"UNDERSTANDING A FILM COMPLETELY IS CONCEPTUAL IMPERIALISM"

This is my comment in FILMSICK’S BLOG:
http://filmsick.exteen.com/20070913/the-big-mess-alexander-kluge-1971-learning-process-with-dead?page=1


I just found an interesting article written by Alexander Kluge. This article is called THE SPECTATOR AS ENTREPRENEUR, which he wrote in 1979 and is included in the book WEST GERMAN FILMMAKERS ON FILM: VISIONS AND VOICES, published by Holmes & Meier in 1988.

I think I really agree with his article. So I quote what Kluge wrote here:

“The film and television corporations live off the money and the cooperation of the imaginative faculties (unpaid labor) which they extract from the spectator. They designate anyone a mature citizen who is willing to pay. Kant says: “Enlightenment is man’s release (Ausgang) from his self-incurred tutelage.” Leni Pickert says:

“People are mature
when they have their day off…”

In order to cheat the spectators on an entrepreneurial scale, the entrepreneurs have to designate the spectators themselves as entrepreneurs. The spectator must sit in the movie house or in front of the TV set like a commodity owner: like a miser grasping every detail and collecting surplus on everything which has any value. Value per se. So uneasy this spectator-consumer, alienated from his own life so completely like the manager of a supermarket or a department store who—even at the price of death (heart attack)—will not stop accumulating the last scraps of marketable goods in the storeroom so that they may find their buyers. How disturbed he is when people pass by his store; how nervous he gets about objects in the storeroom which do not sell immediately.

In a similar entrepreneurial fashion the spectator-having reached the desired consumer maturity—scans films for their spectacle and exhibition values, for complete intelligibility, just as one is taught to gnaw a bone thoroughly, as the saying goes, so that the sun will shine. The sun, however, “taking its thunderous course”, according to its own habits and unconcerned with human communication, does not care the least whether or not we clean our plates.

Understanding a film completely is conceptual imperialism which colonizes its objects. If I have understood everything then something has been emptied out.

We must make films that thoroughly oppose such imperialism of consciousness. I encounter something in film which still surprises me and which I can perceive without devouring it. I cannot understand a puddle on which the rain is falling—I can only see it; to say that I understand the puddle is meaningless. Relaxation means that I myself become alive for a moment, allowing my senses to run wild: for once not to be on guard with the policelike intention of letting nothing escape me.”

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This is my personal thoughts:

--One thing I like very much about Alexander Kluge’s films is its structure, which seems to have many components which are unrelated to one another. This kind of structure can also be found in some Thai short films, such as:

1.LIFE IS SHORT 2 (2006, Tossapol Boonsinsukh, A+)

2.DON’T PUT AN EGG IN MICROWAVE OR IT WILL EXPLODE (2005, Tossapol Boonsinsukh, A+)

3.DREAM WATCH FOR ANYONE WHO IS BELIEVED TO VIOLATE GOOD MORALITY (2007, Manutsak Dokmai, A+)

4.OUR WAVES (2006, Tulapop Saenjaroen, A+)

5.”___” (2007, Tulapop Saenjaroen, A+)