70,000 Years Just Like One Day – Alexander Kluge’s Current Work for Television Films, Plus an Installation – A Place of Enchantment

Permanent Exhibition, Television Section / Program Gallery / Time Tunnel / Hall of Mirrors

At present, Alexander Kluge is dealing with the history of human civilization. The title of his work in progress is 70,000 Years Just Like One Day. For this purpose, he has held numerous conversations – with paleobiologists, behavioral scientists, linguists, bioacoustic researchers, etc. – i.e. with those experts, who trace the history of humankind. It’s an enterprise similar to the stories in 1001 (Arabian) Nights; packed with suspense, driven by scientific curiosity, colorfully told, and determined by the accuracy of facts and phenomenal theories, which open new doors onto the world.
Kluge, the inquirer, condenses, sharpens the focus and takes his audience along on a journey through human history after the apocalypse.

These current works for television form a kind of provisional capstone in Kluge’s television work, which began with the start of dctp, his TV platform, in 1987. These recent conversations, which are as sweeping and all-encompassing as always, while also meandering in the most varied directions, do more than just weave together Kluge’s thought processes and philosophy on life. In fact, Kluge’s present work for television leads audiences far beyond his oeuvre (and moreover, of course, this work almost secretively delves deeper into the center of these reflections about the world and its history). From the “digital world” Kluge steers our view onto its analogous assumptions and origins – through the medium of television, which can sometimes (if presented with the right challenge) be both outstanding and eye opening. It is reminiscence work of the past in analogous space as a possible option for the future.

Select conversations from this series can be watched and listened to in the Program Gallery at the Museum für Film und Fernsehen. An enchanted site of film history augmented the experience in an installation juxtaposing and supporting Kluge’s cosmos with special exhibits from the archives of the Deutsche Kinemathek – with objects that were originally produced and used for completely different, fictional stories. Thus, the fiction of a fictional reality ultimately leads to a repeatedly broken, and yet intact realism in the end. Because the image-making machine of the last one hundred years or so is really just a brief smile in the history of an eternal cinematographic movement of human civilization.