Still More Kluge

[Kluge erzählt] von seinem jüngsten Vorhaben: "Das Kapital" von Karl Marx verfilmen. Sergej Eisenstein, der sowjetische Filmpionier, hatte vor 80 Jahren dieselbe Idee. Wo er scheiterte, wollen sich nun Tom Tykwer, Durs Grünbein, Peter Sloterdijk, Alexander Kluge und andere zusammentun, um eine 420-minütige Filmfassung des dreibändigen Werks zu erstellen. Arbeitstitel: "Nachrichten aus der ideologischen Antike." Antike deshalb, weil Marx, sagt Kluge, "einer fernen Zeit" angehöre. Gleichwohl sei er unverrückbar wie ein Gestirn und deshalb Orientierungspunkt für die Navigation in der modernen Welt.

Even more here, though actually nothing further about the Capital-film.

Kluge's 1970 Der Grosse Verhau was already a film of part of Capital.

Four Angry Men

"Reform Circus" is one of the extras on Disc 4 of Alexander Kluge's collected films. On a TV show called "Ende Offen" in 1970, Kluge is asked "What good is art?"

The producer comes onto the set; he splutters with resentment at the smarter, more articulate Kluge ("You just keep going on and on!"). All talk shows today are nothing but a "verbal shouting match (verbale Schaukampf)" as Kluge complained this episode of Ende Offen had become. So the show isn't remarkable for its lack of decorum, nor for its meta levels (the broadcast gets interrupted by its producer precisely at the moment the guests are critiquing the institution of television), nor for WDR's decision to broadcast the whole thing, including the interruption and the black screen and the argument about the interruption. It's something else.

Dramatically, the show works a little like "12 Angry Men"--it's riveting and not a little heartbreaking to watch Kluge try to explain himself in a forum that has no patience for him, for interlocutors who won't or can't listen.

Like Ende Offen's duller guests, I have also seethed inwardly while my betters showed me up in a seminar or a reading group, but often it's precisely those exasperating, long-winded people with whom I can create intensity of expression. ("You just go on and on!" is uttered only when intensity has failed.)

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I sat down to write a post that would link Kluge's parable forms with Shaviro's blog post on indexical, typical singular characters. Kluge's characters are indexical, but they're nothing like Dickensian. Kluge writes indexical life histories, in a way that has nothing to do, either, with the "'plausible' backstories and motivations" that dominate screenwriting today (both for film and television). But I didn't get that far.

(I find Kluge's miniature or parable form more in his written stories, not so much in the film versions. Jameson wrote briefly about this aspect of the stories in this October article I don't have permission to view on the web--about how abruptly Kluge's fiction shifts from historical to biographical time.)

Jubilee

Not only did I get my tax rebate, or whatever they're calling it, the IRS informed me this week that it has dropped its case against me concerning my 2006 taxes. ("Case" makes the proceeding sound far grander and Kafka-esque than it was, since it all happened by mail. A "postal shakedown," maybe.)

In the resultant burst of consumer confidence, I bought
"Collapse IV." Which looks very good, despite the fact that it contains no fiction by Antoine Volodine. I guess Volodine wouldn't have fit. He's not so much "concept horror," or even horror, more quasi-Blanchotien apocalypticism in decaying, vaguely Russian or Chinese cities.