Carson Welch at n+1:
Alexander Kluge’s ability to detect an illuminating detail was one of his special talents, not only as an interviewer, but also as a fiction writer, filmmaker, critical theorist, and TV programmer. Kluge, who died in March at the age of 94, saw the most disorienting historical upheavals of his time through the prism of these fragmentary perceptions and observations: The entire cold war slackens in the jowls of an East German party spokesman. Across media and genres, Kluge’s work embraces the partiality of these factoids and scattered anecdotes, combining and recombining them in ever-shifting constellations. Hence the many scavengers who populate his narratives, like the protagonist of his 1979 film The Patriotic Woman (Die Patriotin), a history teacher who spends her time rummaging through heaps of detritus from prior epochs but fails to combine any of it into a lesson for her students. Kluge himself was one of those marginal collectors who, as Walter Benjamin said of the ragpickers, are the kindred spirits of Baudelaire, selecting their prized possessions from among the debris of modern life.
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