Alexander Kluge, Cinema and the Public Sphere: The Construction Site of Counter-History

Author(s): Miriam Hansen

Source: Discourse, Vol. 6, [German Avant-Garde Cinema: The Seventies] (Fall 1983), pp. 53-
74
Published by: Wayne State University Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/41389071
Accessed: 18-10-2018 19:58 UTC

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 53

Alexander Kluge, Cinema and the Public Sphere:

The Construction Site of Counter-History

by Miriam Hansen

Contemporary German Cinema is making its way into Film Stu-

dies as an instance of deviation- a deviation from dominant classical
narrative, but, in the same move, also a deviation from modernist,
deconstructive modes of cinema and the theoretical apparatus support-
ing them. Thomas Elsaesser considers recent German films "to
represent... a confirmation of Baudry's and Metz's arguments [concern-
ing the mirroring effect, the specularization of subject/object relations,
the construction of a transcendental subject], and at the same time [to
oifer] a textual practice which might make apparent a dimension elided
or repressed in The Imaginary Signifier Z'1 In his analysis of voyeurism
and fascination in the films of Fassbinder, Elsaesser suggests that we
read strategies of spectator-positioning in historical terms, recognizing a
particular subjectivity at stake in the specular organization of the sub-
ject. The specularization of all social relations, which Fassbinder fore-
grounds in his films, is undeniably linked to the problematic constitu-
tion of social identity under German fascism, a system that- for pur-
poses of its own- promoted a massive specularization of public and
private life. By implicating the spectator in analogous constellations,
Fassbinder both mobilizes and critically dissects a specific social ima-
ginary as it sustained the Third Reich and continued to haunt political
and social relations under its legal successor, the Federal Republic of
Germany.
While Elsaesser grants Metz's concept of primary identification a
descriptive validity with regard to "the specularization of consciousness
and social production," he clearly states the inadequacy of Metz's
categories for grasping the dialectics of cinema and history at work in
this process. Consequently, Elsaesser himself opens his framework to
includes sources that reflect on the formation of subject positions
within the German tradition- for example, in the case of Fassbinder,
the work of Alexander Mitscherlich, or, in a recent essay on Syberberg,
the writings of Ernst Bloch and of the Frankfurt School.2 In a similar
vein, Timothy Corrigan situates his readings of Wenders, Schroeter,
and other German filmmakers in a field of force between Hollywood

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 54 DISCOURSE

and the problem

alist approach of
ceptual framew
posed by the f
discourses not o
categories with
usefulness in co
has as yet to rea
The challenge r
and, by the sam
French sources
relate to their p
determined pub
assertion that a
national and ev
there is a wide r
suppress or prod
If Hollywood r
ideologically inh
man cinema, for
reference to a s
films at the lev
positions. Thus t
for the dimensi
the combat zone
My own inter
growing dissati
current discours
analysis under the structure of the methodological framework
employed. Kluge's work offers an alternative on at least three distinct
yet inseparable levels: his theoretical writings (which situate him in the
tradition of the Frankfurt School); his concept of the cinema as put into
political practice through legal and organizational intervention; and his
textual practices which sometimes take the shape of films (as opposed
to literary activities).
While Kluge's work raises a number of issues that overlap with
the concerns of current film theory, it also presents a number of stra-
tegies beyond the scope of academic discourse. This includes Kluge's
attempt- in a Utopian and a pragmatic sense- to bridge the gap
between transcendental cinematic subject and empirical spectator; cru-
cial to this project is the category of Erfahrung (only inadequately
translatable as "experience") which, through a dialectics of representa-
tion and repression, links subjectivity to the concept of Öffentlichkeit,
the public sphere. Another impulse to revision can be gained from
Kluge's reshuffling of "history" and "discourse," in a direction that

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Kluge, Cinema and the Public Sphere 5 S

reclaims the cinema as a space for historical pract

remembering and rewriting. Moreover, Kluge's text
gest a reconsideration of the problem of figuration
questions occluded by the collapse of rhetoric into
figurative dimension in Kluge's work informs his theo
as well and thus provides an alternative to the stylistic
of current film theory and analysis. Finally, Kluge
different conception of the relationship between theo
both in the films themselves and with regard to the c
within the public sphere.
The difficulty in writing about Kluge lies precisely
glement of theory and practice, the degree to whic
read as an illustration of his theory while the theo
within a larger context of practice. Analyzing the film
tems in their own right is necessary, but such analy
sight of their contextual orientation. Therefore, I wil
cussion of Germany in Autumn, a film that has receiv
tion in this country yet is also an excellent example o
primary context of reception is to such a film's funct
As a second step, I will sketch out some of the theore
underlying Kluge's work. A final section will deal w
practices projected by his films, in particular the fragm
mary identification by means of quotation, figuration
character-look.

