Alas. ** Steeqhen, Hey. Hm, in my world, social media is not primarily a negative force, annoying, sometimes for sure, re-inventive/disruptive, sure, but that’s good to me, so I don’t know. I’m not a doom-y type, and I would say it’s done more good than bad for people I know? Adjusting can be a growth thing. ** Jung ieon, Hi! Good to see you again. Your school projects sound very interesting as school projects go. Are you making a short movie? Is that what you meant? Awesome about the festival and its featuring of faves of yours. I’m excited for you. ** Steve, It probably will be okay, but the worrying is part and parcel, I guess, sorry. I know of Lucy Liyou, but I don’t … think I’ve heard her, if it’s a her. I’ll go investigate, Thanks, Steve. ** pancakeIan, It’s always so heartening when artists are still going full board at, say, his age. As one begins to approach that age, it’s very hopeful. Yeah, I think the Arthur Miller connection was my justification. I know Don Bachardy a little, and, strangely, I think we even talked about autograph collection once unless I’m tripping. Ha, I would be surprised if I’m in Christian’s ‘VG’ character, but I did strongly encourage him to accept that role, so … ? ** Carsten, I came across that autograph book about 20, 25 years ago somewhere, so I guess it might still exist, but fuck knows where. In some storage facility maybe. Oh, man, thank you so much about ‘PGL’. That really means a lot coming from you. Really, thank you. Wow, and hugs. ** Bill, What happened to your internet? If I lose internet even for an hour, it freaks me out. That signed ‘Baby Leg’ could score you a mansion someday if you’re patient and if books hang in there. ** Alistair, I wonder if super famous people feel like they’re handing out money when they sign things. That title ‘Hi Too Loo Rye’ is very familiar. I’ll go find the song. ‘I Saw the TV Glow’ isn’t boring, Jesus, what a boring thing to think and say. Congrats on the poem, of course. What would you do at the bakery? Bake? When I was a kid, my school always took us kids on a field trip to this big bakery in LA, Helms Bakery, long defunct, but it was dreamy and still is in my brain. So fingers stranglingly crossed! I get sunburned very easily too. I slather on SunBlock if I even take a lengthy walk on a cloudy day. Ouch. ** julian, It does sound New Zealand-y, doesn’t it? Ha. It’s a shame my The Same band didn’t pan out because we used the name thoughtfully and in a conceptual way, like, what we’re doing is ‘the same’ as everybody else. But, you know, better, at least in our heads. I’m mostly listening to the new Sparks album right now. I’m not sure if it’ll inspire anything. What about you? ** Uday, Sorry about the insane sickness. An insane sickness is intense to imagine. But you can still think and type at least. I’ve never read Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, and his dying made me realise I really need to. Do recommend anything of his in particular? ** HaRpEr //, Yes, one can dream. Amazing about scoring that signed Ashbery by accident. Mine is a signed copy of ‘The Tennis Court Oath’. Okay, Carroll’s short stories, I’m on it. Thanks! Makes sense about Carroll’s influence there. A friend of mine recently tried to make the case that Dickens is the secret huge influence on post-modern fiction. I’m still trying to wrap my head around that. I just simply can’t accept a world where John Waters or David Lynch can’t make whatever film they want to. ** Hugo, Hi, Hugo. Welcome! A cover letter … you mean the kind of letter you write to approach an agent or a publisher or something? I’m rotten at those. They seem to need a very delicate balance of humility and assertiveness that’s tough. Let’s see … don’t make it too long, just long enough that whoever can tell that you believe in your work. I always go with being very grateful at the opportunity. But you need to express confidence even if you don’t feel confident? I don’t know. Honestly, I’m not good at that stuff. I do honestly believe that the part of you that tells you what you wrote is shit is a liar. Besides, you can’t be the judge of that yourself. All the more reason to get the work out there so others can give you positive feedback that you won’t be able to believe is untrue. That’s probably not much help. I can’t really say too much about Michael’s situation because I’m asked not to, but, in terms of his health. he’s not doing well at all, I’m very sorry to say. Your comment is great and not at all rambling. Please do comment further if you feel so inclined. It’s a pleasure for me. Thanks! ** Darby 🐈‍⬛, You have a dog, or, well, your name does. Nice about those magazines. I’ve never heard of ‘Lowdown’. I suspect there were a lot of those kinds of magazines back then. I only really know magazines from the early-60s onwards because that’s when my brain became independent and useable. When I was a kid I was really into magazines. Like when I was 10, 11 I was obsessed with television for some reason and subscribed to TV Guide, Variety, Hollywood Reporter and these industry trade magazines, I don’t know why. And edgy satirical magazines like Mad, Cracked, Sick. And horror magazines like Famous Monsters of Film Land, and those kinds of things, So I get it. I liked your video mix. It streamed and perked my day up. You take care too, my pal. ** Okay, it’s last day of the month, and the boys show up like clockwork, and do have at ’em. See you tomorrow.

