UNDERDOX halftime | 11 june 2026
filmmuseum münchen 7 p.m. | guest: Angelika Lepper
Alexander Kluge
The recently deceased Alexander Kluge (14 February 1932, Halberstadt – 25 March 2026, Munich) remained a visionary thinker and pioneer of the moving image until his death. In 1962, as a signatory of the Oberhausen Manifesto, he helped rejuvenate German cinema and liberate it from the rigidity of the postwar era. His feature films experimented boldly with the possibilities of storytelling.
From 1988 onward, he revolutionized private television in Germany, expanding broadcast time through the concentrated conversational format 10 vor 11 and proclaiming a “television of authors.”
Artificial intelligence became his final adventure. In two feature-length films, he explored virtuality, employed a “virtual camera,” and intertwined artificial intelligence with his own.
The artistic researcher and film editor Angelika Lepper examines the creative power of AI for art and the moving image, taking Kluge’s final feature film, Primitive Diversity (2025), as her point of departure. Her focus lies on what happens between images: montage as method, as epistemology, and—since AI has begun to pose the same question differently—as a contested terrain.
“AI’s mistakes are better than some of our own insights.” – Alexander Kluge
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.
In Primitive Diversity, the Century of Cinema at its core – its political dead-ends and humanitarian disasters, but also its utopiae and eutopiae. 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
program:
Lecture with Angelika Lepper to PRIMITIVE DIVERSITY
A sharp, sober, and biting journey—at once ironic and full of joy—undertaken through the means of artificial intelligence. It leads through the history and future of image technology, politics, and human fallibility. At its center stands the century of cinema: its political dead ends and humanitarian catastrophes, but also its utopias and successful eutopias.
Much of the often vividly colorful visual world was created with the help of AI, while other materials and textures are interwoven throughout: excerpts from Kluge’s essayistic television laboratory, including a scene in which Helge Schneider—arguably Germany’s greatest living comedian—explains and performs silent cinema through facial expression and gesture alone.
PRIMITIVE DIVERSITY
D: Alexander Kluge | Germany 2025 | 80 min
