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Circus Commentary
Series: The German List
Brief Description
Alexander Kluge explores the madcap, multifaceted world of the circus through a global geopolitical lens. The circus has fascinated Alexander Kluge ever since he was a child, and his devotion to it has been preserved throughout his cinematic output and his most recent literary work. In...
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Circus Commentary
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Description
Alexander Kluge explores the madcap, multifaceted world of the circus through a global geopolitical lens.
The circus has fascinated Alexander Kluge ever since he was a child, and his devotion to it has been preserved throughout his cinematic output and his most recent literary work. In the circus, he finds both the shadow image of work and the epitome of human excellence, from love to war to revolution. As surfaces onto which utopias are projected, these elaborate performances offer a tangible representation of developments within civilisation, with its nearly infinite possibilities and sometimes inevitable crashes—from the excited roar of the crowd to death on the floor of the ring.
In Circus Commentary, Kluge's montage of modernities moves back and forth through time and space, expressing his unique mix of fictional and non-fictional reports, histories, and stories through semantic fields, images, and film sequences inserted in the book via QR codes. We encounter a broad panorama of perplexed artists and sophisticated surgeons cavorting alongside fighter pilots, sans-culottes drunk with dreams of omnipotence, and, most importantly, animals—to whose superhuman performances, this book creates a lasting memorial.
Series: The German List
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Book Details
INFORMATION
ISBN: 9781803093246
Publisher: Seagull Books London Ltd
Format: Hardback
Date Published: 13 November 2024
Country: United Kingdom
Imprint: Seagull Books London Ltd
Illustration: 110 color plates
Contributors:
- Translated by Alexander Booth
Audience: General / adult
DIMENSIONS
Spine width: 18.0mm
Width: 152.0mm
Height: 229.0mm
Weight: 426g
Pages: 208
About the Author
Alexander Kluge is one of the major German fiction writers of the late twentieth century and an important social critic. As a filmmaker, he is credited with the launch of the New German Cinema movement. Alexander Booth is a writer and translator. He lives in Berlin.
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