 

‘Though often acknowledged as one of the most important avant-gardists of his generation in Europe, Alexander Kluge does not think of himself as such. He considers himself a partisan of an “arriere-garde” whose project is not to push into new aesthetic territory or be the vanguard of a new kind of film art, but to “bring everything forward”—to bring forward all the lost utopian aspirations of past political and aesthetic projects, all the wishes and hopes that history has left unrealized. His is a project of redeeming past failures. This might seem an odd claim by Kluge, who was a pioneer of the German New Wave as it emerged in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s, and a signatory and moving force behind the famous Oberhausen Manifesto of 1962 which declared “The old film is dead.” But like his intellectual precursor Walter Benjamin, Kluge has always thought any project for authentic renewal must consciously detour through the past in order to avoid creating what another of his great intellectual mentors, Bertolt Brecht, called the “bad new”—essentially the recreation of existing oppressive social relations and tired aesthetic forms in the guise of a glossy, marketable and illusory “New.” For Brecht, Fascism was the exemplary “bad new”; for Kluge, the “bad new” consisted of the dreary products of the “culture industry” and the tedious social conditions prevailing in Germany—about which he once said that they were bad enough that no one was really happy, but not bad enough to make anyone do anything about them.

‘Maybe our times are not so different, so it’s fitting that the Goethe Institute and the German Film Museum in Munich have decided to bring out a definitive edition of Kluge’s collected cinematic works in honour of his 75th birthday. It is long past due to bring Kluge’s work into public consciousness outside of Germany, where he is far from forgotten and where his style of creation and his role as a public intellectual are not so foreign. To make us aware that such figures still exist might be the greatest service this new edition of DVDs will perform in North America, where it is hard to imagine a personage like Kluge emerging organically from the political and cultural landscape. For Kluge is not only a filmmaker, but an intellectualof an older type whose realm of activity and expertise is astonishingly broad.

‘Kluge’s influence on German cinema extends far beyond the formal or stylistic influences he has exerted over filmmakers such as Harun Farocki. Without Kluge’s untiring activism on the part of the newly emerging Young German Film in the ‘60s, the system of public funding and training infrastructure that helped produce some of the most recognizable names in German cinema—Herzog, Wenders, Schlöndorff—never would have come into being. In addition to producing some 15 feature-length films and almost 20 shorts in his almost five decades of activity, Kluge has also written at least two novels and thousands of short stories that have garnered virtually every major literary and cultural prize that Germany has to offer. He is also an important critical theorist, the most interesting heir to the Marxist tradition of Benjamin and Adorno, who has published several major volumes of political philosophy with his collaborator Oskar Negt, most notably The Public Sphere and Experience (1972), a veritable bible for many leftist intellectuals in the ‘70s, and the massive Geschichte und Eigensinn (History and Obstinacy, 1981), a beautiful and complex rethinking of Marx’s theory of labour that explodes the generic and formal bounds of what has become known as “theory,” mixing together original work with hundreds of images and quotations from the past 800 years of German history. And since the mid-‘80s, Kluge has been producing a series of eclectic weekly television shows as a private entrepreneur—a contemporary cultural businessman cast in the mold of the auteurs who came to prominence in the European new waves of the ‘50s and ‘60s.

‘It is difficult to think of a comparable contemporary intellectual anywhere in the world, nor someone who offers such a radically different image of just what a filmmaker can be. The Film Museum’s first DVD collection (to be released in North America by Facets Multimedia in January 2008), comprised of all the features and short films Kluge produced for the cinema from 1960 through 1986—to be followed by a second collection consisting of primarily video, film and television material shot since 1985—is both a thrilling and daunting encounter for those who have yet to discover the extent of Kluge’s work. Fortunately, the beginning is not a bad place to start, since Kluge’s earliest films are perhaps his most accessible and provide a manageable immersion into his characteristic obsessions and quirks, his refreshingly strange mix of high and low culture, and his juxtapositions of lofty intellectual abstraction with the most basely material of bodily humour. Starting with the early work also provides a slow immersion into what is a truly unique method of film construction, to use a metaphor Kluge prefers, one which becomes over time increasingly complex and seemingly arbitrary. A new viewer needs to learn to watch Kluge, and in some ways to be initiated into a new and exceptional kind of filmic pleasure. Resolutely Brechtian in this, Kluge considers it to be part of what he calls the “utopia of film” that even the spectator nurtured on standard Hollywood fare—or its German counterpart in the horrid ‘50s Heimat films—can learn new ways of enjoying which are not merely distracting (or “culinary” as Brecht would put it), but which combine the more aesthetic and visual pleasures of cinema with the less frequent but no less intense pleasures of learning, knowing, and thinking.

‘Kluge’s start came after a rather inauspicious attempt to break into film. As the now almost mythical story goes, his friend and mentor Adorno helped him get on to Fritz Lang’s set as he was filming The Tiger of Eschnapur (1958). Kluge, apparently appalled at the indignities Lang suffered at the hands of his producers, retreated to the studio canteen and began writing the short stories that would later be collected in his first published work of fiction, Case Histories (1962). The experience only furthered Kluge’s conviction that a new, independent kind of cinema, one not exclusively oriented towards commercial success, was necessary if a vibrant film culture was to emerge in Germany. In 1960 he teamed with Peter Schamoni to direct his first film, the 12-minute Brutality in Stone (1961), which inaugurated Kluge’s decades-long obsession with Germany’s contemporary relationship to its fraught past. Brutality’s topic at first seems remote from the horrors of Nazi Germany, being a study of Nazi architecture and its apotheosis in the Nuremberg Party Grounds, site of the famous Nazi Party rallies and the shooting set for Triumph of the Will (1935).

