Little can be expected to illuminate the bum of an elephant. The shooting conditions for a film behind the thick skin should also be extremely unfavorable. And there’s nothing there either. But with Alexander Kluge, a light really shines in the dark. And a camera light. “Nothing doesn’t fail, says Heidegger.” This is what the universally interested person quotes, hands folded on his fully loaded work table in Schwabing. In his “Pluriverse” (that’s the name of his cosmos of curiosities in a literary house exhibition) is always something. For 20 years, Kluge has been able to rely on his favorite co-creator of strange intellectual worlds, the comedian Helge Schneider. Even he finds something in the bottom of an elephant with which he can make fun of people: the other day he had to remove an entire couch from a “Jumbo that he had eaten” rectally.
Schneider, for example, raves in his role as a veterinarian in their first long film together: “Pandemic Whispers” is a compilation of several video conferences in lockdown. “We never have a plan,” explains Kluge, “Helge wouldn’t answer me at all. You have to lower the I-barrier, put something in the room and wait. It’s like jazz with words.” Usually for her short films for Kluge’s inexhaustible format DCTP it works like this: “He calls himself, then my team has to be ready.” Kluge offers the guest some costumes from a rental shop on Hohenzollernstrasse. This is how small masterpieces of absurd humor and brains can emerge: Helge as the Chancellor’s Tyrolean ski instructor or as the Nibelungenlied-Hagen who insults the AfD. Kluge appreciates Schneiders humor that refuses any punch line, especially the broad storytelling in the “Mühlheimer counter tone”. This can be used to fill evenings at the counter, but also to fill sluggish lockdown days.
The elephant with dyscalculia
Once in the film, Schneider joins Kluge’s suggestion “The darkness in the elephant’s butt” and becomes a veterinarian. “What I’ve got out of elephants, you don’t believe it!” You really don’t believe it, but then the split screen shows shots of a real pachyderm intestinal evacuation, a veterinary arm-deep in the anus, from which it gushes like a geyser. Doc Schneider, meanwhile, tells of a zoo elephant who recognized him 41 years after a tusk operation and told him that he had failed to graduate from high school because he suffered from dyscalculia. And Kluge mentions that elephants could definitely count, namely with their feet, and that he would have given him his Abitur simply because he knew such beautiful foreign German words.
It’s absurd, it’s grotesque. This fascinates the great astonished Kluge, who looks at pictures of elephants from his desk. They also fascinate him. Because they are “obviously clever”, “to me this is extraterrestrial”. He likes to fool. But the 89-year-old can really explain the world with elephants: As in Indian fairy tales, where researchers touch and describe a different part of the animal in the dark. An image can only be created together. Kluge has another image for the world that shaped his second film, “Artists in the Big Top”, for which he received the “Golden Lion” in Venice in 1968: Below the heavy elephants, next to them the guards and the clowns, and above the acrobats on the trapeze: “Everything depends on each other, everyone needs to be on the ground, and they have to be free to be able to dare something.”
This is how Kluge’s workshop works, albeit more like in the American circus, in which everything happens at the same time in three arenas. Before the interview, he phoned a publisher about the cropping of one of his upcoming books, such as the monumental main work “Commentary on Comments” in early 2022. Soon, “A Scratch in the Sky” will appear, the result of years of conflict between Kluge and Jonathan Meese about the Siegfried murderer Hagen von Tronje; the painter provided the pictures and the idea of making the anti-hero into a Hagen von Troy through a deliberate mistake and thus extending the area of association into antiquity. That gives him real freedom of thought, says Kluge, whenever he talks to Habermaas on the other hand, he is immediately biased.
At the Kammerspiele they celebrate Kluge’s 90th birthday for months
Kluge’s “Napoleon Commentary” was only published in April with pictures that Baselitz painted for him and which he then brought to the Kammerspiele to read. The theater is now organizing a month-long celebration of Kluge’s 90th birthday. They don’t just want to celebrate with a party on the weekend before February 14, 2022, but also with a “Repair Review based on stories and motifs by Alexander Kluge” (“Whoever hopes dies singing”, premiere on March 12) and many other activities and collaborations (for example with the State Opera, where Kluge last showed his film installation “Sphinx Opera”). All of this in order to get into conversation with the audience: “Because dialogue does not mean that I flatten my own views, but rather that they are evoked in the first place.”
So Kluge “of course” comes to today’s film premiere in the Kammerspiele. His favorite playmate can only be seen on the screen. Then they will look at the stars with Schneider’s telescope, make light film art with the spotlight behind Helge’s curly hair and bring other things to illuminate the dark days. For example, about the carnivalesque rush of the Trump loyalists on the Capitol (portrayed by Helge as his bouncer): “This is a gigantic Casperl theater,” says Kluge, “I sit there and like a child I want to shout out to the audience: ‘Watch out, the devil ! ‘ Something happens that we both don’t like, because that determines the fate of my grandchildren, and there is nothing I can do about it. ” He could also look for the causes of such horrors “in the ass of an elephant,” explains Kluge. Is there an answer? That would be in the tone, which becomes more and more calm as the film progresses: “That is the meaning of the pandemic whisper: We talk about world conditions as if we were not afraid.”