News from Ideological Antiquity: Marx/Eisenstein/Capital, Alexander Kluge, Germany, 2008, 490'
10:00 Part 1: Marx and Eisenstein in the Same House (188').
15:00 Part 2: All things are Bewitched People (120').
18:00 Part 3: Paradoxes of the Exchange Society (182').
News for Ideological Antiquity: Marx/Eisenstein/Capital (2008) is one of the most complex, monumental works of recent cinema history. Over the space of nearly nine hours, director Alexander Kluge (b. Germany, 1932) offers a reconstruction of Eisenstein's unfinished project of filming Marx's Das Kapital following a feverish meeting with James Joyce in 1927. News from Ideological Antiquity is also a new aid to understanding the contemporary spectre of Marx, based on a phantasmagorical image made up of free association and a montage of ideas, capable of re-imagining cinema as a medium for criticism and knowledge.
Although the film shares in the current wave of interest towards Das Kapital, Kluge distances himself from the prevailing celebrations and literal revisits to create an allegory in which, while the text is the melancholic potential of an unrealised radical project, the subtext is the redemption of the present through a rigorous excavation of the past. News of Ideological Antiquity thus stands as a broad cross-cutting archive, containing film-within-film, images from 20th century history and catastrophe, fragments of opera, interviews with a variety of thinkers (Peter Sloterdijk, Oskar Negt, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, etc.), acted fictions, educational efforts and texts and fragments of speech interwoven amidst the images. Within this torrent of ideas, Kluge appears to be referring to the way in which the media are both the ruins of the past and models for the future. "The history of cinema continues to be a challenge", he writes; "it is a phoenix, and it remains unfulfilled. Around 1929, at the dawn of the era of talking cinema, when Eisenstein wanted to make his version of Marx's Das Kapital, old cinema died for the first time for commercial reasons, only to be reborn elsewhere. The same is true today: cinema is dying in the cinemas and coming back to life on the Internet".
Thus, with a way of working that is close to that of film in its dissolution, using fragment and montage, Kluge –paradoxically–champions cinema anew. This form of cinema is not a space for self-representation of what exists, like the cultural industry described by Kluge’s teacher, Theodor Adorno, but rather a sphere into which to introduce negativity and to devise counterpoints.
News from Ideological Antiquity will be screened in one continuous session, with a short break between each of the three parts. The idea is to offer the audience a different experience and at the same time, to recover the parallels which –as Miriam Hansen has rightly said– Kluge seeks to draw between contemporary cinema and early cinema, seen as an open event, stripped of hierarchy.
Chema González
Head of Cultural Activities at Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía
In collaboration with:
Alexander Klugeren filmaren hiru zatien proiekzioa, ia bederatzi orduz, Eisensteinek, James Joycerekin 1927an izandako topaketa biziaren ondoren, Kapitala filmatzeko proiektu burutu gabea berregitea proposatzen duena.