Alexander Kluge

Alexander Kluge (°1932, Halberstadt) is a German writer of both fiction and non-fiction and a prominent filmmaker and public intellectual. His oeuvre for video and film is enormously expansive and diverse. He started his career in film as a collaborator of Fritz Lang (The Tiger of Eschnapur (1959)) and subsequently became one of the most influential members of the New German Cinema in the sixties. In 1978, together with Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Edgar Reitz and Werner Schlöndorff, Kluge made Autumn in Germany, about the terrorist attacks of the seventies. From the eighties onwards, Kluge has been creating work for television, amongst which documentaries about German history, interviews with scientists, authors and philosophers, and experimental persiflages of historical figures such as Adolf Hitler. More recently, Kluge has created video installations for a museal context.

Kluges work for film and video revolves around an innovative use of text, language and editing. It is motivated by the desire for an alternative public sphere in which the living existence of working man can be made visible. A running thread in his work is the idea that “human beings are in essence not interested in reality” and that, for that reason, the creation of fiction and “counter-histories” constitutes the ultimate form of political resistance.

During this evening in STUK Kluge’s work will be introduced by Stéphane Symons and Bart Philipsen, followed by a screening of Der Angriff der Gegenwart auf die übrige Zeit.

The screening is organised by STUK and Courtisane, in collaboration with the Lieven Gevaert Centre, the Institute of Philosophy (KU Leuven), the Research Group German Literature, Fac. of Arts (KU Leuven) and the Goethe-Institut.