Abstract/Summary

This chapter positions Alexander Kluge’s iconoclastic films and/or diminishing pictures as after-(dialectical)-images, which is to claim that they are best encountered as a form of poetic/political expression operating between both Adorno’s conceptualisation of the ‘affective consciousness’ of after-images and Benjamin’s ‘sudden illumination’ of dialectical-images. In News from Ideological Antiquity: Marx – Eisenstein – Capital (2008), Kluge takes up Eisenstein’s desire for ‘a different kind of cinema’ accordingly: ‘Sometimes you’re lucky enough that the old [images] linger on unconsciously in a memory beneath the memory and sort of colorize the new [images], thus creating epiphanies.’ If film as mass media is too augmenting, too in your face, too immediate, too blah-blah, then, Eisenstein’s and Kluge’s solution is to construct films through fragmentary, slow, discontinuous and diminishing pictures, via ‘a radical practice of montage,’ trusting that ‘the viewer fills in the gaps themselves.’ Such interior images (of the imagination) are certainly required for a different kind of cinema.