This week, Film Notes publishes Alexander Kluge’s “Cinema in the 21st Century,” an excerpt from The Dragonfly’s Eye: My Virtual Camera (AI) (Spector Books, 2024).
Cinema = also known as play of light. By nature, the camera is a devourer of light. In practice, however, it is rarely used for capturing light—shadows, grey values and flashes—alone. Even if my subjective eye is most delighted by shooting those rich grey tones you can capture in late autumn between 5:00 and 7:00 p.m., the time when the light changes, my footage and later montage work at the editing table serve to tell stories. A kind of civilizational yoke? A compulsion that became normalized at the beginning of sound film? Is it possible to tell a non-linear story without losing all one’s viewers?
Cinema belongs to the most recent of art forms. Its history is only about 128 years old. Due to pressure from other media and its antiquated commercial structure, film history has fallen into crisis. And yet, it is my lasting conviction that film and the “utopia of cinema” have a key power for all other media and arts. It is possible that film will thereby change its form and its tools, but film history will continue. It did not emerge from the spirit of the entertainment film, but the inquisitive spirit of the pioneer of the camera, Eadweard Muybridge.
Film and cinema are a necessary contribution to an IMAGINARY BAUHAUS OF SUBJECTIVITY.