1. Deutschland im Herbst, Germars/ in Autumn

have thought of a better title for this film: the name
longer exists (legally, at least, there are two German s
reference to a season rather than a point in history. T
sense of loss, mitigated by the rhythm of nature, l
falling leaves, a vision rendered opaque by mists a
Hardly appropriate: the harvest was violent, reaped
crop German in its peculiar monstrosity. While Roma
a convenient label for this incongruity, it does not ex
what moved intellectuals on the left to resort to s
obvious answer, implied yet elided in the title phrase,
historical moment at which the events of Septemb
imposed themselves on public discourse.5
The kidnapping and killing of Schleyer, the hi
Lufthansa plane and its liberation at Mogadishu, the a
Baader, Meinhof, and Raspe in the prison of Stuttg

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56 DISCOURSE

this catastrophic
of 'history-in-th
ciousness which t
man national ide
shock briefly illu
tory as a fundam
illumination, how
what Benjamin h
rather a tiger's le
Whereas public
crisis was drown
tory" of Mogadi
German leftists a
the warring force
were outgrowths
man tradition. T
"Hitler's children
German left; yet
history of opposi
failures. In addi
activists were str
tic scenarios had
late strategies fo
positions as a po
describe- the co
current catastroph
As an effort to
Autumn has beco
production. The f
geneity of styles
production, inclu
the compromises
film defines its i
subjectivity withi
stake was not me
very possibility o
contradictions, re
What technically
episodes, is more
political, a chall
private spheres.
point-of-view,"
honesty, represen
geois intellectua
male; yet also a g

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Kluge, Cinema and the Public Sphere 57

along with that of their medium. Strategically situate

of the film, the episode by and with Fassbinder forc
the distance between auteur cinema and public sphere
conventionally segregated levels of enunciation, Fassb
the enclosed space of his apartment into a public stag
personal-political double-bind of the individual artist
the episode would probably leave the spectator in the
melancholia, but contextualized as it is by the re
assumes the function of a thesis proposed for dialectic
Moreover, the pessimistic stylization of Fassbin
counterbalanced by his actual participation in a coll
collaboration of nine directors, writers, several leadin
editor, Beate Mainka-Jellinghaus resulted in a fo
different from the usual omnibus film. The montage
many in Autumn, created by the editor in close consu
intercuts various episodes and documentary footage w
for auteurial signatures, thus emphasizing the priorit
textual practice over the contributions of individu
emphasis, Germany in Autumn has become a catalyst
of production" ( Produktionspolitik ) which involves co
well as the coordination of projects and programming
Paradoxical as it may seem, this concept of coop
around the figure of Kluge, whose activities as a film
lobbyist, writer, teacher, and theorist have decisi
development of German cinema since Oberhausen.
neither implies him to be the secret super-author of
Produktionspolitik- let alone the ulterior source of enunciation for a fil
like Germany in Autumn- not does it mean to efface the dimension of
personal style from the project of collectivity. In Kluge's view, th
only viable form of Autorenkino (inadequately translated by the term
"auteur cinema") is one of cooperation: only if independent film-
makers combine their forces can radically personal modes of cinem
hope to have an impact on the public sphere.
The very notion, and particular assessment, of the public
sphere- a keyword in post-student movement oppositional politics-
owes much to Kluge's influential study, co-authored with Oskar Negt,
on Public Sphere and Experience (1972). 11 As a medium that organizes
human needs and qualities in a social form, the existing public sphere
maintains a claim to be representative while excluding large areas of
people's experience. Among the media that increasingly constitute the
public sphere, the cinema lags behind on account of its primarily artisa-
nal mode of production (In Germany, at least), preserving a certain
degree of independence thanks to state and television funding.12 This
ironic constellation provides the cinema with a potential for creating an
alternative, oppositional public sphere wthin the larger one, addressing

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 58 DISCOURSE

itself precisely
the cinema's in
misrepresentatio
and Nazism- but
Germany in A
federal nor telev
direction. Beyo
public sphere fo
as well as an alte
once more demo
ence. Given its
pies a precarious
Not quite subsu
privately owned
the function- th
geois public sp
filmmaking). As
of television as a "program industry" organize- or rather de-
organize- the viewers' experience on the principle of a pluralistic abun-
dance of material and a systematic shortage of time, thus creating a
mediocre amalgam of "general" interests with the exclusion of vital
interests of both entertainment and information. In a situation as criti-
cal as the one at hand, the pluralistic pretensions faded into news
black-out and self-censorship; the supposed autonomy of cultural pro-
grams collapsed as the representatives of the public tried to prove
themselves defenders of the state. Böll/SchlöndorfTs satire (in Ger-
many in Autumn) on a program committee's decision to postpone
Sophocles' Antigone seems to exaggerate only in its attempt at
unification and closure, hardly, however, in its assessment of the situa-
tion.

Throughout Germany in Autumn, television is inscribed as a prob-

lematic counterpoint to the enterprise of the film itself. A pan to the
spotlight of a TV crew filming the Schleyer ceremony establishes its
own crew on the opposition bench. Polemically rejecting the hierarchy
of perception ordained by the dramaturgy of TV news,
Schlöndorff/Kluge's camera pans to the margins of so-called public
events, discovering there a Turkish labor immigrant stopped by the pol-
ice for carrying a rifle with which he had planned to shoot a pigeon for
his lunch. During the video transmission of the ceremony for employ-
ees of Daimler-Benz, a series of identical, larger than life overhead pro-
jections of Schleyer's photograph, shot across a series of black mirror-
finished antique Mercedes models, hyperbolizes the official effort to
preserve Schleyer's image while making no attempt to save his life.
Later on, we witness Herbert Wehner's speech at the Social Democratic
Party convention on a monitor in the foreground, whereas the speaker

