Alexander Kluge (Halberstadt, 1932) is one of the leading intellectual voices in Germany today. His huge body of work can be regarded as a continuation, in words and moving images, of the Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School. He is described, as a young man, as Adornos favorite son (Oskar Negt). The motives, themes, and formal strategies of Kluge's radical cinéma impur, raise questions on representation and gender, history and memory, theory in its relation to practice, and the ongoing vitality of modernism. Adorno introduced him 1958 to Fritz Lang for whom Kluge worked as an assistant on the making of Der Tiger von Eschnapur, 1959. He became one of twenty-six signatories to the Oberhausen Manifesto of 1962, which marked the launch of the New German Cinema. His first feature film Abschied von Gestern (Yesterday Girl) won the Silver Lion at the Venice Film Festival in 1966, the first German entry since 1945 to garner the prize. His film Die Artisten in der Zirkuskuppel: ratlos (Artists on Top of the big Top: Perplexes) won the golden Lion in 1968. In 2008 Kluge presented the almost nine hour film Nachrichten aus der ideologischen Antike: Marx/Eisenstein/Das Kapital (News from Ideological Antiquity: Marx/Eisenstein/Capital), a reinvention of Eisenstein's unfinished project of filming Capital by Karl Marx, and one of the most complex and monumental films of recent film history. Kluge is also one of the major German fiction writers of the late-20th century. His literary works are significant for their formal experimentation and insistently critical themes. As Rainer Werner Fassbinder wrote in 1982, his prose does "document, after all that it is one of his chief aims to call every kind of institution into question, particularly those of the state." Alexander Kluge's major works of social criticism include Öffentlichkeit und Erfahrung, co-written with Oskar Negt and originally published in 1972 (Public Sphere and Experience: Toward an Analysis of the Bourgeois and Proletarian Public Sphere), and Geschichte und Eigensinn (History and Obstinacy), also co-authored with Negt. His most important exhibitions include: dctp - Alexander Kluge. The Interview as Artistic Form (ZKM, Karlsruhe, 2008), The Boat is Leaking. The Captain Lied (Fondazione Prada, Venice, 2017), Pluriversum (Museum Folkwang, Essen, 2017), Gardens of Cooperation (Württembergischer Kunstverein, Stuttgart and La Virreina, Barcelona, 2017) and The poetic power of Theory (Belvedere Haus 21, Vienna, 2018). His last books Geschichten vom Kino and Kongs große Stunde - Chronik des Zusammenhangs (Kongs' finest hours - Chronical of connections) have been published in Italia, 2017. At the beginning of September 2018 the newest book with Ben Lerner Snows on Venice will be released.
