Cinema Stories

The 120 stories of this volume are literary essays told in Alexander Kluge's customary short and laconic style. At the same time, they also expose director Kluge's deep fondness for filmmaking that developed over the decades of his career, more than a fifth of film history.

The stories span topics from the invention of the camera to the fervor that accompanied the masses into early cinema, as well as the way in which film was both faithful to the tragedies of the twentieth century while remaining simultaneously blind to them. It is about the anti-realism of emotion that film used to establish a »feel-good store«, and the diligent expertise of the audience to judge whether happy and sad endings were dealt to the proper players. It is also the story of filmmaking and filmmakers, of the array and intricacies of the shade of grey in black and white film, and the utopia hidden within the »principle of cinema«, always surviving the onslaught of younger medias attempting to replace it.

»Alexander Kluge is a gigantic figure in the German cultural landscape. He exemplifies – along with Pasolini – what is most vigorous and original in the European idea of the artist as intellectual, the intellectual as artist. ... Essential, brilliant.« Susan Sontag

»A bold, galvanizing hybrid of fiction, interview, film theory, German history, scientific inquiry, and his cosmology of cinema.« KGB Bar Book Review
 

»What makes Kluge’s texts such a true source of the elixir of life for our minds and imaginations is not only the wealth of content, but also the experience that however logical the answer, however focused the act, neither seems stringently necessary. There is no other contemporary author whose work is so defined by what the philosophers term ›contingency‹.« Frankfurter Rundschau

»Storyteller Kluge provides the raw material of history for the universal movie theater of life.« Süddeutsche Zeitung