GOING TO THE MOVIES
601
Tiitowierung,
the caricature is not always distinguishable from the
imitation.
In these movies, one can find certain evidences of the
nouvelle
vague
-
not so much in its formalism, but rather in the way material
is used,
in
the abandonment of fixed storylines and conventional plot in
favor of a freer structure, and in a more conscious use of dialogue for
purposes other than dramatic.
But the freshest approach to cinema is that of Alexander Kluge,
who has made two movies to date. The first,
Abschied von Gestern,
is
a film version of his own short story, "Anita G.," and retains the same
authenticity that marks his prose.
Like Godard, Kluge likes to work with nonprofessionals. He uses
an idea as a loose framework, moving about freely within it, obliging
the actors to think and feel for themselves, react on the scene to newly–
put situations and improvise their own dialogue.
Kluge also makes use of texts projected on the screen to interrupt
the flow of action and create the now-classical effect of Brechtian aliena–
tion. (Reitz also uses this technique in
Mahizeiten.)
The texts have
diverse functions. They are not, as one might expect, mere statements
of the author's view; they propose dialectical poles which cancel each
other out. This is a favored technique of much new German prose and
is a method which seems ideally suited to stating the intellectual's
dilemma in today's world. Very often statements, not in themselves
absurd, are worked to absurdity by the action which exemplifies them.
In other instances, slogans or cliches are quoted in visual contexts which
unmask them.
Abschied von Gestern
describes the vicissitudes - more down
than up - in the life of a young and mixed-up socialist, a girl of J ewish
origin who fl ees from Leipzig to the West. The year is 1966. Kluge
parachutes Anita G. into the field of West German double-standard
morality, to be buffeted around by the winds of Beamtertum and to
break at last on the reef of West German callousness. Pregnant, she
lands in prison. Anita G. is a fresh young thing who drifts into criminal
activity after being misused by eve.ryone she meets. Experience fails to
embitter or to wisen her. Or is Anita G. Germany itself, East and West,
which has failed to learn from its own history? In any case Kluge is more
interested in depicting social than psychological reality, and the fi lm
suffers, as a film, because of this. Subtlety gets sacrificed for clarity, and
art for moral thesis.
"Something's got to give," says a loony trapeze artist in Kluge's
second film,
Artisten in der Zirkus Kuppel: RatIos.
Quite so. And what