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Kluge, Cinema and the Public Sphere 59

himself is seen only from an oblique angle in the bac

after Böll/Schlöndorifs explicit treatment of televisio
rorists' funeral intercuts video footage with 35mm
impossibility of mourning in the face of an ubiqui
cameras; the slow pace and duration of the whole sequ
significance as a public event.
More important than these various instances, how
in which the format of the film reflects- and at the same time
subverts- the overall structure of television programming. The juxta-
position of documentary and fictional genres, of newsreel and historical
footage, interview, show, thriller, and short film episodes, the con-
stantly shifting modes of representation and address indeed parallel if
not exceed the formal diversity of daily television programs. Whereas
the programming policies of public television impose an exclusive, uni-
fying order on the diversity of people's experience, thereby effectively
reducing the scope of the public sphere, Germany in Autumn offers an
even more diverse, self-consciously heterogeneous structure with a
different timing, allowing space for contingencies, incongruities and
contradictions to unfold- ruptures through which the discourse of the
spectator is provoked to enter.
Such exercise in subversive mimicry finally points to the institu-
tional differences between cinema and television- differences all too
often obliterated by the TV-sponsored 'amphibious' film. The diversity
that may lull the TV-spectator into the complacent security of a world-
wise subject of the state is more likely to irritate the spectator in the
cinema who, after all, came to see a single feature film. From the per-
spective of the latter, Germany in Autumn appears to be employing the
staple techniques of avant-garde films for disrupting primary
identification, deconstructing the subject-effect of conventional cinema.
The critical distance imposed on the spectator is, however, linked to a
recognition of the programming strategies of television and their decep-
tive subject constructions. Thus, the conjunction of distance and fami-
liarity produces the conditions for a pragmatic subjectivity, a subjec-
tivity that has to define its position within the public sphere. In an
even more pragmatic sense, the cinema, as an urban public space,
offers a social configuration different from that of television which
assumes its public function in a privatized environment, i.e., people's
living rooms. Collective reception, as classical cinema has taught us to
forget, still holds the potential of communicative interaction, which is
the prerequisite of political practice.
The ambitious project of transforming the public sphere for and
through an alternative cinematic discourse, inspires Kluge's film prac-
tice as much as his theorizing. The Utopian springboard in Kluge's con-
cept of cinema is what he calls "the film in the head of the spectator."
In a Marxian mode of prolepsis, he declares that the only real means of

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 60 DISCOURSE

production reside
fantasies, howev
privatized exper
studios, video c
determining the
mers produce a
media are thus
consequentiallly
them according t
The notion of
parison with psy
Metz in The Imag
Metz analyzes spe
ality, elaborating
mary identificat
subject, the fetis
as a vital link in
institution demands- the circular motions of desire. As indicated
above, this construction tends to reduce spectatorship to its cinematic
positionality and the psychoanalytic framework employed in analyzing
it, while leaving more specific- historical, social, cultural- qualifications
outside of theory. These however are crucial to Kluge's concept of the
film in the spectator's head which subsumes psychoanalytic considera-
tions within the larger- and necessarily more vague- category of
experience.
The film in the head of the spectator, after all, is a trope, rather
than a scientific term, and as such figures the political priority of the
spectator's experience as the basis of production. "Cinema learns from
the spectator, the spectator does not learn from the cinema. Unfor-
tunately, historical development has reversed this relationship-
spectators have allowed themselves to have their experience constricted
by cinematic and TV conventions."15 The obvious difference at stake is
one between a filmmaker's program, prone to indulge in utopianism,
and an academic theory, risking the fallacy of normative descriptive-
ness. Granting a divergence of premises, there remains nonetheless a
common ground of empirical observation; it is on the basis of the latter
that Kluge insists on an irreducible degree of autonomy in the
spectator's involvement, even with films that make every effort to elim-
inate it.

A potential incongruity between the spectator's disposition and

the organization of desire on the screen emerges in a reading, some-
what against the grain, of Metz's essay, "The Fiction Film and Its
Spectator," a Freudian analysis which is in many ways closer to Kluge's
notions than the essentially Lacanian framework of "The Imaginary
Signifier." Considering the convergence of the impression of reality,

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 Kluge, Cinema and the Public Sphere 61

the impression of the dream and the impression of t

"confused territory" of the filmic state, Metz elaborat
contradictions involved in that process- contradiction
ing and being awake, between pleasure and reality pr
important, between the individual's authorship and th
the cinematic phantasy. With regard to the latter, he
as to admit cautiously a social dimension to the cinem
contradictions at hand. "The material existence of the filmic
images.. .helps recover some advantages that compensate more or les
completely for the images' immediately alien origin: their profound
conformity to one's own phantasy is never guaranteed, but when
chance permits this to a sufficient degree, the satisfaction-the feeling
of a little miracle, as in the state of shared amorous passion- results in
a sort of effect, rare in nature, which can be defined as the temporary
rupture of a quite ordinary solitude."16 The promise of collectivity is
nothing more than an effect, to be sure, and thus in the realm of ideol-
ogy, but nevertheless it is a potential to be appropriated by an alterna-
tive practice. Such practice, however, is not one of Metz's most press-
ing concerns, as his stabs in the direction of avant-garde cinema- in the
same essay- once again confirm.
The division of labor between the film theorist and the avant-
garde practitioner is also reflected in a difference of emphasis when it
comes to the point at which spectator and film collude, respectively col-
lide. Whereas Metz, in "The Imaginary Signifier," proceeds from the
mirroring effect of the cinematic image and the illusion of imaginary
plenitude it temporarily affords, Kluge's strategic focus is on the
moment of negation: the empty space between shots (Leerstelle), and
the emptying out of the image itself, the non-image (Nichtbild, rhyming
with the German word Lichtbild, i.e., slide, transparency).17 Frequently
mocking Adorno's apothegm, "I love to go to the movies, the only
thing that bothers me is the image on the screen," Kluge himself
invests in a similar aesthetics of negativity. Over against the flood of
images that beckons the spectator of the contemporary Hollywood pro-
duct, an alternative cinema has to engender a resistance- in the
psychoanalytic sense- resistances that provoke the spectator into auto-
nomous co-authorship. Hence the importance of cuts, ruptures,
silences, breaks- whatever may counteract the obtrusive referentiality
of the image flow; hence the emphasis on a radical practice of montage.
Kluge's concept of montage (which I discuss in greater detail else-
where18) can be roughly characterized in analogy to Barthes's notion of
the "writerly' text, a self-conscious interplay of discourses depending
for its meaning of the discursive activity of the reader/ spectator. 19 The
individual montage sequence does not produce a new, unifying idea,
but, on the contrary, aims to dissolve fixed positions of meaning
through a continuous overlayering and unmaking of one discourse by

