ABSTRACT
As a filmmaker with a modest but loyal transatlantic following, Alexander Kluge’s oeuvre and career are markedly different from those of other European directors venerated by cinephiles. 1 He belongs to the same generation as Jean Luc Godard, Jean Marie Straub, and Theo Angelopoulos, but trained as a lawyer before making his first film in 1960. In Germany, he is equally if not more famous as a short story writer, television personality and the author of several volumes of sociology. To film historians, he is the legal brain and policy shaper behind the New German Cinema of the sixties and seventies, having been the driving force behind the famous Oberhausen Manifesto of 1962 and the government film-funding legislation that followed. 2 In 1964 he co-founded West Germany’s first film school (at the Ulm Institute for Design) and in 1972 he published, in his capacity as professor of sociology at the University of Frankfurt, a book with Oskar Negt, which became a classic for the student generation of ’68, Public Sphere and Experience, a radicalized rejoinder to Jürgen Habermas’s equally classic 1962 The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. Co-author of other critical and political analyses, including a book-length study of the European film industry, Kluge remained, for more than two decades, the undisputed master-strategist of the parliamentary lobby and the chief architect of a state film subsidy system based around the concept of the Autorenfilm (auteur film)—before becoming, in the eighties, one of its fiercest critics. 3
