If one wanted to summarise Alexander Kluge's film work in a catchphrase, it might well read: ‘film-making out of foreign material'. Kluge himself compared his aesthetic programme with the cluttered and unfinished state of construction sites. Shimmering through such formulations is a notion of film that declares the brilliant, thoroughly composed, autonomous work of art to be ideological. For Kluge, art is not a Spanish wall that the individual artist draws between the audience and social reality. Art is perception, perception of reality. As such, it stays close to the experiences of the audience, their experiences of social reality. Kluge's construction-site artistry does not purport to explain reality. In his hands, contact with reality dissolves into a polyphonic dialogue of found materials. Contemporary images, written documents, film clips, footage from silent films, quotes from opera, wholly or partially fabricated biographies, the German fairy-tale tradition, fragments from children's books, visual representations of superstition - all these and more are thrown together in his films.

If one nonetheless were to encapsulate Kluge's oeuvre in a single theme, then this would have to be German history, and with it the historical nature of the present. History is here not to be understood as a compact, interpretable object placed before him by the author, about which he makes certain statements, but rather as a process of work on our perceptions of historical material, an incessant questioning of the images we make of history. For Kluge, historicity is both the irreducible horizon of his work and a social utopia. All his films are informed by an insistence on the significance of historicity, an insistence that viewers are invited to adopt as an attitude - towards themselves, towards the film, and towards their own social reality.

While working on German history in the medium of film, Kluge is simultaneously trying to open up the medium to a realistic relationship to the object of social reality. Kluge is not concerned with the ‘redemption of external reality', but with building and maintaining channels of communication that make possible the production of social experience. I will attempt, in the first part of this chapter, to show by theoretical means how this idea of realism differs from the ‘realism’ of generic film, and to explain the signal importance it attaches to the figure of the author.