A news magazine program on important aspects of the history of postrevolutionary Cuba, consisting of two documentary film sequences about Castro and two interview sequences with Heiner Müller. Castro speaks about his experiences in the revolution and about Che Guevara; he has himself filmed during...
Citing Nietzsche, Müller describes the motive of the philologist as "greed," "simply wanting to have everything, grasp everything, know everything." This "hunger" distinguishes the artist, but has become lost in modern art, which is so boring now because it has only "appetite."
"At the beginning of the 19th century there is no Chicago. There was a fort that was set on fire by Indians shortly thereafter. Later, the turbulent expansion of a settlement began, which became a center for the immigrant workforce, traditional industry, slaughterhouses, and, in 1941, armaments for...
A reference to the song of the same name, which carries the motif of "La Paloma" (the dove) and can be traced back to an episode that occurred in 492 BC, before Darius' invasion of Greece, a time when the white dove had not yet been seen in Europe.
Heiner Müller defines Stoicism as an attempt to deal with anarchy. For him, Erich Honecker is an example for "forced stoicism". Müller agrees with the following quote by Goethe: May God save me from self-awareness! For Müller, it represents a stoic attitude. When asked about "patriotism" in the...
People who do not have the patience or the opportunity to listen to all 86,000 operas that exist in the world need an opera guide. The opera guide is imaginary when it takes in the full force of the pain and extreme expression that are part of the utopia of opera.
On the one hand, the beyond-Tropicália surreal, wild, ecstatic universe of Khavn de la Cruz, the Philippines’ internationally most venerated underground filmmaker. On the other, the Frankfurt School dialectics of Alexander Kluge, self-proclaimed arrière-guard eternal of 1960s modernist...
In order to justify interpreting the Oresteia as a representation of the "birth of democracy" (P. Stein), one has to repress a lot, for example the sacrifice of Iphigenia or Elektra's feminist rebellion. The Oresteia represents an "Egyptian" material, situated between Europe and Asia,...
Heiner Müller was invited to a conference in Japan on the fate of opera in the 20th and 21st century. He talks about his flight over Siberia and his fascination with this "giant ridge" that he characterizes as the "Asian time preserve of Russia." This is followed by thoughts about the past,...
In this interview Müller and Kluge explore the East German’s memories of the final days of the war. The session is introduced by a clip from the Russian film maker Sergei Parajanov’s 1961 film entitled The Ukranian Rhapsody. Here a soldier of the Red Army is writing a letter to his fiancee...
An old building in Venice hosts an exhibition. A visitor walks through empty rooms discovering a fictionalized architectural space that functions like an abandoned theatre set. Inspired by Alexander Kluge’s oeuvre, this exploration attempts to de-construct the subjective experience and liberate...
