Primitive Diversity

Filmmaker Alexander Kluge loves to use the expression ‘primitive diversity’ in relation to the origins of his art: the first films that were made, their genres, motives and moods. With the development of AI, Kluge asks, what could its primitive diversity look like?

Thanks to technological developments, film has been through many transformations. Now, with the development of Artificial Intelligence another begins. In this new age of image-making, Young German Cinema paragon Alexander Kluge finds himself experimenting with this latest tool of image creation. Diving into a world of pictures and views whose basis is not reality itself, but mankind’s digital repository of them.

After hosting the world premiere of Kluge’s first AI-based feature, Cosmic Miniatures (2024), IFFR welcomes him back with his second: Primitive Diversity. A very different, more caustic and sober while still ironic and mirthful journey through the history and future of image technology, politics and human flaws. The Century of Cinema at its core – its political dead-ends and humanitarian disasters, but also its utopiae and eutopiae. Again, the main bulk of its often gaudy imagery was created with AI; but other materials and textures have been weaved in, like excerpts from Kluge’s TV laboratory of essays, including one where Helge Schneider, Germany’s greatest living comedian, explains-performs silent cinema through facial expressions and gestures. What a joy Primitive Diversity is!

– Olaf Möller

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