Alexander Kluge’s News from Ideological Antiquity begins with Soviet filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein’s ambitious but unrealized plan to combine Karl Marx’s Capital and James Joyce’s 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.
Direction
Kluge's associative spiral—like falling down a very educated Wikipedia hole.
Writing
Dense, playful, unapologetically esoteric. Bring a philosophy degree.
Director
Alexander Kluge
Trivia, insights & behind the scenes
Eisenstein planned his Capital adaptation as a 'dialectical film' using James Joyce's stream-of-consciousness techniques—two notoriously unreadable texts colliding into one impossible movie.
Kluge, now in his nineties, remains the last giant of West Germany's 1968 Oberhausen Manifesto generation—this film is essentially his lifetime achievement speech in essay form.
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