Film Marathon
Marx Now: News from Ideological Antiquity - Marx/Eisenstein/Das Kapital

Commemorating Karl Marx's 200th Birthday

Thu, 05/31/2018
10:00 AM - 19:30 Goethe-Institut Chicago

Film Marathon on May 1st and 31st!

Director: Alexander Kluge, color, 570 min., 2009, in German with various subtitles 

“The decision has been made to film Das Kapital according to the scenario of Karl Marx," noted Sergei Eisenstein on 12 October 1927, who revolutionised film language with Panzerkreuzer Potemkin (1926) and wanted to "filmize" Marx's book. Eisenstein believed that the challenge posed by such a work would shift film art from the ground up. He envisaged the application of completely new forms derived from James Joyce's Ulysses: "faits divers", "emotional convolutes" and series of "dialectical images". 80 years later Alexander Kluge comments on Eisenstein's monumental plan. On three DVDs he collects cinematic miniatures on Marx's theory, which is as close and as far away as antiquity. Talks with Peter Sloterdijk, Dietmar Dath, Oskar Negt, Boris Groys, Rainer Stollmann and others provide very different perspectives on Das Kapital.