Alexander Kluge

Born in 1932 in Halberstadt (Germany), he lives and works in Germany.

Writer, film-maker and philosopher, Alexander Kluge has been active for over fifty years, and is now one of the “sacred monsters”: he was a close friend of philosopher Theodor W. Adorno, played a central part in the history of New German Cinema, was awarded a Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival for his second feature-film and today runs a daring audio-visual production company.

In order to present this abundant and varied work, le Printemps de septembre's proposal is an exhibition spread across the city like a constellation whose anchor point is the screening of his first short film Brutalität in Stein (Brutality in Stone, 1961), at the Goethe-Institut. This film, in which Kluge stages the ways that Nazi past survives in its own ruins, already contains the program of his work: a committed cinema that questions dominant histori- ography.

Initially one of philosopher Theodor Adorno's students and a legal counsel, Alexander Kluge was Fritz Lang's assistant for his film The Indian Tomb before starting his career as a filmmaker in 1961. A signatory of the Oberhausen manifest that marked New German Cinema, he became its principal advocate among public authorities in order to encourage the funding of the kind of films the entertainment industry generally disdains. He has directed many documentaries, short and feature-length films and imposed himself as one

of the main German writers of fiction as well as social critique by the end of the 20th Century. Alexander Kluge was awarded the Theodor W. Adorno prize in 2009 and the Heinrich Heine prize in 2014. For his body of work, he was awarded the Georg-Büchner prize in 2003 and the Grimme Award in 2010. The French edition of the second volume of his Chroniques des sentiments will be released by P.O.L. in September 2018.