NACHRICHTEN AUS DER IDEOLOGISCHEN ANTIKE. MARX/ EISENSTEIN/ DAS KAPITAL

Eighty years after Sergei Eisenstein’s plans to make Karl Marx’s ’Das Kapital’ into a film, the German film-maker Alexander Kluge (1932) breathed new life into the project. The starting point was Eisenstein’s intention to turn Marx’s seminal work into a movie and add a montage inspired by James Joyce (who Eisenstein met in 1929). Eisenstein was convinced that the project would be more likely to lead to a radical change in orientation of the possibilities of cinema than to a mere screen version of Marx’s ’Das Kapital’. Through strategies radically different from those usually employed in cinematic narrative, Alexander Kluge continues to use what he calls Eisenstein’s ’modernity’ in the year 2008 in his ’Nachrichten aus der ideologischen Antike. Marx – Eisenstein – Das Kapital’. Interviews, music recordings, an incredibly diverse range of visual and audio fragments, thoughts about Hölderin and Schiller, and self-staged sequences are all brought together in a cinematic clash lasting over nine hours. Intermediate titles in diverse, trashy-looking typographies prevent the spectator from getting lost in an apparent narrative, and disparate image and sound strategies perpetually encourage him to use his imagination, or rather what Kluge calls ’Phantasie’. With that, Kluge reveals himself to be a confirmed modernist: the strategies he employs leave nothing concealed, and the spectator is expected to engage in the film’s construction. The film serves as a reference to Marx’s analytical instruments which, according to Kluge, are not yet out of date. He does not approach Marx’s key work as an essential economics work, but he does consider it as a literary masterpiece, from which fragments are read aloud when the tones of a keyboard are depressed (pianos are a well-established recurring theme in his films). Additionally, ’Nachrichten aus der ideologischen Antike. Marx – Eisenstein – Das Kapital’ contains, among other things, conversations with Peter Sloterdijk, Dietmar Rath, Oskar Negt, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Durs Grünbein, Sophie Rois, Helge Schneider, Boris Groys and Rainer Stollmann.