‘The choice of National Socialist culture per se, as opposed to National Socialist politics or racial policy, as the starting point for his lifelong historical project is no accident, convinced as Kluge is that the cultural realm, and cinema in particular, is crucial to “organizing human experience” in the 20th century. It is characteristic of Kluge’s adamant modernism that his work bears this mark of cultural guilt that must be processed as much as any subjective and personal guilt felt on the part of individual Germans. The film’s brilliance lies in the way it locates the Nazi genocide within the heart of this falsely utopian culture, a culture that took great pains to prevent the horrors of the regime from breaking through its glossy and well-choreographed edifice. In a fantastic bit of montage, the camera slowly tracks through abandoned rooms and colonnades on the party grounds as excerpts from Rudolf Höss’ Auschwitz diaries are read, as if the very spirit of Nazi crimes haunted these now empty spaces. Though Kluge remains concerned with the legacies of National Socialism to this day, it should be noted that Brutality stands out as the only consistent and sustained treatment of the Nazi genocide within Kluge’s filmic oeuvre, whereas his later, more reticent meditations on the subject have occasioned some serious criticism.

‘Kluge’s breakthrough came with his first feature film, grievously translated in English as Yesterday Girl (1966), which won the Silver Lion in Venice in 1966. A truer rendering would be “Taking Leave of Yesterday,” an ironic title pointing to the plight of the main character and her inability to ever really escape the past. This is perhaps Kluge’s most accessible feature, and many critics have noted its obvious stylistics affinities to the early work of Godard, who had an enormous influence on Kluge at this time (Kluge has remarked that Breathless inspired him to go into filmmaking in the first place).

‘Yet those critics who paint the early Kluge as little more than a degraded imitator of Godard miss out on the fact that there’s something very different going on in Kluge, something that sets him apart from Godard and the other modernist filmmakers who would later be celebrated in the ‘70s in journals such as Screen. The French brand of “political modernism,” as D.N. Rodowick has labelled it, emerged from an intellectual tradition deeply informed by various strains of French Marxism, especially Louis Althusser and Guy Debord, as well as the structural semiotics of Roland Barthes and the theorists associated with the journal Tel quel. Kluge, however, came of intellectual age under the aegis of Brecht, Adorno, and the other thinkers associated with the Frankfurt School. Adorno, who discouraged Kluge’s filmmaking aspirations despite introducing him to Lang, was deeply antipathetic toward mass culture, and cinema and television most particularly, as was clear from the notorious “Culture Industry” chapter in The Dialectic of Enlightenment. For Adorno, cinema stood at odds with reason and enlightenment and constituted little more than a very effective and profitable method of manipulating the filmgoing public. He had little faith that cinema could escape its integration into an all-encompassing system of commodity culture and ever attain the status of Art.

‘Perhaps this cultural and intellectual inheritance accounts for the nagging pessimism of Yesterday Girl, which is offset by the beautiful black-and-white cinematography of Edgar Reitz, who would later helm the epic Heimat series. The main character, Anita G., stumbles her way through the landscape of the Federal Republic, from boyfriend to boyfriend, bad job to bad job, always on the run from the police who may or may not be chasing her, until she turns herself in, having no other options, in order to find a place to deliver the child she is carrying. The film is a great portrait of the malaise Kluge saw following in the wake of the great Wirtschaftswunder, and the nascent commodity culture (which gets a far more sanguine treatment from Godard) of the Federal Republic provides minimal pleasures to distract the main characters from their unpromising futures. The film does not suggest any course of action to change this situation, or for that matter to change Anita’s fictive life, and though Kluge has always maintained that his films are “partisan,” this refusal to create an agitational cinema did not sit well with more radical elements of the German left in the ‘60s, as became clear in 1968 at the Berlin Film Festival when students pelted him with eggs.

‘In 1968 Kluge premiered his second feature, Artists in the Big-Top: Perplexed, which for many is Kluge’s true masterpiece, though it prompted such confusion on the part of many viewers that Kluge offered free tickets for a second viewing. To the extent that it retains a coherent narrative, Artists follows the circus owner Leni Peickert, a classically stubborn, even obtuse, Kluge heroine, as she tries to fulfill her dream of creating a “reform circus”, a pursuit which of course proves to be hopeless—in the end she liquidates her assets, including selling off her beloved elephants, gives up and goes to work in television, opting for the “long march through the cultural institutions.” For some, this was an obvious abdication of revolutionary cultural aspirations and the more militant strains of Brechtianism current at the time. But the film is also a rather complex, if perhaps ultimately failed, attempt to negotiate between the poles of a Brechtian engagement and an Adornian belief in the radical negative potential of high “autonomous” art, both of which seemed insufficient on their own as self-contained programs. Yet Kluge, ever the dialectician, does not abandon either of these projects but seeks a rapprochement between them, Brecht’s didacticism matched with a healthy dose of Adornian negativity and skepticism. At no point do Kluge’s films resolve into either propagandistic sloganeering or an irresponsible withdrawal from their obligations to engage the world.’ — Christopher Pavsek

