In Danger and Dire Distress the Middle of the Road Leads to Death

Kluge (together with Reitz this time) once again uniquely colonizes the blank spaces on the map of cinema, settling in its "gaps" and launching an attack on film narration from this unexpected place. Or it is another successful attempt by Kluge to dismantle the false division of cinema into "fiction" and "documentary," "story," and "truth." This is best manifested to the audience in poetic passages, where we observe a "fictional" character wandering through "real" situations from the life of a Western metropolis, accompanied by non-diegetic music. The techniques of cinéma-vérité documentaries blend with fictional narration into a single entity. This entity combines a typified sociological event with the impact and closeness of the individual story of a "living" character, a character with a name. It is obvious that by doing so, the authors achieve a greater effect on the viewer than either a purely "documentary" or purely "novelistic" storytelling method could achieve. (08/05/2015)