German filmmaker and author Alexander Kluge, "who elevated cinematic collages into an art form and won the top prize at the Venice film festival in 1968," died March 25, the Guardian reported. He was 94. A former assistant of legendary filmmaker Fritz Lang, Kluge "was an accomplished director of intellectually rewarding, if at times oblique filmic essays, and an ever-productive writer of short fiction."
He also played a key role in organizing the New German Cinema movement, which "brought forth better-known auteurs such as Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Werner Herzog, and he continued to bring experimental film to the small screen in his later years," the Guardian noted.
After World War II, Kluge studied law, history and church music at the Goethe University Frankfurt, where he was mentored by the philosopher Theodor Adorno. Although he began practicing law, he was increasingly drawn to literature and film. In 1962, he signed the Oberhausen Manifesto, which called on the German film industry to break free from current trends.
Abschied von Gestern (released as Yesterday Girl in the U.S.), one of the first films to emerge from the manifesto, is the story "of a Jewish woman who struggles to settle in West Germany after fleeing from the east, it was told in a jarring style, using discontinuous sound and a non-sequential narrative," the Guardian wrote. It won the Silver Lion at the Venice film festival, an honor Kluge followed up by winning the Golden Lion two years later with Artists in the Big Top: Perplexed.
As an author, Kluge's first collection of short stories, Case Histories (1962) "brought him accolades for its empathetic depiction of characters trying to navigate a country defeated in war," the New York Times noted, adding that his experimental novel The Battle (1964) "focused on the Battle of Stalingrad as seen through German eyes" and won the Bavarian State Prize for Literature.
Kluge's films often included a montage of photographs, archival footage, paintings, drawings and intertitles. This was echoed in his short stories and novels, which included documentary material like photos, maps and diagrams, complicating narratives as he melded nonfiction and fiction, the Times added. One of the best-known writers to be influenced by Kluge's use of photographs was W.G. Sebald (The Rings of Saturn).
In the 1960s, Kluge became involved in Gruppe 47, the West German literary association whose members included Günter Grass and Heinrich Böll.
Kluge worked with the German sociologist philosopher Oskar Negt, whom he met in 1969. They co-authored three books about political and social subjects, including historical materialism and the philosopher Jürgen Habermas's concept of the bourgeois public square. In 1972, they published Public Sphere and Experience, a sociological study of television, his first book-length collaboration with Negt.
Kluge's book Chronicle of Feelings (2000) is a two-volume, 2,000-page collection of his stories. The Times wrote that he "initiated collaborations with artists, writers and thinkers for exhibitions, theater productions and staged readings. Among those he partnered with were the German artists Gerhard Richter and Georg Baselitz."
Kluge also collaborated with the U.S. author Ben Lerner on a "poetic dialogue" book, The Snows of Venice (2018). "My language is not as beautiful as lyrics," he told the Paris Review at the time. "This is something that you have to know how to do. Poets are diamond polishers. But there are also collectors of raw diamonds--I am a good archaeologist."
His many honors include the Georg Büchner and Heinrich Böll literary prizes and, in 2007, the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany, the Times noted. Despite his success as a filmmaker, Kluge maintained that he always considered himself an author first, observing in his 1993 Heinrich Böll Prize acceptance speech: "This is because books have patience and can wait, since the word is the only repository of human experience that is independent of time.... Books are a generous medium, and I still grieve when I think of the library burning in Alexandria. I feel in myself a spontaneous desire to rewrite the books that perished then."