 

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Stills

 

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Further

Alexander Kluge @ IMDb
Alexander Kluge Site (in English)
Alexander Kluge Site (in German)
Alexander Kluge’s books @ New Directions
The Stubborn Utopian: The Films of Alexander Kluge
Ben Lerner Interviews Alexander Kluge
Alexander Kluge interviewed by Jonathan Thomas
ALEXANDER KLUGE: ARCHAEOLOGIST AND VISIONARY
Alexander Kluge by Gary Indiana
Alexander Kluge and Hans Ulrich Obrist: What Art Can Do
The attack of the 13th fairy
DECEMBER BY ALEXANDER KLUGE AND GERHARD RICHTER
Alexander Kluge: ‘something almost monstrous in so much talent’
A short story about Donald Trump by Alexander Kluge
A PLURIVERSE OF POSSIBILITY: THINKING ABOUT THE FUTURE WITH ALEXANDER KLUGE
‘Body Count’, by Alexander Kluge
INDEFATIGABLE POLYPHONY, OR ALEXANDER KLUGE’S NARRATION IN COMPLETE THOUGHTS
Brecht Today: Interview with Alexander Kluge
A CINEMA OF CITATION: THE FILMS OF ALEXANDER KLUGE
“A CERTAIN LUXURY WE CALL FREEDOM” – MAX DAX INTERVIEWS ALEXANDER KLUGE
Alexander Kluge: «Weil wir Trump haben, brauchen wir einen Gegen-Trump»
Revisiting the Films of Alexander Kluge
‘I ONLY BLAST UNDER WRITTEN ORDERS’, by Alexander Kluge
Brecht and Labor in Post-1968 Cinema: Elio Petri and Alexander Kluge

 

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Extras

Alexander Kluge talks about his mentor, Fritz Lang

Heiner Müller und Alexander Kluge mögen Death Metal

Alexander Kluge im Gespräch mit Anselm Kiefer

Alexander Kluge (dctp): „Freuen Sie sich über die neuen Mitbürger?“

 

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Interview
from MUBI

 

NOTEBOOK: To begin with, how did you become interested in filmmaking? Why did you want to be a filmmaker?

ALEXANDER KLUGE: I am an author of literature. I have been a lawyer, and on the other hand, I wrote books. But I was intensely interested in modern music—Alban Berg, Webern, Stockhausen, etc. Adorno took the same interest in modern music. This music is moving. A book is not moving, and therefore I was interested in film as something between literature and music.

We were very enthusiastic about the film of the 20s. We did not like the film of that present day, of the 50s at all, especially German film—the same UFA-principled film of the Nazi period. But the Nazi period minus politics. This is bad enough. Therefore our favorites were Hans Richter, Fritz Lang, Griffith, and the earliest films.

NOTEBOOK: Yes, I read a recent interview with Werner Herzog in which he said, “My connection to the cinema of the Twenties has anchored my work much more than anything else.”

KLUGE: This is exactly the same with my patriotism in film. I am a patriot of the 20s concerning film.

NOTEBOOK: A vibrant avant-garde culture flourished in the Weimar Republic for men such as Lang. Do you believe that the filmmakers who came to prominence in the 1970s relocated it in New German Cinema?

KLUGE: Well, I think that we learned from these filmmakers and from dramatists like Bertolt Brecht and Piscator. We have never been only filmmakers. Cinema d’auteur is always open to other kinds of art—to literature, to music, and not so much to photography because it doesn’t move. We liked James Joyce as much as the filmmakers of the 20s, and we introduced this style of montage into the 60s. The film I made, Yesterday Girl, has more to do with Eisenstein than with any German director of the 50s, 40s, 30s. And Fritz Lang belongs to the 20s.

NOTEBOOK: Why does Yesterday Girl have so much to do with Eisenstein?

KLUGE: It has to do with him because it is a similar kind of film montage. But my kind of montage is more like Godard than Eisenstein.

NOTEBOOK: You once stated that Breathless (1960) inspired you to become a filmmaker. And many critics have observed similarities between Yesterday Girl and Godard’s early work. What was the impact of Godard on you?

KLUGE: He’s my alterer bruder. He’s two years older than me. I was struck by his first films. We are followers of this French kind of filmmaking. The German way to make Autorenfilm/cinema d’auteur—if you compare Fassbinder, for instance, it’s a little bit more wild. We are more barbaric than the French.

NOTEBOOK: Do you believe that the Autorenfilm of the 1960s and 1970s fulfilled the Oberhausen Manifesto’s aims?

KLUGE: To some extent, yes, because all these short filmmakers started to make feature films. But there’s always been a fraction that stayed with the short film. For instance, I made a lot of one-minute films during the last five years. They are even shorter than the ten-minute films we made in the 60s. I believe in very short films, pieces, fragments on one hand, and on the other hand, in films of eight or ten or twelve hours. Did you ever see the film News from Ideological Antiquity: Marx – Eisenstein – Capital (2008)?

NOTEBOOK: Unfortunately, I haven’t, but I do know of it.

