Alexander Kluge – one of the great thinkers of our times – using cinema as a method to move and arrange thoughts. Germany in the 1960s. A country in movement. Slow movement, but movement. To Be Honest…I Don’t Feel Like Company is a way to reflect Kluge’s positions in two film programs – contemporary art meets yesterday’s engaging films.
I_FORA I_OUT
This program deals with cinematographic strategies in the 1960s – when in Germany cinema was the new and the one, but not only, tool to create a new society. Powerful, beautiful, engaging – cinema was the way. Kluge taught, together with Edgar Reitz, in the academy in Ulm, the successor of the Bauhaus Academy in Weimar. A story of its own – only 24 students, only 15 finishing the curriculum; still the ones that came out of these studies had cinema in their vein, until today: Ula Stöckl, Claudia von Aleman among few others. Inspired by Jonas Mekas’ filmmakers’ cooperative, in New York, a filmmakers’ cooperative was founded in Hamburg and London. Hamburg became the center for avant-garde filmmakers who presented their works in a new film festival. Full of egos and anarchistic energy. Politics entered cinema in 1968 in an intellectual way – Haroun Farocki was the one, pushing the borders forward – and in a very sensual way – with Roland Klick. Without audience no need to make cinema! So, engage the audience ; )
II_DENTRO I_IN
Inside Kluge from today’s POV or better said – what else is to be said. The body and soul as an emotional momentum. In love, in regards, in excerpts, in songs. German photographer Wolfgang Tillmans focuses on an energy spot in the human body, following the heartbeat. Caroline Poggi and Jonathan Vinel’s Bébé Colère brings together rage and images, power and thoughts. As Tracey Emin’s Why I Never Became a Dancer understands – in only few minutes – why a woman must move if she wants to get anywhere:
And as I started to dance
people started to clap
I was going to win
and then I was out of here
Nothing could stop me
And then they started
SLAG SLAG SLAG
Love is the changemaker