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 62 DISCOURSE

another, thus c
Whereas repres
dialectically, ten
of an overall na
an excess and an
number of way
down, fragme
approaches the
their experience
Kluge claims, w
patterned on th
calls "the ten-t
technical invent
on an industrial
polemical one: K
by intentions b
tivist than that
invokes has clea
between fact an
crossing of doc
tions for the pr
example of Joy
In a late essay
that the images
experience on w
against each oth
of writing unde
signs; in the sa
arranging thing
into account th
philosophy,22 t
tical thought-
allegories in disguise, makig them readable, decipherable, through
cinematic means of figuration. Translated into Kluge's concept of mon-
tage, this involves a highly mediated discourse, figuring itself forth in
self-conscious construction, which sets it quite apart from what is com-
monly understood by associational montage.
The grounding of Kluge's concept of montage in the stream of
associations can be further elucidated with recourse to the notion of
"inner speech" which Paul Willeman, resuming the work of Boris
Eikenbaum, applies to cinematic disburse. While all visual perception
is structured by verbal discourse, Willemen argues, this inner speech is
nevertheless different from manifest speech. The greater tendency
towards predication and condensation allows inner speech to "freely
integrate thing-representations in its chain of signifiers, a facility it

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Kluge, Cinema and the Public Sphere 63

shares with cinema."23 A cinematic practice that fore

ings of inner speech (rather than suppressing its ver
sical cinema) would restore to the image ("thing-r
high degree of indeterminacy and thus its poetic func
illusionist myth of visual accuracy. In a similar vein,
the photographe capability of the camera, for precise
discursively contextualized visual particularity can its
critique of language and thereby set off new processes
In a less technical sense, Kluge's images, charge
tions of memory and phantasy, aspire to the condi
"dialectical image"- an image that flashes up in the m
nition, its shock arresting and crystallizing configur
into a monad, capturing and redeeming a moment
notion, criticized as it was by the more rationalistic
cial to Benjamin's philosophy of history as it appea
historical projects- in film, fictional prose, and th
deconstruction and redemption.

"The relationship of a Love Story to History," sequence from The Patriot (1979).
Voice-over accompanying this and the following shots: "Rome, August 1939. Fred
Tacke and his wife Hildegard, nee Gartman. This is their first trip together. . . Sep-
tember: he has to join his regiment. . . In 1953 Tacke returns from Russian captivity.
Now they are expected to resume the love story of August 1939."

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 64 DISCOURSE

At this point, it s
Metzian distinction
distinction betwe
seeming self-suffic
of events thus re
French word histoire and the German word Geschichte. So we know
that the absence of an enunciating subject is ideological, that historical
events are never closed, that they do not have the status of natural
facts or transparent artifacts. But how do we distinguish between
"story" and "history," how do the functions of narrative and discourse
intersect with either of them? The construction of these issues in
linguistic terms seems to occlude a dimension which is certainly not
outside languge, yet is by no means exhausted or sufficiently defined by
the economy of signification: the specific relationship of historical indi-
viduals to history. To invoke Marx- a rather old-fashioned Marx as it
were- human beings do make their own history, but not of their own
free will. The deconstruction of subject ideology notwithstanding, the
question remains as to why the enormous productivity of generations
has yielded so little praxis, so little self-determination by human beings
of their real conditions of existence. Or rather, and this is a question
particularly relevant to German history, why does it tend to produce the
opposite- failure, non-identity, and catastrophe?
Kluge proceeds from the assumption that actual life histories are
generally not determined by the individuals who live them; instead the
catastrophic continuity of history imposes structures of interruption and
discontinuity on individual experience. The ideology of the fiction film,
i.e., classical narrative, seeks to imprint the structure of the family
romance on the world, which Kluge reads as an instance of negative
utopianism. The method of the "antagonistic realist," however, the
construction of scenes through reduction and interruption, is already
prefigured- arbitrarily- by the way in which historical reality interferes
with the stories of human life- "empirical forms (Realformen) which
history employs to cut human beings to size for its fiction of reality
(Real-Roman). "The task of the filmmaker, then, is to provide complex
models with which the spectators can organize their experience for and
by themselves. "Either social history continues to tell its fiction of
reality, regardless of the human beings, or human beings tell their own
story, that is, counter-history (Gegengeschichte)."28 The dialectical
mediation of the categories of Real-Roman and Gegengeschichte offers
an Ац/hebung of the formalist opposition of histoire/discours into a con-
cept of praxis, in which the transformation of story into discourse is
functionally subjected to the cinema's seeking of access to history.
The dialectical conception of histoire and discours enables Kluge to
maintain the basically narrative function of cinema, his critique of clas-
sical fiction film notwithstanding. The emphasis is on the act of

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Kluge, Cinema and the Public Sphere 65

narration, not story: "Telling stories, this is precisely

narrative cinema." And he adds slyly, undercutting t
city of his statement, "what else is the history of
vastest narrative surface of all? Not one story but
The aspiration of narrative cinema to historical p
requires a radical revision of genre conventions. Th
between documentary and fictional genres, according
logical in that it disregards the coexistence of fact
human mind; the fiction film falls short because of it
tory and social experience, the documentary in so far
the ideology of representational authenticity which on
"wicked fiction of reality."30 As an alternative, Kluge
less than a crossing of radical observation and rad
would leave neither genre intact but rather appropria
the field of discourse.

