Alexander Kluge – Happy Lamento #Venezia75

September 3, 2018

Alexander Kluge - Happy Lamento #Venezia75 fredfilmradio

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PODCAST| Matt Micucci interviews Alexander Kluge, director of the film Happy Lamento.

Alexander Kluge, a director with a long and illustrious history at the Venice Film Festival, returns to the Lido with his new film, Happy Lamento, featuring the filmmaker Khavn De La Cruz. In this interview he reveals that as a filmmaker – one of the filmmakers who signed the famed Oberhausen Manifesto – he has never stopped experimenting with the art form and reveling in the opportunities that technological developments allow.

Happy Lamento: At heart, the film concerns electric light, the circus, the song Blue Moon, and street wars among children’s gangs in North Manila, a wilderness otherwise inaccessible to Western eyes. We see how the circus comes to town with the appearance of President Trump at the G-20 summit in Hamburg in 2017; we see how the street wars of the children in Manila run on for years; Helge Schneider appears as a “human light snake” as in Edison’s Annabelle: Serpentine Dance, from 1895; my friend, the dramatist Heiner Muller, philisophizes about the moon; we hear a musical requiem for commodities that lie unpurchased on a Saturday; we see the dramatic evacuation of a circus in Russia that tries to save its elephants in the early morning stands in contrast to a world that is increasingly savage; the poet Ann Cotten appears in the role of King Kong, the cinematic hero that defends what he loves to death. The images that one sees in this sequence are filmed through glass panels made by artist Kerstin Braetsch in New York.

Written by: fredfilmradio

Alexander Kluge Giornate degli Autori Happy Lamento Matt Micucci Venezia 75