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24 September 2016: Cosmopolitan Universal Cinema

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We are delighted to host a performance by artist and writer Nikhil Vettukattil, Cosmopolitan Universal Cinema based on Kluge's text The Cosmos as Cinema. The performance will be followed by a screening of Kluge's The Assault of the Present on the Rest of Time. Both works take different approaches in considering what Miriam Hansen has described as "the historical significance – and imminent loss – of the cinema as a site of different temporalities". They can each be situated by the question "What does one decline advise the next to do?"

Whilst Alexander Kluge’s film deals with the relation between cinema and the city, Cosmopolitan Universal Cinema is a performative reflection on the relationship between cinema and cosmopolitanism in its broadest sense, drawing upon writers such as Kluge, Cesar Aira, and Rae Armantrout to present a fractured narrative on what such a cinema might be.

Cosmopolitan Universal Cinema
Nikhil Vettukattil with Ana Berkenhoff, Javon Bennett and Tanya Singh
2016 | ca. 40 min | Performance

Cosmopolitan Universal Cinema uses the architecture of the cinema theatre as a context for a live performance that reflects on cinematic experience divorced from the technical specificities of its apparatus; as a way of seeing, remembering, and anticipating abstracted into elements of sound, light, and time.

The Assault of the Present on the Rest of Time
Alexander Kluge
1985 | 113 min | Colour | Digital

"An organic and fractured, yet humorous, intuitive, and poetic rumination on the integral – and correlative – nature of technology and (urban) identity, the intersection of film and new media in the creation of art, and the delusive quest to manipulate time." – Miriam Hansen


A novel periodisation of Kluge's own invention situates the two works in a sequence of historical events. When The Assault of the Present on the Rest of Time was made, sixteen years had passed since the student protest movement. Universal Cosmopolitan Cinema is in turn developed sixteen years after the moment which Kluge's film in turn anticipates – the beginning of a new century;

"We speak about the opera of the 19th century; it is considered the summit of dramatic art...

Bound up with our own century is another "power plant of emotions" – the cinema. Presumably, in the next century, beginning sixteen years from now, we will call it the cinema of the 20th century.

Bound up with our own century is another "power plant of emotions" - the cinema. Presumably, in the next century, beginning sixteen years from now, we will call it the cinema of the 20th century. This art form is ninety years old - a love affair of the century. The cinema consists of screening rooms, movie palaces, theaters on the front-lines, as well as many other gathering places, wherever films are shown for money. It also consists of a series of fascinating technical inventions which, though very elementary compared with the capabilities of electronics, all have to do with with the construction of a time machine. This cinema tells stories and it has produced artistic figures [Kunst-figuren] and idols. Obviously, this medium intrigues me. The present film project deals
(1) with elements of cinema
(2) with the illusion of the city;
(3) with people acting in the city who have all kinds of things moving through their heads: personal experiences, notions about cinema, the reality of the city.

The stylistic link, and simultaneously the basis for a certain comic dimension corresponding to the seriousness of the situation, is the category of time... Cinematic time, the "condensed dramatic time of cities," a lifetime - wrestling with time obviously occupies the course of our lives. The title is a provisional working title. The film could also be called: The Mystery of the Final Hour (Last-Moment-De- tails)2, or: Cinema and the Illusion of the City. Please trust me to develop the definitive title as the work progresses." – Alexander Kluge,  Der Angriff Der Gegenwart auf die übrige Zeit, Frankfurt/ Main: Syndikat Autoren und Verlagsgesellschaft, 1985

This programme is kindly supported by the Goethe-Institut: https://www.goethe.de/ins/gb/en/index.html