Alexander Kluge
News from Ideological Antiquity:
Marx–Eisenstein–Capital

A Free Presentation in Three Parts

Hosted by Red Channels in collaboration with
Platform for Pedagogy, 16 beaver, e-flux and Ludlow 38

Part One
7pm Tuesday, 09 November 2010 | Goethe-Institut Wyoming Building
5 East 3rd Street, New York NY

Part Two
7pm Sunday 21 November 2010 | e-flux
41 Essex Street, New York NY

Part Three
7pm Friday 26 November 2010 | 16 beaver
16 Beaver Street, 4th Floor New York, NY

Running time for each presentation is approximately three hours
German with English Subtitles

Alexander Kluge's News from Ideological Antiquity: Marx–Eisenstein–Capital (2008, 570 minutes) begins with Russian filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein's ambitious but unrealized plan to combine Karl Marx's Capital and James Joyce's Ulysses. For over nine hours, the film expands in concentric circles as Kluge, his guests, interlocutors and monologists make associative links on a range of topics that starts from a filmic discussion of Eisenstein's notes.

Kluge's film is divided into three parts: I. Marx and Eisenstein in the Same House; II. All Things are Bewitched People; III. Paradoxes of Exchange Society. At several points in the film we get a sense of what Eisenstein had in mind with his project. At one point, Kluge shows a "pot of soup has become a water kettle, boiling away and whistling: the image recurs at several moments in the exposition (Eisenstein's notes projected in graphics on the intertitles), in such a way that this plain object is 'abstracted' into the very symbol of energy. It boils impatiently, vehemently it demands to be used, to be harnessed, it is either the whistling signal for work, for work stoppage, for strikes, or else the motor-power of a whole factory, a machine for future production ..." By insistence and repetition this banal object, a commodity, transforms into a larger-than-life symbol, and we start to get a sense of the full range of cognitive and material links this commodity has to the web of life that surrounds it.
—Marty Kirchner