Screening "News from Ideological Antiquity" by Alexander Kluge

Film programme

Spanish premiere of the film News from Ideological Antiquity Marx/Eisenstein/ Das Kapital, in its 83-minute abridged version, prepared by Alexander Kluge for the Moscow Film Festival and the Goethe-Institut in Buenos Aires, introduced by Oksana Bulgakova.

Film-maker, writer, writer and film critic, besides being a radio and television producer, Alexander Kluge (Halberstadt, Germany, 1932) was one of the renovators of German cinema from 1962 onwards and he proposed close collaboration between cinema and television. His cinematographic work began in 1958, as assistant to Fritz Lang. From 1960 he began to direct and produce shorts. In 1962 he was one of the promoters of the Oberhausen Manifesto, a celebrated reaction by various young directors against the earlier German cinema. In 1963 he set up his own production company: Kairos-Film. With his first feature-length film, Abschied von gestern (Farewell to Gender, 1966), his name became, for the critics, a key figure in the New German Cinema.

Alexander Kluge’s new film takes as its starting-point an idea that Soviet director Sergei Eisenstein never turned into reality. A few days after the 1929 New York Stock Exchange crash, Eisenstein visited the novelist James Joyce in Paris to discuss an ambitious project for which he had started to make notes. The idea was to make a film version of Karl Marx’s Capital, and the director thought the best way to approach this might be to imitate the narrative structure Joyce used in Ulysses, a day in the life of a worker. Based on Eisenstein’s notes, Kluge turned Marx’s magnum opus into a film series with a running time of nearly ten hours. The abridged version includes Eisenstein’s notes, original fragments from Capital, a conversation between Kluge and H. M. Enzensberger about the 1929 Depression, a fictional short film about merchandising fetishism by Tom Tykwer and a scene from Luigi Nono’s opera Al gran sole carico d’amore. Finally, the film ends with a visit to Marx’s grave in London.