3. In Kluge's films, the field of discourse is projected in a

number of ways, the most obvious being the use of quotations- or
misquotations- on the level of silent titles and voice-over. Reminis-
cent of modernist practices in poetry (e.g., Pound, Eliot), Kluge's quo-
tations however show no cultural reverence whatsoever; the sources
remain for the most part anonymous or insignificant, and accuracy gives
way to usurpation. "Give me a point outside the family and I shall
move the world," reads a title from Gelegenheitsarbeit einer Sklavin
(Part-Time Work of a Domestic Slave, 1973); or, to take a phrase from
Germany in Autumn, rendered by the voice-over, "suicide- the choice
of those who have no place in this world" ("Selbstmord begeht, иш
nicht in diese Welt passt"), echoing a sentence from Adorno's Aesthe-
tische Theorie, "Denn wahr ist nur, was nicht in diese Welt passt. "31 Other
quotations present proverbs, set phrases (Redensarten), commonplaces,
fragments of discourse that are half-familiar and half-esoteric but
mostly forgotten, rendered strange in new constellations. (A similar
method is at work in the arrangement of still images and music, that is,
second hand music which bears the traces and connotations of previous
usage;32 even if referred to a subjective source- as the suicide images
or the Deutschlandlied to the mind of Gabi Teichert- these image clus-
ters or musical themes more often than not outrun diegetical anchor-
ing.) Kluge's obsessive use of quotation marks, figuratively speaking,
foregrounds the act of enunciation itself, suspending and simultane-
ously provoking the question of authorship: a discourse in search of
spectators who can remember and revise.
Applied to documentary footage, this strategy attempts the
transformation of events- past, completed, "natural"- into instances
of discourse. In the Frankfurt film, In Gefahr und grösster Not bringt der
Mittelweg den Tod (In Danger and Extremities the Middle Road Leads to
Death; co-directed with Edgar Reitz, 1975), the title "Die Sprechweise

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 66 DISCOURSE

öffentlicher E
introduces a doc
occupied house
convention of
"Punctuating 'r
mended, Kluge
connects them
of representati
public sphere.33
The most stri
remains the T
knee belongs to
was invented by
genstern. Over
as reconstructed
standing that
Insisting on an
Knee defends
sense. (Towards
Latin which is t
tation of the te
parody of and
itself points ou
voice- or rather
is what motivat
Gabi Teichert.

The character of Gabi Teichert touches on the most interesting

yet also problematic device of genre-crossing in Kluge's films; the
insertion of a fictional protagonist in an intermittently documentary
context. As Kluge maintains in his critique of genre divisions, there
can be no objectivity without emotions, intentions, actions, human eyes
and ears; in cinematic terms, the spectator needs an instance of secon-
dary identification which structures the look in a comprehensible,
anthropomorphic way. In Kluge's practice, however, secondary
identification remains highly rudimentary, in the measure that the char-
acters upon whom it rests are themselves highly fragmentary, artificial
figures. Primary identification is not only broken down by the peculiar
construction of secondary identification- as Elsaesser shows for the
case of Fassbinder- but is problematized from the start, through the
inscription of a many-voiced, pragmatically positioned subject.
The status of character in Kluge's films is inseparable from its
relation to the voice-over, the absent narrator who intervenes, seem-
ingly, to mediate the character for the spectator. The relationship of
voice-over to character inevitably provokes criticism for its gender-
specific division of labor: a male voice- that of the filmmaker
himself- speaks a female figure.34 The validity of this criticism hinges,

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Kluge, Cinema and the Public Sphere 67

in part at least, on the dimension of authority and c

associated with voice-over narration, especially in
usage. Let us take a brief look at Gabi Teicherťs a
many in Autumn. Over an image of the character ge
out, looking at herself in a mirror, the narrator intro
tory teacher in doubt of her profession, since the
now searching for "the foundations of German his
shot she trudges through a deserted winter landscape
we to read this as a literalization of a worn-out tro
the voice-over enters again, this time from a differe
she is digging a shelter for World War III, or she is d
torical remnants." The uncertainty implied in the
possibilities making as much and as little sense- subve
assumption of narrative control over character int
takes on a life of its/her own, as she is engaged in a p
narrator nor spectator as yet understand. Taken as a
discourse, Kluge's voice-over consistently shifts its st
articulation, deconstructing itself as it goes along. Th
between the first and the second comment as well as
distance of the voice-over/character relationship stim
search for another meaning him/herself. (It has be
plausible for a film structured by a series of fun
Teichert is digging a grave; rather than calling t
suppression, I would cite it as an example of how, as
film's meaning materializes in the spectator's head.)

Digging, or, The Archeology of Fairytales, - "how a people work

over a period of eight hundred years."

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 68 DISCOURSE

There is neverth
the absent filmm
Benjamin's Denkb
und Erinnern"3
Teicherťs arcane
indeed be reduce
male intellect wit
cal effect exceed
codes of the psy
Kluge's character
conventional fem
construction, as
achieves the relat
interpretation by
ing.36 Since whe
hot bath to warm her frozen feet?