KLUGE: It is a nine-hour film consisting of fragments, and this is exactly the way Adorno wrote books, Walter Benjamin made The Arcades Project. Or in music—the modernists in the 20s tried to make new kinds, to find new forms of music. I still belong to this modernism of the 20s. A lot of others, like Edgar Reitz, did the same and made one hundred minute films on one hand, and on the other hand, one to ten-minute films and then twelve-hour films, eight-hour films, four-hour films.

NOTEBOOK: The one-minute films remind me of the films from the very earliest days of cinema, such as those of Georges Méliès and the Lumière brothers.

KLUGE: Yes, and Edison.

NOTEBOOK: Early cinema is very important to you. Was there a certain promise it held?

KLUGE: I believe film is like the phoenix. He dies, and then he rises again. This is the symbol of film history for me. If you go online, on YouTube, you will find one-minute films again. And we make them in 65mm. This is a very valuable kind of filmmaking. 35mm is the normal feature film format, and if you have double the negative, then you have 65mm film. It’s huge and very brilliant. We showed these minute films at the Venice Film Festival.

NOTEBOOK: To return to Autorenfilm, how do you view the contributions of your fellow filmmakers?

KLUGE: Well, they are very different. Each is an individual. It was a very strong group of about thirty young people—men and women. Some of them are still unknown, but they belong together. And our center of theory was at the Ulm School of Design. It is a college of design and the successor of the Bauhaus of the 20s. We had a film department in the school.

NOTEBOOK: Members of New German Cinema also made cooperative films, such as Germany in Autumn (1978), The Candidate (1980), and War and Peace (1982). How did you go about making these films? And how were your experiences on the cooperative films different from others?

KLUGE: I am a great ally of cooperative filmmaking, because film is not something you can make in your own room. Something exists that the economist-philosopher Adam Smith calls “animal spirits.” One worker, he says, works less in one hundred hours than one hundred workers in one hour. Because if people work together and there is cooperation, there is a certain spirit. Smith calls that “animal spirit.” If they are together, they feel stronger and are more inventive. I believe that imagination itself is collective. In my mind, there is a chorus of 20, 40, 50 ancestors and friends. For instance, my sister—I worked very often with my sister, an actress, and she is always present in my mind. Therefore I am not alone. And in a collective film like Germany in Autumn, all these people who work together behave more freely. The cameramen also behave differently. The directors are not tiger tamers anymore; they are more like gardeners. So they behave different on a collective film than on films they make only for themselves.

NOTEBOOK: You collect and assemble a great wealth of materials in your films. How do you go about doing this?

KLUGE: I am convinced that the material—it’s not what I make as a director, but what I meet as a director. This helps to bring a plurality into the film. The idea is a prism, not spectacle.

NOTEBOOK: So the material comes to you?

KLUGE: Yes, but I am able to seduce the material sometimes.

NOTEBOOK: You have said that films arise in the heads of spectators. What do you mean by this?

KLUGE: Since the Stone Age, people carry a kind of cinema in their heads. They painted memories of fights with rhinoceroses and other wild animals on the walls of their caves during this period. That was the beginning of cinema. This was already a kind of film, because it moved in their minds; outside it was static. Therefore cinema existed long before cinema was invented as a technical method. This kind of observation within every human being…they cannot but use their imagination. It is a film that is revitalized if you go to the cinema. Today people do not go to the cinema as often, and TV is not the same. But the pictures in people’s minds are still cinema.

NOTEBOOK: And these pictures, in a way, help them to live their lives?

KLUGE: Yes.

NOTEBOOK: Considering people do not go to the cinema as often anymore, what do you think is the future of cinema?

KLUGE: It’s a very complicated question. The cinema within our minds will continue and has an eternal life. Outside, in the cinemas, the distributors avoid real cinema. They show—well, you know what happens in the cinema. This does not have too much to do with film history. In Venice or Cannes or the Museum of Modern Art or film museums, you find a lot of film, and this is the second life of film—sometimes without much of an audience. But if you have two people who are interested in cinema, it’s still cinema.

NOTEBOOK: Lastly, you deal in wishes in your films. Would you share some of your own?

KLUGE: Well, you do not wish in every moment. You should ask me in what context.

NOTEBOOK: Well, what do you wish as a filmmaker?

KLUGE: I wish to cooperate with at least ten or twelve young filmmakers and to make film. This one is very simple. Film history is a matter of practice, and therefore I would like to have this practice. By the way, we have dctp.tv (Development Company for Television Programs) online, and there you will find a lot of films of mine and of others. Then you can understand it is not necessary to wish, because I have good cooperation with a lot of people there. You can find films of 140 minutes consisting of twenty or thirty pieces on different subjects. The pity is it’s in German. But you can watch the pictures regardless of the language, and there are lots of pictures.

I can tell you another wish. I would love to be accepted by an audience on the other side of the Atlantic.

