Alexander Kluge: Montage Film as Cultural Criticism

Abstract

The films and theoretical writings of Alexander Kluge have been receiving greater attention from the North American German Studies community in the 1980's. This thesis is designed to give the reader a general introduction to the intellectual context of his writing and film-making, as well as provide an analysis of the relationship between the structure and content of one of his more recent films, "Der Ang riff der Gegenwart auf die Obrige Zeit", and his theories about the structure and content of the individual and collective societal consciousness. The first part of the thesis deals with Kluge's association with the lnstitut tor Sozialforschung, more commonly known as the Frankfurt School, and their particular brand of marxist social and cultural theory. The work of the Frankfurt School's most noted scholar, Theodor W. Adorno, is used as a reference work with which Alexander Kluge's early theoretical writings are contrasted and compared. The second part deals with two exemplary cultural producers and critics, Bertolt Brecht and Jean-Luc Godard. The use of montage technique in Brecht's dramas and Godard's films, and the desired effect which was to be produced, is compared to Kluge's own ideas on the associative technique and its potential as an analytic tool. The third part of the thesis deals with the work of Walter Benjamin, whose unique fusion of Critical Theory and near-eastern mysticism produced an epistemology which finds its most precise expression in the employment of montage. Benjamin's assertion that the truth content in any situation can only arise out of the juxtaposition of elements in a 'constellation' corresponds very closely to the 'constellation' construction in Kluge's films. Finally, the analysis of the film "Der Angriff der Gegenwart auf die Obrige Zeit" brings together all of these concepts --the social theory of the Frankfurt School, the production aesthetics of Godard and Brecht, the epistemology of Benjamin --and combines them with Kluge's own most recent theoretical writings to provide the reader with a possible interpretation of the elements in the film and their relation to the network of ideas which forms the world-view of theorist and film-maker Alexander Kluge.