The Power of Emotion

Accelerated sequences of an urban landscape: How else can Kluge open another one of his socio-historical dramatized essays than with this shot (which he has been using since the beginning of his "feature-length" career)? This shot, which dissolves the individual hustle and bustle of pedestrians and cars into one accelerated mass of light, erases their individuality and turns them into indistinguishable particles of a single mass, which is the only one that is observable and significant. This acceleration takes place against the background of an inert and solid, unchanging, and brutal mass of reinforced concrete administrative buildings of modern capitalism. In this introduction, the latent organizational order of the film and Kluge's films of this time is captured – an analysis of permanent structures, unchanging invariants, moving through different costumes of opera drama and the drama of German and European history, all against the backdrop of specific, "dramatized" passages (this time not as drama in relation to literature, but drama in relation to a documentary), which are in harmony or tension with these structures. The assignment of the film was to show emotion as a product and commodity of modern capitalist structures, and it is up to the viewer to judge whether this can also summarize the result of the author's analysis. (02/09/2018)