PRIMITIVE DIVERSITY

Drawing on Alexander Kluge’s idea of primitive diversity in early cinema, “Primitive Diversity” asks what such a diversity might look like in the age of generative AI. Combining AI-generated imagery with archival fragments and material from Kluge’s earlier films and television works, the film moves freely across more than a century of cinema, from early moving images to histories of war, political catastrophes, popular culture and technological change. Playful, essayistic and deliberately heterogeneous, it brings cinema’s unruly past into dialogue with new forms of machine-generated imagery, asking what might be lost, transformed or newly imagined as images enter another technological era.