 

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19 of Alexander Kluge’s 132 films

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Brutality in Stone (1961)
‘In his experimental short film _Brutalitaet in Stein_ (brutality in stone), Alexander Kluge demonstrates how Nazi architecture used dimensions of inhuman and super-human scale to bolster the regime’s politics of the same kind. Shots of huge neo-classical architectural structures from the Nazi period are confronted with equally anti-human national-socialist language as a voice-over.’ — IMDb

the entire film

 

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Yesterday Girl (1966)
‘As the flagship film of the “young German cinema” movement, Alexander Kluge’s first feature, Yesterday Girl, paved the way for the New German Cinema of the 1970s. Produced immediately after the Oberhausen Manifesto, Yesterday Girl is an experimental, youth-oriented satire with a fragmentary story about an unruly heroine named Anita G. (Alexandra Kluge, the director’s sister and frequent collaborator.) Like any postwar German youth worth her salt, Anita wants to break free of the collective baggage left by her parent’s generation, but her flee from East to West Germany only confirms that conservatism and scarred memories thrive on both sides of the wall. A nominee for the Golden Lion and winner of a Special Jury Prize at the 1966 Venice Film Festival, Yesterday Girl made it clear the waning German film industry was headed for a renaissance.’ — Facets

Excerpt

Excerpt

 

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Artists Under the Big Top: Perplexed (1967)
‘The film is a film d’auteur. It is an homage to the great times of silent movies and to the beginnings of film history. At the same time, it depicts something very modern, something that is as up-to-date in 2016 as it was in 1968. High up in the dome of the circus, the artists cannot react to the inhumanity of the world, and below on the ground, the clowns and circus workers can’t even begin to get the idea to start a revolution, to put in lots of effort and to change the world. So what to do? A film like Artists can, much like an insect’s eye, be a mirror via music, plot, montage, and words for such a topic. Today we have the ‘Internet of things,’ Silicon Valley, an Africa practically without industry, bomber planes over Aleppo (like artists under the big top), and victims in the basements (like the circus workers on the ground). A new circus film would certainly be adequate.’ — Alexander Kluge

Excerpt

Excerpt

 

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The Big Mess (1971)
‘An aptly-named, hyper-collage, hyper-conceptual satire on capitalistic expansion, Kluge’s film feels like a strange d.a. levy poem about space travel written on a wall in a gas station bathroom. One’s ability to enjoy this film is directly related to one’s ability/willingness to follow the conceptual tangents Kluge is weaving throughout. Particularly of note are the themes of industrial monopoly and industrial scrap. Considering that the special effects in the movie are basically appropriated pieces of trash, Kluge is painting the great cosmic expansion as a pursuit where the largest companies are making insanely massive, state-of-the-art spaceships that are simply floating scrap ready to be bought and refurbished into new floating pieces of scrap not long after being launched. None of it seems to matter to the companies so long as they maintain control.’ — Cinema Imagination

Excerpt

 

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Willi Tobler and the Decline of the 6th Fleet (1972)
‘After The Big Mess, Alexander Kluge returned to the conventions of science fiction for this assault on the German establishment. During the Galactic Citizen’s War, Willi Tobler, played by actor and intellectual Alfred Edel, decides to rid himself of material possessions after his sector is bombarded. He not only leaves behind his belongings, but also his wife and child as he volunteers to be the public relations man for the Chief Admiral of the 6th Fleet. However, his new life does not give him the security he seeks. Willi Tobler is an interesting genre experiment, combining Kluge’s dependence on improvisation with an intentionally low-budget look and offbeat intertitles, which evoke the hand-crafted effects of Georges Melies.’ — Facets

the entire film

 

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Part-Time Work of a Domestic Slave (1973)
‘Alexander Kluge’s Part-Time Work of a Domestic Slave is a film that probes just how difficult it is to understand the complex workings of politics and society, and to make a difference, when society and its structures are designed to eat up so much of a person’s time and energy. The film’s title itself implies as much: Roswitha (Kluge’s sister and frequent star Alexandra) is the “domestic slave,” a housewife who must divide her time between caring for her three children and her verbally abusive husband Franz (Bion Steinborn) and working to provide for them, leaving little time for thoughts or concerns outside of family life. The film is divided roughly in half, reflecting two different definitions of Roswitha’s “part-time work.” In the film’s first half, she works as an illegal underground abortionist since Franz has no job and she must support the family. In the second half, after Roswitha’s practice is shut down and Franz is forced to get a job, she becomes involved in social and political matters, trying to learn about the world outside her family. Her part-time work thus shifts, over the course of the film, from the need to provide for her family’s physical and material needs, to the freedom and time to develop her own thoughts and ideas independently of the family. It is seen as an essential trade-off: when Franz isn’t working, he’s free to read and think, to study with no clear purpose in sight, but once he has to get a job he all but disappears from the film. By the same token, when Roswitha stops working, her mind becomes active and engaged, and she has time to develop an interest in things happening outside of the home, outside of her immediate scope.’ — Only the Cinema

Excerpt

 

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In Danger and Deep Distress, the Middleway Spells Certain Death (1974)
‘ A female prostitute and thief makes her way through the city with a female GDR spy. Frankfurt, 1974. It’s Carnival time. At the same time police forcibly evict students from occupied buildings). Strong-Man Ferdinand: A fundamentalist of the security forces. The chief of plant security Rieche (played by Heinz Schubert) has more proficiency in his job than his superiors permit. He needs to somehow demonstrate that his position is valuable. «The most dangerous opponents of a system are its protectors.»’ — Trigon Films

Excerpt

 

