by Henry Berry
Member since:
December 16, 2005

BOOK REVIEW: CINEMA STORIES

January 10, 2008 11:53 AM EST
views: 65 | comments: 2

multifaceted, illuminating views on film and filmmaking by a top German director 

CINEMA STORIES by Alexander Kluge, Translated by Martin Brady and Helen Hughes. New Directions, New York, NY; nd@ndbooks.com. 2007. 111+xii pages. $11.95 trade paper, 5" x 7", ISBN 978-0-8112-1735-4. illustrations.

   One of Germany's top filmmakers for several decades (he was born in 1932), Kluge nonetheless does not regard film as a discrete art form. "Film and music are like cousins...[in that] each moves us inwardly". He has also received Germany's top literary award, the Georg Buchner Prize.

   Even so, as confirmed in the 39 pieces about "cinema"--"older than the art of film"--Kluge nonetheless possesses a singular, precise, revealing grasp of film. "The stories in this book are subjective." They're concisely anecdotal, seemingly random in unpredictably, somewhat whimsically ranging over subjects as diverse as the architect Rem Koolhaus, a waiter in a German restaurant, Walter Benjamin's famous essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction", costuming, acting styles, filming in Africa, and the cosmos as cinema. (Regarding the last topic, you see what Kluge means with his careful use of the word "cinema" to denote a species of experience.) The vagariousness of the topics actually discloses the intellectual and material sources of cinema as they display the keen directorial and artistic eye of a master filmmaker.

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Comments: 2

Beaker (just Beaker) Jan 10, 2008, 1:12pm EST
Could you tell us more about the cinema discussed by Kluge (examples of film titles/directors, for example). I have a child studying film now, so I'm always grateful for a chance to learn something about it.
Henry Berry Jan 10, 2008, 3:22pm EST
Kluge doesn't mention any films except in passnig; and there are pictures from some simply to incidentally illustrate something he says in the short pieces he writes. Nor does he write about directors, except again maybe to mention someone in passing. The book is more like a notebook - maybe this clarfiies it. It's not a familiar bookof film critique or history. Instead, it's personal and idiosyncratic - a king of book often described by reviewers as "quirky". There's very little in it on technique, such as your son as an art student might be interested in. It's really about the eye, the mentality, the sensibility, and the thoughts--i. e., the aesthetic nature--of a superior film director. If you've read parts of Camus's notebooks, for example, you'd get the idea of its content. A few of the (idiosyncratic) titles of sections are The Aura of the Remarkable; Paradeon New Year's Eve in Paris; How We Camseramen Becames Patriots, Simply Because We Were Efficient; Great Cinema, Vanished As If Aborted. The book of collected short pieces is not meant to be instructive, but more like poetry or a notebook.

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