As part of the Serpentine Gallery’s Park Nights season, film-maker Alexander Kluge presents an evening of short films and lectures that culminates in an 83-minute screening of his epic 570-minute film News from Ideological Antiquity: Marx–Eisenstein–Das Kapital, based on the work of James Joyce and Sergei Eisenstein. Full details about the event here.
Fredric Jameson contributes ‘Marx and Montage‘, about the work of Kluges to New Left Review 58, July-August 2009. The author of The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern, 1983–1998 unearths fragments from ‘ideological antiquity’ in Alexander Kluge’s recent film on Capital:
“It is always good to have a new Kluge, provided you know what lies in store for you. His latest film, News from Ideological Antiquity—some nine hours long—is divided into three parts: I. Marx and Eisenstein in the Same House; II. All Things are Bewitched People; III. Paradoxes of Exchange Society. Rumour has it that Kluge has here filmed Eisenstein’s 1927–28 project for a film version of Marx’s Capital, whereas in fact only Kluge’s first part deals with this tantalizing matter. The rumour has been spread by the same people who believe Eisenstein actually wrote a sketch for a film on Capital, whereas he only jotted down some twenty pages of notes over a half-year period. And at least some of these people know that he was enthusiastic about Joyce’s Ulyssesduring much the same time and ‘planned’ a film on it, a fact that distorts their fantasies about the Capitalproject as well. Yet if Eisenstein’s notes for film projects all looked like this until some of them were turned into ‘real’—that is to say, fiction or narrative—films, it is only fair to warn viewers that Kluge’s ‘real’ films look more like Eisenstein’s notes.”
Jameson’s Valences of the Dialectic is forthcoming from Verso.
[…] disappointed to have missed this last night, I must […]