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Strongman Ferdinand (1977)
‘Tense and satirical, Strongman Ferdinand (Der Starke Ferdinand) remains writer-director Alexander Kluge’s most accessible film. A master at political drama, Kluge employs a realistic mode and a straightforward narrative to create a timely story of terrorism. Heinz Schubert stars as Ferdinand Rieche, the head of security at a big chemical firm who becomes obsessed with finding potential risks. He fabricates threats to demonstrate his expertise and to suggest that he is indispensable, ultimately leading to harsher tactics and tighter enforcement. When the company director questions the need for such controls, Rieche considers the director a risk. Though produced during the 1970s, this tale of paranoia being exploited for personal gain is “a potent parable for our age (Thomas Elsaesser, Film Comment). Winner of the FIPRESCI Prize at Cannes.’ — Facets

Excerpt

Excerpt

 

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The Patriot (1979)
‘The central figure in Alexander Kluge’s 1979 film The Patriot (Die Patriotin) is Gabi Teichert, a high school history teacher from the German state of Hesse, whose complaints about the shortcomings of her discipline guide us through the diverse collection of photographs, drawings, stories, poems, maps, and staged and documentary footage out of which the film is constructed. Gabi Teichert, we are informed by the director, is a ‘patriot’ because she takes an interest in the rubble of history—in the memories, stories and diverse materials which have been forgotten and/or discarded by the official narratives which appear in the textbooks assigned to her students.’ — Tara Forrest

Trailer

 

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Miscellaneous News (1986)
‘Vermischte Nachrichten (Miscellaneous News) are on the last page of the newspapers. This drama strings together vignettes of events taken from everyday newspaper headlines. These stories are the base line of the film and they complement one another by creating a context. In this way, Germans are shown in their reactions to World War II, minorities, and the elderly. A side plot follows a meeting between former West German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt and East German leader Erich Honecker. Vermischte Nachrichten is, together with Der Angriff der Gegenwart auf die übrige Zeit (1985), the last film for cinema by Alexander Kluge.’ — ARGOS

the entire film

 

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To Vertov (1998)
‘Alexander Kluge’s tribute to Soviet master Dziga Vertov, displaying a collage of stills from Vertov’s work on the screen of a white round TV set to the sound of brass music and percussion.’ — letterboxd

the entire film

 

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Spaceflight as an Internal Experience (1999)
‘Short science fiction film, a companion piece to Kluge’s Der Große Verhau and Willi Tobler und der Untergang der 6. Flotte.’ — trakt

the entire film

 

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News from Ideological Antiquity (2009)
‘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 our the status of the political in our present condition. The film will be shown in different sessions throughout the course of five weeks as to introduce a visual experience that is complex as well as demanding from its audience. 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.’ — klugedaskapital

Excerpt

 

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w/ Basil Gelpke Mensch 2.0 – Die Evolution in unserer Hand (2012)
‘What does it mean to be human in an age of artificial intelligence and lifelike robots? Alexander Kluge and Basil Gelpke investigate the complex interplay between man and machine and ask what direction our evolution will take. In MENSCH 2.0 – DIE EVOLUTION IN UNSERER HAND (G/CH 2012) they meet robots, neurologists and doctors and ask if robots are doubles of people, do they only provide help in everyday life or are they completely new beings? Some scientists believe that people and machines will be connected in such a way in future that the technology that surrounds us today will be introduced into our bodies. The question of what makes a person is central to the film. Do people have their evolution under their control or is a new form beginning with androids?’ — Pablo Marte

Trailer

 

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Nachrichten vom Großen Krieg (1914-1918) (2014)
‘Three-channel video installation, color, sound’.

the entire film

 

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Happy Lamento (2018)
‘A feature-length music film featuring director Khavn de la Cruz. It’s all about the circus, about electricity – but above all about the song Blue Moon, to which Elvis Presley lent his voice. Helge Schneider appears as a light snake man and Heiner Müller philosophizes about the moon. — MUBI’

 

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Orphea (2020)
‘The myth of Orpheus is well-known: he returns back to life from the underworld and laments the loss of his love with his music. Alexander Kluge and Khavn, an exceptional duo with explosive power, take this myth as the basis for a genuine revolution. Orpheus’ journey to the realm of the dead to save Eurydice has been failing for millennia and ends fatally. Anyone who wants to give the story a different twist must come up with something new, such as switching the genders. The result is “Orphea”. Determined to do anything for her “Euridiko”, Orphea (superbly played by Lilith Stangenberg) possesses the stirring power of music. Not only does she want to look at her beloved, she is intent on bringing all the dead back to life. Orphea is the angel of history: she turns her face to the past and is blown towards the future, understanding everything and carrying it all along with her. Philippine slums, immortality projects in the wake of the Russian Revolution, afterlife research in Silicon Valley, migration movements in Europe. The thousand-headed snake, the woolly mammoth, Tchaikovsky, Purcell, Adorno, Rilke… Kluge and Khavn deliver a total work of art for the new millennium.’ — Berlinale

Trailer

Excerpt

Watch the film here

 

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Cosmic Miniatures (2024)
‘At 91 years of age, Alexander Kluge is solidly regarded as a trailblazing figure in New German Cinema and the avant-garde. He remains active and curious about media, so it’s no wonder that he recently began experimenting with artificial intelligence. He has been exploring a particular programme developed in Munich for medical research, which he systematically strains in order to find his images at the farthest ends of the system’s creative faculties. With these, Kluge plays in the same essayistic fashion beloved from his television work – historical footage and a plenitude of texts, comics, charts and cabaret. In short: facts and fictions freely intermingle.

