Alexander Kluge

Vocation

German author and film director. After growing up during World War II, he studied history, law and music in Marburg and in Frankfurt am Main in Germany. He received his doctorate in law in 1956. While studying in Frankfurt, Kluge befriended the philosopher Theodor Adorno, who was teaching at the Institute for Social Research, or Frankfurt School. Kluge served as a legal counsel for the Institute, and began writing his earliest stories during this period. At Adorno's suggestion, he also began to investigate filmmaking, and in 1958, Adorno introduced him to German filmmaker Fritz Lang, for whom Kluge worked as an assistant on the making of The Tiger of Eschnapur. Kluge was one of twenty-six signatories to the Oberhausen Manifesto of 1962, which marked the launch of the New German Cinema. That same year, with filmmakers Edgar Reitz and Detlev Schleiermacher, Kluge established the Ulm Institut für Filmgestaltung, to promote the critical and aesthetic practices of Young German Film and the New German Cinema. In 1965 he was a member of the jury at the 15th Berlin International Film Festival. He has gone on to direct a number of films which have an inherent critique of commercial cinema and television through the creation of a counter-public sphere and their deployment of experimental forms, including montage. They include Abschied von Gestern (Yesterday Girl) (1966), an adaptation of Kluge's story "Anita G."; Die Artisten in der Zirkuskuppel: Ratlos (Artists under the Big Top: Perplexed) (1968); and The Assault of the Present on the Rest of Time (1985). For the TV, Kluge produced many documentaries, often characterized by the lack of spoken narration and a heavy reliance upon text as well as graphical montages and image editing, as well as many interviews with various international personalities from the fields of arts, entertainment, science, philosophy, and politics. Kluge is also one of the major German fiction writers of the late-20th century and an important social critic. Link to Wikipedia biography