Thunderbird Would Be Readily Swallowed Viewing This

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 – Eisenstein – 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 Dürs Grünbein 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 – 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 – 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. *

Take me parodic caravan - yes I know you can

Indeed, where do we drag it . . . or should we allow it to carry us? There is no doubt that this bit of the electronic ego-press has often lacked its its own drive-train, hardly is it Edgar Cayce's prophesied machine, but does that mean it should lapse into poverty and despair? Can it not still have a unique taste all its own? No doubt the easy thing is to simply allow the rot to filter by as Friends of Shelby: (who is whom here?)



And yet, you offer up a man who changes his name to mark his reverence for his favorite American author and fetishized weapons and hats . . . hats man! Perhaps the funneled end is narrow but that can also serve to focus the flow my friend - be that what is wished of course. Tell me there is nothing to be considered, nothing to be pondered, take a look, and tell me there is nothing:



How should it be played sir, and not that sittin and waiting for tea is a bad thing and the Popeyes does a fine biscuit and honey.

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Please God, Not The Beer!

One could turn on the torque of Hotel Cinema and discover the weedy philosophical underpinnings of egoism-as-blogging. Sure, we could. Despite Joel's pleading and whip-smart soliloquies, I 've felt since the site's inception that it was an enterprise for people with more time on their hands likely a narrower aperture of interest. It isn't that the Feral Doctor hasn't entered the game and played the paint like a polymath, which he is. he's handy with a jump-hook and stilted opinions on American Exceptional ism.



Where then do we drag this caravan? There is high risk of such lampooning itself, much like the pathetic Anthony Bourdain. Where goes the Monroe Doctrine but to lap at the heels of Kurt Russell, though obviously before he straps himself into Death Proof. Months ago after viewing Terminator:Salvation and Army in The Shadows in the same day, I thought of the insurrective qualities of cinema. The thought of Jean-Pierre Melville being elected to our pantheon soon gripped me, alas my thoughts soon drifted to a more kindred soul, one certainly ripe with sloshing goodness



Alas as climate change may ultimately bring benefit to our sessions of sun tea, we should guard our beverage qua erudition balance and ponder our headmaster

The Friends are drawn into Global Warming

Perhaps the keel and rudder of this venture has been cinema - hotel cinema in all its grandolinquent charms of charged dialogue and all that comes with it, the laughs, the cries (of joy and pain), and all the rest - but, and let's be honest about it, it is often the beer that can fuel the exchange, the fruitful digression, the equating of Brando with the Turner Thesis and rhuemy expressions of awe for Godard. For this reason we must now find ourselves drawn into the fight for the future of the mankind as global warming has wreaked havoc on the acid balance of the delicate Saaz hops, the subtle "compound that produces the delicate, bitter taste of pilsners." According to the report by the Czech Hydrometeorological Institute, as reported in the New Scientist, it may begin here and with those delightful Czech beers where the acid balances and the flavors are indeed quite so delicate, it will spread to other beers by way of their ingredients as well. This is something we should fight, something we should stand in arms about, something that should be stopped immediately. How can we stand idly by and allow the slow (though accelerating) destruction of one of the world's finest beers. Something must be done!

Oh, and Roman Polanski was arrested in Switzerland by request of US authorities. I understand for what and even why, and it is with a bit of a cringe that I admit my ambivalence regarding such. The same does not hold, however, for the need to protect the hops!

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Letters to sons about various things

It is nothing exceptional, if you are at all a fan of American cinema, and/or are at all a student of the country's mid-century politics, to know the name Dalton Trumbo. Screenwriter of some of the most recognizable and significant films of the sweet-spot of American cinema from the 1930s into the 60s, he was also one of the most visible and out-in-the-open members of the Hollywood Ten. This is not a new story, but it is one that was more than ably told earlier tonight on PBS's American Masters. With a script heavily dependent on the script of a stage play by the screenwriter's son Christopher, it was indeed not a heavily critical affair, but it was generally and garrously informative. Nathan Lane, however, stole the show with his reading of a letter from father Trumbo to son on the bawdy and shameful pleasures of masturbation. Redolent with faux-shame and filigreed with an apparently new-found love of Nabakov, the letter was an expression of self-entertaining chagrin and the barely contained glee of Lane's reading won over even the half-witted curmudgeons watching the show.

A shameful moment in American cultural history, even if one that seems almost defanged by time and more recent events. Still, Trumbo could craft a unity of voice against ugly power, even if it was largely imaginary. It seems hard to think of a better image than the one he imagined



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