This figurative complexity of character conception owes much to

the fact that the actors in Kluge's film not only quote, in the Brechtian
tradition, but also improvise. In a film like The Patriot, which neither
has a script nor gives direction credit, the dialogues were invented by
the actors who speak them. Gabi Teichert as a walking instance of
catachresis is as much a creation of the filmmaker as of the actress,
Hannelore Hoger, herself. The mock mise-en-scène device of her
appearance at the Social Democratic Party convention (only in the
course of her actually being there did she transmogrify into a fictional
character), the intersection of documentary and fictional space brings
out the highly fictional character of the political muscle show.37 The
question she asks, deadpan as throughout The Patriot, of individual
delegates is as inappropriate in the pragmatic context as it is legitimate
from a radical perspective: dissatisfied with the teaching material Ger-
man history has provided so far, she demands of these real politicians
that they change history- "here and now"- so as to enable her to
render German history in a patriotic version.38
The incongruity of goals, means, and results, finally, is inscribed
in the specular organization of Kluge's films, in particular the way in
which character-look rejects the role it has in traditional narrative. In
classical cinema, character-look predominantly serves to stitch spaces
together under the laws of diegesis, a process that keeps binding the
spectator in a fetishistic structure of representation; when looking itself
is figured, it predominantly assumes a voyeuristic and sado-masochistic
function.39 Character-look in Kluge's films, however, is rarely part of
point-of-view constructions, eyelines hardly ever match, and when a
character is shown looking, we can more likely expect a montage cluster
of semi-autonomous images than a reverse shot of an object within
diegetic space. Character-look far from merely failing to integrate

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Kluge, Cinema and the Public Sphere 69

spaces, emphasizes their disparity and incongruity. C

of looking is barely tied to action but is motivated b
itself, thus establishing an explicit, non-illusionistic
the spectator.
The foregrounding of looking as a legitimate activity- even
though sometimes practiced in less than legitimate professions- raises
the question as to whether there can be a fetishistic mode of scopophi-
lia, an alternative to the voyeurism that governs the fiction film and its'
spectator.40 Gabi Teichert discusses this alternative in a section of The
Patriot entitled "Der Spanner" ("The Peeping Tom"). Staatsschützer
M./The Voyeur, addressing the camera, complains he is overworked: as
an employee of the State Intelligence Service, he spends his days
observing politically suspect individuals while at night he continues this
activity for purposes of sexual gratification. In his latter capacity, he
can be seen observing Gabi Teichert behind a lit window (she is sup-
posed to be ironing, which may be as difficult to discern for the
voyeur as it is for the spectator), when a cut to a different angle shows
the object of his look entering the very scene of observation. "Don't
disturb me, I'm working," he tells her; "I am down here now," she
responds. There follows a professional conversation about voyeurism,
bracketed by shots through a window of the restaurant where the two
are meanwhile seated. Stating an affinity between their occupations-
his as an observer of the present, hers as one of the past- Gabi
Teichert understands his predicament and gives valuable advice: "If
you want to be a voyeur you have to be relaxed," she says, punning on
the German words for "voyeur" and "tension." ("Als Spanner
müssen Sie entspannen"), and points to the tense area on his forehead.
"You make a mistake, you put your eyes on a leash- during the day
when you spy on people and at night when you restrict yourself to this
perverse business. This hampers the overall vision." As a relaxing
exercise, she recommends a rapid blinking of the eyelids, "as if you
were taking little shots with a camera. That's how you get the energy
to flow."

Gabi Teichert speaks for herself. But she is also speaking for
Kluge, as she links the redemption of voyeurism as a form of social
practice with cinematographic imagery. Refusing to provide the glue
between primary and secondary identification, her own look in the film
rather functions like a Lacanian gaze,42 the look that pre-exists the sub-
ject in the field of desire. Never satisfied nor ever satisfiable, this gaze
is challenged by the vast panorama of disasters which is German his-
tory. "The more closely you look at a word, the more distantly it looks
back," a title in The Patriot quotes from Karl Kraus, and Kluge adds, in
capital letters, the word "DEUTSCHLAND." Benjamin, recalling the
same phrase in "Hashish in Marseilles," adds from his notes the
"surprised comment": "How things withstand the gaze."43 It is only

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70 DISCOURSE

consistent that t
positive results
develops a succe
photograph of t
never performs
for the GDR.44 T
female incompe
Franziska Busch
a Kluge characte
private life she
endows her with
ception film."
Gabi Teichert's
To enlist the scop
tion is at the cor
to his authorsh
"female modes o
appear parasitic
Teicher may be K
history, but Han
she- together w
wreckage. Her v
onto found ma
Autumn, includ
Teichert verwir
the time Gabi Te
in perspective.)"
Teichert oppose
historian's task o
In a similar vei
salvaging histori
as cumbersome
again in the Benj
texts and insert
strange and jarri
that is not cont
suppressions. As
tive readings of
Enlightenment a
historical exper
requires deconst
them on the lev
("Baustelle"),46
many in Autumn
history - "Gegeng

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 Kluge, Cinema and the Public Sphere 71

Notes

1. Thomas Elsaesser, "Primary Identification and the Historical

Germany/' Cine-Tracts, No. 11, (Fall 1980), pp. 45, 51.

