Alexander Kluge's News from Ideological Antiquity

News from Ideological Antiquity

The Goethe Institut, German Current Film Festival, Human Resources, and Los Angeles Filmforum present

Alexander Kluge's News from Ideological Antiquity

Sunday, December 2, 2018, 12:00 pm – 9:30 pm

At Human Resources, 410 Cottage Home Street, Los Angeles, California 90012

Free admission, tickets via the Facebook page

https://www.facebook.com/events/288411515125840/

Presented in its entirety as a 9.5 hour "marathon" screening / Installation.
Guests are encouraged to bring pillows/cushions for extra comfort.
Refreshments will be served throughout the event.

Presumably the LA Premiere

Over the course of 570 minutes (three DVDs), Alexander Kluge works his way through the “ideological antiquity”, inspired by Sergei Eisenstein’s unfulfilled plan to film Marx’s “Das Kapital“. Eisenstein’s art of montage and Marx’s critique of the trade in commodities are fundamental bases of modernity – yet we have lost touch with modernity just as we have lost touch with antiquity. What can Marx and Eisenstein tell us about our current cultural and social production, Kluge wonders, but because it’s Kluge asking, there are many answers and even more new questions.

Alexander Kluge’s film, News From Ideological Antiquity: Marx-Eisenstein-Capital, begins with Eisenstein’s ambitious but unrealized plan to combine Capital and Ulysses. For over nine hours, the film expands in concentric circles as Kluge, his guests, interlocutors and monologists make associative links on a range of topics that starts from a filmic discussion of Eisenstein’s notes. Kluge’s film is divided into three parts: I. Marx and Eisenstein in the Same House; II. All Things are Bewitched People; III. Paradoxes of Exchange Society. At several points in the film we get a sense of what Eisenstein had in mind with his project. In one scene, we see that a “pot of soup has become a water kettle, boiling away and whistling: the image recurs at several moments in the exposition (Eisenstein’s notes projected in graphics on the intertitles), in such a way that this plain object is ‘abstracted’ into the very symbol of energy. It boils impatiently, vehemently it demands to be used, to be harnessed, it is either the whistling signal for work, for work stoppage, for strikes, or else the motor-power of a whole factory, a machine for future production …” (Frederic Jameson in the New Left Review, July/August 2009). By insistence and repetition this banal object, a commodity, transforms into a larger-than-life symbol, and we start to get a sense of the full range of cognitive and material links this commodity has to the web of life that surrounds it. (Marty Kirchner)