Kairos-Film

Made with an eye to the autumn of 1980 when the German parliamentary elections took place, The Candidate examines Germany’s history past and present and Franz Josef Strauß, the man who, as the CDU/CSU candidate, aspires to be elected to the most important political office in the land.

Gabi Teichert, a history teacher, is unhappy with the way history is portrayed in textbooks and is looking for an alternative, more practical approach to 'uncovering' the past, quite literally digging with the spade and dissecting books with hammers and drills.

A young German woman searches for happiness, liberation, and independence in the illusive wake of a transformative national recovery.

An old building in Venice hosts an exhibition. A visitor walks through empty rooms discovering a fictionalized architectural space that functions like an abandoned theatre set. Inspired by Alexander Kluge’s oeuvre, this exploration attempts to de-construct the subjective experience and liberate the cinematic energy from the horror vacui of the display.

Roswitha runs an illegal abortion clinic in Frankfurt to support her student husband and children. When she is forced to close her practice she delves into political and social activism.

Early Alexander Kluge short film that follows the career of a German policeman from World War I into the 1960s.

Thanks to technological developments, film has been through many transformations. Now, with the development of Artificial Intelligence another begins. In this new age of image-making, Young German Cinema paragon Alexander Kluge finds himself experimenting with this latest tool of image creation. Diving into a world of pictures and views whose basis is not reality itself, but mankind’s digital repository of them.

A reinvention of the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, set in contemporary Manila as a rock musical.

The film does not have a plot per se; it mixes documentary footage, along with standard movie scenes, to give the audience the mood of Germany during the late 1970s. The movie covers the two-month time period during 1977 when a businessman was kidnapped and later murdered by the left-wing terrorists known as the RAF-Rote Armee Fraktion (Red Army Fraction). The businessman had been kidnapped in an effort to secure the release of the original leaders of the RAF, also known as the Baader-Meinhof gang. When the kidnapping effort and a plane hijacking effort failed, the three most prominent leaders of the RAF, Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin, and Jan-Carl Raspe, all committed suicide in prison. It has become an article of faith within the left-wing community that these three were actually murdered by the state.

Short science fiction film with footage from Willi Tobler und der Untergang der 6. Flotte.

The Indomitable Leni Peickert is a loose, half-hour sequel to Alexander Kluge's second feature film, Artists in the Big Top: Perplexed. This shorter work, seemingly assembled from leftover footage from the longer film, continues the story of the circus owner Leni Peickert after she first abandoned her idea of a radical circus in favor of a job in television. It opens where the previous film left off, at a TV station where Leni and her friends have gathered as employees, attempting to infiltrate the corporate establishment with their own revolutionary ideas.

A new version of Nipp and Tuck (Del Ruth / Sennett, 1923)

The third episodic film, after Deutschland im Herbst and Der Kandidat, in which notable German filmmakers reflect on the state of their country. A collage of documentary and dramatised sequences dealing with such topics as overkill, peace demonstrations, NATO arms policy, and life after the next war.

Outer space in 2034 is run by greedy corporations in a rundown bureaucracy. Two astronauts, who are not very smart, make their way with shady dealings, smuggling and spaceship wrecking.

Short science fiction film, a companion piece to Kluge's Der Große Verhau and Willi Tobler und der Untergang der 6. Flotte.

A poignant film essay about 'superfluous people' facing up to a moment of crisis in their lives.

A drama that strings together vignettes of events taken from everyday newspaper headlines. Germans are shown in their reactions to World War II, minorities, and the elderly. A side plot follows a meeting between former West German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt and East German leader Erich Honecker.

Emotions and feelings should not be confused with sentimentality. Emotion is ancient and more powerful than any artistic expression. The film observes young couples facing difficulties while trying to move their love experiences towards clear decision making. A film full of ideas, details and associations, fictional scenes, documentary footage, archival materials and opera music.

At 91 years of age, Alexander Kluge is solidly regarded as a trailblazing figure in New German Cinema and the avant-garde. He remains active and curious about media, so it’s no wonder that he recently began experimenting with artificial intelligence. He has been exploring a particular programme developed in Munich for medical research, which he systematically strains in order to find his images at the farthest ends of the system's creative faculties. With these, Kluge plays in the same essayistic fashion beloved from his television work – historical footage and a plenitude of texts, comics, charts and cabaret. In short: facts and fictions freely intermingle.