2. Elsaesser, "Myth as the Phantasmagoria of History: H.J. S

Representation," New German Critique, Nos. 24-25 (Fall/Winter 1

3. Timothy Corrigan, "The Realist Gesture in the Films of Wi

and the New German Cinema," Quarterly Review of Film Studi
pp. 205-216; "Wenders' Kings of the Road: The Voyage from D
German Critique, no. 24-25, pp. 94-107. The latter is part of a
Dialogic Image: Audience, Text and Context in Contemporary
pertinent is the essay version of Corrigan' s paper read at the Mi
German Avant-Garde Film: The Seventies, April 1982.

4. The most convincing analysis of this tendency remains, wi

blindness, Adorno and Horkheimer's chapter on "The Culture In
of Enlightenment, trans. John Cummings (1944; New York: Seabu

5. For a related enterprise, documenting the contradictory curre

Tatjana Botzat, Elisabeth Kiderlen, Frank Wolff, Ein deutsc
Dokumente, Berichte, Kommentare (Frankfurt/M.: Verlag Neue K
analysis see contributions by Marcuse, Dutschke, Habermas an
Critique, No. 12 (Fall 1977). A more detailed description of the
production of Germany in Autumn is given in Marc Silberm
Milwaukee Conference, reprinted here. Also see Miriam Hanse
Cinema and Oppositional Public Sphere: Alexander Kluge's cont
Autumn," NGC, Nos. 24-25, pp. 36-56; the following section repea
with different emphasis, arguments I have developed in that essay

6. Alexander Kluge, Die Patriotin, (Frankfurt/M.: Zweitausendei

7. The government-imposed ban on information, enforced by

press, radio and TV stations, was strategically violated whenever
before in German history, politics was filtered through the l
deutscher Herbst, pp. 45 ff.

8. Jan Dawson, " Germany in Autumn [Der] kleine Godard,

(November 1978), pp. 14-15, pp. 44-45; 14.

9. For a close analysis of Fassbinder's contribution to Germa

Rentschler's essay in this issue.

10. Heike Sander, "Filmpolitik als Produktionspolitik," Frauen u

pp. 48-49; Klaus Eder, Alexander Kluge, Ulmer Dramaturgien : Re
Hanser, 1980), especially 'Stichwort: Bestandsaufnahme," p
Patriotin, pp. 4 Iff., 280ff. Films that have come out of this impu
(1980), a collaboration of Kluge, Schlöndorff and two other film
Strauss, and War and Peace (1982), a film planned by Kluge, Schlö
Fassbinder, whose part has now been taken over by Heike San
this context is an increased historical orientation of a whole cluster of films that have

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 72 DISCOURSE

come after Germany

Federal Republic; He
Subjective Factor; or Kl

11. Negt/ Kluge, Öffen

proletarischer Öffentl
of this book, see Ebe
Organization," NGC,
the cinema's function
the cinema vis-á-vis f
ciousness industries,
Filmwirtschaft in de
1973), pp. 65 ff.

12. One such model o

Radical Film Funding

13. Die Patriotin, p. 2

the Public Sphere," N

14. Christian Metz, Le

d'Editions [10/18], 19
1981); first English t
pp. 14-76.

15. "Cinema Pure, Cinema Impure: Ein Gespräch zwischen Alexander Kluge und Bion
Steinborn," Filmfaust, No. 26 (Feb.-Mar. 1982), pp. 32-64; 63.

16. Metz, "Le Film de fiction et son spectateur," Le signifiant imaginaire, pp. 121-175;
167; quoted from the English translation in New Literary History, 8 (Autumn 1976),
pp. 75-105; 98.

17. Enno Pataias, Frieda Grafe, interview with Alexander Kluge, Filmkritik, 10, No. 9
(1966), pp. 487-494; 490; Ulrich Gregor, "Alexander Kluge," in Herzog/K luge/Straub
(Munich: Hanser, 1976), pp. 153-178; 158, 166 ff.; Kluge, Ulmer Dramaturgien, p. 64,
trans, in NGC, Nos. 24-25, p. 216; "Cinema Pure, Cinema Impure," passim.

18. "Alexander Kluge: Crossing between Film, Literature, Critical Theory," in Film und
Literatur, The Thirteenth Amherst Colloquium on German Literature, forthcoming
(Bern: Francké, 1982-83).

19. Roland Barthes, SfZ, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill & Wang, 1974); also
see Judith Mayne, "S/Z and Film Criticism," Jump Cut, Nos. 12-13 (Dec. 1976), pp. 41-
45.

20. Gelegenheitsarbeit einer Sklavin: Zur realistischen Methode (Frankfurt/M.: Surhkamp,

1975), p. 208; Die Patriotin, p. 295, trans. NGC, Nos. 24-25, p. 209.

21. Th. W. Adorno, "Filmtransparente" 1966), Ohne Leitbild (Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp,

1967); trans, by Thomas Levin, "Transparencies on Film," NGC, Nos. 24-25, pp. 199-
205; 201, 203.

22. Cf. my introduction to Adorno, "Transparencies on Film," pp. 186-198, 196 ff., for
further references.

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Kluge, Cinema and the Public Sphere 73

23. Paul Willemen, "Cinematic Discourse- the Problem of Inner S

No. 3 (1981), pp. 63-93; 82.

24. Ulmer Dramaturgien, p. 15 ff., 97 ff.

25. Walter Benjamin, "Zentralpark," Illuminationen (Frankfurt/M.

p. 245; "über den Begriff der Geschichte," p. 253; the latter tran
Illuminations (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), p. 255.

