Alexander Kluge: Potential Images, Alternate Histories

In so far as Alexander Kluge is a realist, his realism has always been a realism of potentiality rather than actuality. Kluge’s comments from a 1974 interview are as relevant as ever in the context of his recent works: “What you notice as realistic, given the way our senses have been educated, is not necessarily or certainly real. The potential and the historical roots and the detours of possibilities also belong to reality. The realistic result, the actual result, is only an abstraction that has murdered all other possibilities for the moment. But these possibilities will recur. Which is why I don’t believe too much in documentary realism: because it doesn’t describe reality. The most ideological illusion of all would be to believe that documentary realism is realism.”

In this seminar, we will watch and discuss a number of older and recent films by Alexander Kluge, both long and short, ranging from “handmade” science-fiction from the late 1960s to recent experiments with AI image generators.

Bio

Sven Lütticken is associate professor at Leiden University’s Academy of Creative and Performing Arts / PhDArts, and he coordinates the research master’s track Critical Studies in Art and Culture at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. His most recent book publications are Objections: Forms of Abstraction, Vol. 1 (Sternberg Press, 2022) and the critical reader Art and Autonomy (Afterall, 2022).

This seminar is open to graduate and postgraduate students and the general public. Please write an email to phildoc@fcsh.unl.pt if you would like to attend. Registration is mandatory, as places are limited.

This event is organized by the working group “Thinking Documentary Film”, and part of the project “PhilDoc – Philosophy and Documentary Film. Mediating the Real”, funded by national funds through FCT — Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia under the project EXPL/FER-FIL/0045/2021.