‘What makes Cosmic Miniatures especially satisfying is the way Kluge connects back to the early 1970s, arguably his most exuberant filmmaking period. It was then he created a few low budget science fiction movies – pulpy but with serious political smarts. This would also well describe the occasionally lurid joys of Cosmic Miniatures, like when memories of valiant space dog Laika sets the stage for the birth of a whole species of intergalactic battle dogs. The finale, though, with its homage to Kluge’s friend Edgar Reitz, opens up another unexpected dimension, very much a masterpiece unto itself.’ — Olaf Möller

Trailer

 

 

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p.s. Hey. ** Misanthrope, Was your Dad particularly hot? My autograph is more likely to get you a million ‘Who?’s. ** _Black_Acrylic, Very nice treasure there, B. ** scunnard, I think I’ve signed a few French editions of my books with ‘Denis’. Close. ** Steeqhen, Gosh, do you think, about that social media influence? I have a lot of young friends who look at their ever-present social media filled phones like palm readers, but they seem pretty clear about social media’s irreality. But maybe I’m just lucky. And I suppose I’m old enough that social media just mostly seems like interactive television. And one of my favorite things is to pretend I’m invisible. So I don’t know. Whatever works, man. Exciting things happen at the gym? I’ve never been in one. Whenever my friends who go to the gym talk about their experiences there they only talk about ‘cute guys’ they saw. But I guess that counts as excitement. Anyway, again, whatever works, right? ** julian, Yeah, I’m surprised that Beckett thing isn’t even more expensive. I wish my punk band had been cool. It had a cool name, The Same, which, at that time, had never been used as a band name before, believe it or not. Music’s a giant influence on my writing, of course, and I do try to namecheck the specific influences in the novels if I can do so gracefully. I think someone made a Spotify playlist of all the music referenced in my novels at one point. Not sure if it’s still extant. Happy day, friend. ** pancakeIan, Hi. I kind of cheated by slipping in that Marilyn thing since she wasn’t exactly a literary figure, but it was intriguing enough that I broke the rule and hoped that no one would complain. Thanks for the direct Anna’s link. I keep putting off going there, and now I have no excuse. I got to know Christian (Bale) pretty well post- the interview, and he is complex but a very good person. I knew his dad pretty well too. Lovely guy who, in those days, was married Gloria Steinem. ** Kendon Ray aka Dennis harkner, Hi. Well, thank you. Love in return. ** Steve, That’s mind-boggling. Death is so fucking huge. No explanation on the Burroughs quote. So I guess it could be ‘screw’ as in the hotsy kind of sense or ‘Screw’ as in the fuck you kind of sense. No, no lingering thoughts or dreams of further musical exploration. It just really wasn’t in my talent’s wheelhouse, trust me. ** Carsten, Hey. When I was young I obsessively collected Grove Press books, and I do treasure having all those first edition hardcovers of Beckett, Burroughs, Genet, and on and on. I do like autographs. When I was kid I carried an autograph book with me all the time and hit up every celebrity I happened upon (Lucille Ball, Mickey Dolenz, various TV actors, etc.) in stores or the airport or wherever for their signatures. I don’t know why. Good question. ** HaRpEr //, Cool about the Dirk Bogarde signed books. I’m a fan. Two of my most prized possessions are personally signed books by Robbe-Grillet and John Ashbery. R-G signed it ‘to my comrade in the phantastmic’, which is cool. What’s a lesser known Lewis Carroll book that I should read? I only know the biggies. Huh, interesting about Gaspar -> children’s film. Yeah, that could work, for sure. It’s good he’s trying to change things up because his films got pretty schticky at a certain point, to me. John Waters tried to make a children’s film for Netflix, but they wouldn’t pony up with enough funds to make it happen, the idiots. ** Paul Curran, Hey, Paul! Not Jerry G’s, indeed. Obviously your kid should avoid the US, not that they would let any student in at the moment. Yeah, the money thing … like you can’t get French filmmaking funds if the film’s not shot in France unless almost every actor and crew member is French, but then you have to pay for all those people’s flights and lodging elsewhere. It’s a racket even here where there are funds. O’Rourke lives where you are, yes. Stephen O always sees him when he’s touring there. Stephen has volunteered to hook O’Rourke and me up next time I get down there. Weird, I just randomly watched a video interview with Mustaine yesterday where he was ranting about how he was the only important thing about Metallica and wrote their only good songs and just generally seeming like a washed up wretch. Nice autograph though, haha. I think I have a book of yours signed by you here somewhere unless I’m hallucinating. ** Okay. Alexander Kluge is one of the last surviving visionary filmmakers, a slightly older peer of Fassbinder, Herzog, etc., but extremely less known than his former comrades, I guess because his work is so challenging and cerebral, but it’s shame because he’s one of the greats. ‘Artists Under the Big Top: Perplexed’ is one of my all-time favorite films. Anyway, I thought I would give you a chance to get to know of his work if you feel so inclined today. See you tomorrow.