Sunday 27 May | Doors 7pm | Admission Free
News from Ideological Antiquity
Directed by Alexander Kluge, Germany, 2010, (84 mins)
Alexander Kluge's film is a discursive essay about and around Eisenstein's notes on a film of Marx's Capital - written shortly after the release of October in 1927 and connected to his ideas for conceiving a film of Joyce's Ulysses. According to Helmet Merker writing on the 570 minute version, 'Eighty years on, Alexander Kluge joins the party and takes up where Eisenstein failed, because neither Hollywood's capitalists nor Moscow's Communists were prepared to send the necessary funds his way… Scholarly stuff, wide and deep in scope, yet bold and playful. But even if your own study of Marx is no more than a faded memory, it is hugely enjoyable to watch and listen to these experts… Alexander Kluge is a great manipulator, an industrious loom, who weaves the most far-flung observations into his system. He is not filming Das Kapital but researching how one might find images to make Marx's book filmable. The quest is the way is the destination… In Kluge's hands this becomes a collage of documentary, essayistic and fictional scenes, interviews and still photos, archive images of smoking factory chimneys, time-lapse footage of pounding machines and mountains of products, diary entries and blackboards scribbled with quotes referencing constructivism and concrete poetry…'
News from Ideological Antiquity
Directed by Alexander Kluge, Germany, 2010, (84 mins)
Pamphlet of expanded materials about the film here
Alexander Kluge's film is a discursive essay about and around Eisenstein's notes on a film of Marx's Capital - written shortly after the release of October in 1927 and connected to his ideas for conceiving a film of Joyce's Ulysses. According to Helmet Merker writing on the 570 minute version, 'Eighty years on, Alexander Kluge joins the party and takes up where Eisenstein failed, because neither Hollywood's capitalists nor Moscow's Communists were prepared to send the necessary funds his way… Scholarly stuff, wide and deep in scope, yet bold and playful. But even if your own study of Marx is no more than a faded memory, it is hugely enjoyable to watch and listen to these experts… Alexander Kluge is a great manipulator, an industrious loom, who weaves the most far-flung observations into his system. He is not filming Das Kapital but researching how one might find images to make Marx's book filmable. The quest is the way is the destination… In Kluge's hands this becomes a collage of documentary, essayistic and fictional scenes, interviews and still photos, archive images of smoking factory chimneys, time-lapse footage of pounding machines and mountains of products, diary entries and blackboards scribbled with quotes referencing constructivism and concrete poetry…'
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