Der Angriff der Gegenwart auf die übrige Zeit

A drama or a documentary? Neither one nor the other, but both at the same time. Instead of one traditional fictional story, Kluge once again creates a discontinuous series of individual micro-stories, divided into separate chapters, in which he presents the fates of the characters in a dramatized way, in the style of conventional narrative films, utilizing their life situations for a broader documentary statement about society. To maintain unity and comprehensibility, the film is interspersed with information and notes from the narrator, adding to this Kluge's (Godardian) penchant for including references to films and other forms through shots from classics or collages of images and film windows, creating a unique authorial statement on the postmodern border between fiction and documentary. The content itself is a despondent and nostalgic critique of industrial capitalist modern society, in which individuals are slowly but increasingly being robbed of the possibility of free choice in favor of a hectic time in which the needs of people are overtaken by the demands of industrial products and their producers. For only in long-term time (chronos) can something like love manifest itself, but the modern situation offers something else - life compressed into fleeting presence (kairos), where it is always in the hands of more powerful forces than oneself and yet, precisely because it is the present, it lives under the illusion that it can freely make decisions. (01/28/2015)