Tuesday 14 February 2012

Spectators of our Lives: Alexander Kluge Studies on his 80th Birthday

If I feel myself as the producer of my life, then I am unhappy. So I would rather be a spectator of my life. I would rather change my life this way since I cannot change it in society. So at night I see films that are different from my experiences during the day. Thus there is a strict separation between experience and the cinema. That is the obstacle for our films. For we are people of the 60s, and we do not believe in the opposition between experience and fiction. –- Alexander Kluge, 1988  [cited by Jonathan Rosenbaum]

It's Alexander Kluge's 80th birthday and Film Studies For Free is delighted to celebrate his astonishing and hugely important career with its own little e-festschrift of scholarly links - see below.

If you love and value Kluge's films as much as FSFF does, you'll want to read the fine post that David Hudson has composed in the German filmmaker's honour at the MUBI Notebook full of fascinating online reading, including news of Kluge's latest book out, Das fünfte Buch - Neue Lebensläufe. 402 Geschichten.

FSFF's own assembly, from the great video above to the list of written studies below, contains links to the contents of a fabulous new openly accessible book on Kluge's work -- one of the best edited (by Tara Forrest) collections FSFF has ever had the pleasure of reading -- which has just been published by the fantastic scholars at Amsterdam University Press.

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