Alexander Kluge: Cinema Impure: An Eclectic Modernist Style

Through his films and theoretical writings, and as a television producer, teacher, political lobbyist, lawyer, and public spokesman, Alexander Kluge has played a substantial role in creating the New German Cinema, as well as in German cultural politics. Since 1961 Kluge has produced almost thirty films and hundreds of television programs, written four volumes of fiction, coauthored three major works of sociocultural theory, and won almost every major literary and film prize in Germany. Peter Lutze provides in-depth analysis of Kluge's films and television work but also devotes attention to his political work. In raising issues that have become key questions in contemporary debates about modernism and postmodernism, Kluge's films and pronouncements demonstrate his modernist sensibility and an appropriation of modernist formal strategies for the purpose of the social critique.