Alexander Kluge

"The old film is dead, we believe in the new one" - that is the concluding sentence of the Oberhausener Manifesto. Alexander Kluge was one of the authors of this legendary avowal from 1962 which marked the beginning of New German Cinema. No one meant this as earnestly as he, either at that time, when he was still making his mark on German cinema, or 45 years later. For Alexander Kluge, cinema is a constant development; the spirit of discovery and joy of experimentation are inherent to everything he touches. Then, he wanted to turn cinema upside down, and he still does. And he is probably the only filmmaker who still reflects seriously about how Internet and cinema can be united by more than the mere sales and distribution platform.

This summer takes Kluge back to the place where he had his first big film premiere in 1966 with Yesterday Girl - to the Mostra in Venice. Filmmaker and festival, both born in 1932, celebrate their 75th birthdays together, so to speak. What he will show there are five programs especially put together for the festival. Kluge is downright libidinous when making films and his work has grown noticeably in scope in the last few years, but mainly on television. In News & Stories or Zehn vor 11 he experiments with short forms, films cut associatively, and long interview shows. He creates the shows with dctp, which arranges timeslots on its own authority (and 37.5% of which belong to him). Kluge comments: "I secretly continued with cinema on television."

The Lido Project is the first for the screen in years. Kluge and the director of the Mostra, Marco Mueller, did not know each other beforehand. "We met in Berlin and very quickly agreed: I don't want to make a retrospective and he didn't want to have an antiquated festival. The Mostra has surprising qualities, and always did." Kluge can arrange the programs in the style in which he also conceived the television programs: associatively. "Mueller coordinates something, so to speak: he browses and finds a title like The Poetical Power of Theory and based on that, I then make a program of a hundred minutes. For example, I selected sentences from philosophy, from Aristoteles to Heidigger, which seemed especially puzzling to me. These pieces are layered over techno. And then there is a piece about how Eisenstein wanted to film Das Kapital in 1929. I talked to Oskar Negt for it, who is a philosopher and social scientist, and he explained how rich in pictures the economy is - according to Marx, if you stick a knife into a machine, the blood of the person who built it should come out - and that is what Eisenstein wanted to film."

Unique associations of past and present come out in these works and if Kluge's associations are often arranged in a strictly logical fashion, one cannot see them as only an intellectual construction. He would also protest against that: "Cinema is concentrated emotion; there is also no science possible without emotion."

For Kluge, the Mostra was an important moment very early in his career, when he showed Yesterday Girl there in 1966, and the fact that the road is taking him to Venice again is no accident. He has found an ideal ally in Mostra director Marco Mueller. "The oldest festival, Venice, is on the cutting edge of innovation, that is the fundamental idea. Edgar Reitz sees it that way as well." What they are doing, he and Reitz, explains Kluge, are, so to speak, the extreme forms of the same idea - that one has to free cinema again from the rather arbitrary self-imposed 90-minute constraints. "The 90-minute cinema was an opulent European model, which is completely atypical today for the main interest on this planet. People want to test for a minute whether they find something interesting - and then latch on to it for up to 12 hours. What Edgar Reitz did with 52 hours of Heimat is an answer to that - my minute-long films are another." Heimat was also shown in Venice in wonderful marathon presentations.

The future of cinema will find itself somehow. Kluge believes in that and does not see a threat in television and the Internet, but rather new means of transport. "I am sure that this talent, of letting pictures run through your head - that has been the prototype of cinema since the Stone Age - is the reason that we have not died out yet: because we can dream."