[Marxism] Kapital-the movie

[Charles Brown <cdb1003@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Kapital-the movie 
 

http://archives.econ.utah.edu/archives/a-list/2009w05/msg00039.htm
Features  Film

19/01/2009

Marx: the quest, the path, the destination
Alexander Kluge's nine-and-a-half hour long film of Marx's "Kapital" is not a 
minute too long says Helmut Merker
What is a revolutionary? The writings of Marx and Engels both use the metaphor 
of revolution as the "locomotive of history". Is, then, the revolutionary a 
standard bearer of progress, a pace setter, a frontrunner?

None of the above, because in a world ruled by a turbo "devaluation" where only 
the new has market value, where commodity production spirals out of control, 
the "train of time" is a deadly trend. Alexander Kluge instead opts for Walter 
Benjamin's idea of the revolution as mankind "pulling the emergency brake". We 
must hold up the torch of reason to the problems at hand, and the true 
revolutionary is therefore the one who can unite future and past, merging two 
times, two societies, the artist who montages stories and history. And so we 
come to Alexander Kluge and his art.

Kluge's monumental "News from Ideological Antiquity. Marx â Eisenstein â 
Das Kapital" is a 570-minute film available only on DVD which is based on the 
work of two other montage artists, James Joyce and Sergei Eisenstein. These two 
met in 1929 to discuss filming Marx's "Kapital" which had been written 60 years 
beforehand. Now, eighty years on, Alexander Kluge joins the party and takes up 
where Eisenstein failed, because neither Hollywood's capitalists nor Moscow's 
Communists were prepared to send the necessary funds his way.

Most of the film consists of involved discussions between Alexander Kluge and 
other Marx-savvy writers and artists. Poet and essayist Hans Magnus 
Enzensberger compares the soul of man with the soul of money, author Dietmar 
Dath explains the meaning of the hammer and sickle on the Soviet flag and, from 
the standpoint of the Stoics, leaps (rather than marches at an orderly pace) 
into industrialisation, the actress Sophie Rois makes an impassioned appeal for 
Medea, differentiating between additive and subtractive love, filmmaker Werner 
Schroeter stages a Wagner opera featuring the "rebirth of Tristan in the spirit 
of battleship Potemkin", philosopher Peter Sloterdijk talks about Ovid and the 
metamorphosis of added value, a man at the piano analyses the score of a strike 
song while workers and factory owners face off in an opera by Luigi Nono, the 
poet DÃrs GrÃnbein interprets Bert Brecht's aesthetisation of the Communist 
manifesto in swinging oceanic
 hexameter, cultural scientist Rainer Stollmann emphasises the myriad meanings 
of Marx's writings as science, art, story telling, philosophy, poetry. And 
social theorist and philosopher Oskar Negt looks sceptical when asked whether 
it's possible to find the right images for all this stuff when you're less 
interested in pedagogical content than the encompassing theory. 

Scholarly stuff, wide and deep in scope, yet bold and playful. But even if your 
own study of Marx is no more than a faded memory, it is hugely enjoyable to 
watch and listen to these experts as their "thinking gradually deepens through 
talking" and to watch Kluge interject, hopping adroitly from one thought to the 
next, surprising his interlocutors, catching them off balance, sending them off 
on new trajectories. We never know how much agreement and variance is hidden in 
Kluge's objections. His a Socratic approach to questioning, curious, open to 
everything, and so wonderfully subtle that at the end always find yourself 
wondering whether he had been driving at a particular target all along. 
Alexander Kluge is a great manipulator, an industrious loom, who weaves the 
most far-flung observations into his system.

He is not filming "Das Kapital" but researching how one might find images to 
make Marx's book filmable. The quest is the way is the destination. The model 
for his underlying structure is Joyce's "Ulysses" where the entire history of 
the world is packed into a day in the life of his hero, Bloom. In Kluge's hands 
this becomes a collage of documentary, essayistic and fictional scenes, 
interviews and still photos, archive images of smoking factory chimneys, 
time-lapse footage of pounding machines and mountains of products, diary 
entries and blackboards scribbled with quotes referencing constructivism and 
concrete poetry. 

Coincidences, collisions. Back to back with a short film in which director Tom 
Tykwer stirs things up in a Berlin street, two readers struggle to recite the 
following sentence, slipping in and out of synch with increasing desperation: 
"Whenever real, corporeal man, man with his feet firmly on the solid ground, 
man exhaling and inhaling all the forces of nature, posits his real, objective 
essential powers as alien objects by his externalisation, it is not the act of 
positing which is the subject in this process: it is the subjectivity of 
objective essential powers, whose action, therefore, must also be something 
objective."

No sooner are we shown "how the history of industry and the established 
objective existence of industry are the open book of man's essential powers, 
the perceptibly existing human psychology" than we have the history of 
capitalism is explained to us as a giant extension of the fairytale about the 
devil with the three golden hairs â every thing is a human being being cast 
under a spell. And the beginning of Mae West's film career runs parallel to the 
leap into industrialisation â a form of aesthetic slapstick in which not 
cream pies fly through the air but ideas and concepts.

Unlike Eisenstein, who was driven to desperation by the herculean task of 
cutting the 29 hours of "October" into a 90-minute film version and turned to 
drugs into the process which left him temporarily blind, Kluge cooly sticks to 
his guns and his nine hours. And it's not a minute too long. 

* 

This article was originally published in Tagesspiegel on 8 January 2009.

Helmut Merker is a film critic.

 


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