26. Under this rubric: almost all of Kluge's films, beginning with his
first feature film, Abschied von Gestern (Yesterday Girl, 1966) throu
Patriot, 1979); among his works in fiction, Lebensläufe (Curriculae Vi
beschreibung (Description of a Battle, 1964), Neue Erzählungen: Unheimlic
Stories: Uncanny Times, 1977) and other texts; as well as a 1,283 pag
Geschichte und Eigensinn (History and Obstinacy/Autonomy, 1981), a
with Oskar Negt. For further biblio/ filmographie references see R
Die Filme von Alexander Kluge (Hildesheim, New York: Olms Presse, 1
ander Kluge (Munich: C.H. Beck, 1980)

27. Metz, "History/Discourse: Note on Two Voyeurisms," Edinburg

No. 1, [1976], pp. 21-25; also, Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, "A Note on
in the same issue, pp. 26-32.

28. Gelegenheitsarbeit einer Sklavin, pp. 222, 204 ff.

29. "Erzählkino," Die Patriotin, p. 40, trans. NGC, Nos. 24-25, p. 206; cf.
Gelegenheitsarbeit, p. 215: "It should be possible to represent reality as the historical
fiction it actually is."

30. Gelegenheitsarbeit, pp. 202 ff., 21 5ff; excerpts, trans, by Skip Acuff and H.B. Moeller,
in Wide Angle, 3/4 (1980), pp. 26-33.

31. Adorno, Ästhetische Theorie (Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 1970), p. 93; cf.

Gelegenheitsarbeit, p. 218.

32. Rudolf Hohlweg, "Musik für den Film- Film für Musik: Annäherung an Herzog,
Kluge, Straub," in Herzog/Kluge/Straub, pp. 45-68; 52-61.

33. Kluge/ Reitz, "In Gefahr und gröter Not bringt der Mittelweg den Tod," Kursbuch,
No. 41 (Sept. 1975) pp. 41-84; trans., in excerpts, Wide Angle, 3/4.

34. For feminist positions on that issue see reviews in Frauen und film: on Part-Time
Work of a Domestic Slave, No. 3 (1974), pp. 12-25; on Germany in Autumn, No. 16,
(1978), pp. 15-21; on The Patriot, No. 23 (1980), pp. 4-13; and Ruby Rich's paper read at
the Milwaukee Conference, April 1982. Also cf. my essay in NGC, No. 24-25, pp. 51 ff.

35. Benjamin, Schriften, vol. IV/ 1 (Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 1972), pp. 400ff.

36. This particular concept of allegory, elaborated within literary criticism by Paul de
Man, owes much to Benjamin's Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels (1923-25), trans. John
Osborne, The Origin of the German Tragic Drama (London: New Left Books, 1977).

37. A similar technique is used, for instance, in Part-time Work of a Domestic Slave when
Roswitha Bronski (Alexandra Kluge) joins a group of government officials on a bus tour
through Frankfurt labor immigrants' tenements; see Jan Dawson, interview with Kluge,

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 74 DISCOURSE

in Alexander Kluge
1977), p. 35.

38. The topical urgency behind this question, crucial to the whole film, was created by
the decision of the Hessian government to abolish history as an obligatory part of
highschool curricula.

39. Stephen Heath, "Narrative Space," Screen, 17, No. 3 (1976), pp. 68-112; Laura
Mulvey, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," Screen, 16, No. 3 (1975), pp. 6-18.

40. For the distinction between a voyeurism that allows for the ambivalence of perverse
relationships, e.g., that characteristic of the theater and its exhibitionist aspect, and a
voyeurism governed by the system of the primal scene and the keyhole, i.e., the fetishis-
tic structure of the cinema, see Metz, 4 'History/ Discourse," p. 23; also "The Imaginary
Signifier," Screen, p. 64. In addition to the interactional dimension of
voyeurism/exhibitionism, I would assume that Kluge's redemption of scopophilia also
aims at the subversive elements of that drive as Freud theorized it in his writings on
infantile sexuality. In a similar direction cf. Gertrud Koch, "Warum Frauen ins
Männerkino gehen: Weibliche Aneignungsweisen in der Filmrezeption und einige ihrer
Voraussetzungen," in: Nabakowski, Sander, Gorsen, Frauen in der Kunst, (Frankfurt:
Suhrkamp, 1980), I, pp. 15-29.

41. Die Patriotin, p. 107; the following dialogue is translated from Kluge's shot descrip-
tion.

42. I am thinking here of the particular ramifications developed around that term in "Of
the Gaze as Objet Petit a, " such as the element of touché, the sublation of subject/object
divisions, the distinction between "vision" and "sight"~the implications of which do not
yet seem to have entered film theory on a larger, productive scale; nor can they be com-
pletely subsumed by the categorical framework of the symbolic and the imaginary (cf.
Heath, "Difference," Screen, 19, No. 3, (1978), pp. 51-112; 88 ff.) Jacques Lacan, The
Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton,
1977), pp. 67-119; also see his remarks in the same volume on voyeurism, p. 181 ff.

43. Karl Kraus, in Die Fackel, No. 326-328; Benjamin, Illuminationen, p. 331; trans, by
Edmund Jephcott in Reflections (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979), p. 144.

44. The latter two are protagonists of Kluge's Artists Under the Big Top: At a Loss (1967)
and the Frankfurt film, respectively.

45. Öffentlichkeit und Erfahrung, pp. 44 ff., 50; Gelegenheitsarbeit, pp. 223-241; Geschichte
und Eigensinn, pp. 309 ff.

46. Gelegenheitsarbeit, p. 220.

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