Trigger warning: The article mentions death. Reader discretion is advised.German filmmaker and writer Alexander Kluge He died at the age of 94. Kluge, the face of the German New Cinema movement, turned cinematic collage into an art form and won the top prize at the Venice Film Festival in 1968. News of his death in Munich was confirmed on Wednesday by his publisher, The Suhrkamp.
Alexander Kluge’s legacy in German cinema
Kluge was a prolific director of intellectually rewarding work and a prolific writer of short fiction. He played a key role in organizing the New German Cinema movement that produced more well-known auteurs such as Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Werner Herzog.Kluge was one of the last living torches of the Frankfurt school of neo-Marxist cultural criticism.
Alexander Kluge’s early life in the midst of World War II
Born in 1932 in Halberstadt, West Germany, Kluge narrowly survived the April 8, 1945 bombing of the city by Allied forces. After the war he studied law, history and church music at the University of Frankfurt, where he was tutored by the philosopher Theodor Adorno.After starting to work as a lawyer, he was more and more attracted to literature and cinema. In 1962, he signed the Oberhausen Manifesto, which called for German cinema to free itself from deep-seated tearjerkers and nationalist Heimatfilme.
Alexander Kluge’s notable wins at the Venice Film Festival
Kluge’s ‘Abschied von Gestern’ (released in the US as ‘Yesterday Girl’) was one of the first films to emerge from the manifesto. The story of a Jewish woman struggling to settle in West Germany after fleeing the East was told in a moving style, using discontinuous sound and non-sequential narration. The film won the Silver Lion at the Venice Film Festival, the first time a German director had won the honor since World War II. Klug cemented his reputation two years later by winning the Golden Lion for ‘The Artists in the Big Top: Perplexed’.
