Alexander Kluge, a German film director who pioneered the New German Cinema movement in the 1960s and won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival in 1968 for “The Artists of the Big Top: Confused,” has died. He was 94 years old.
News of Kluge’s death was confirmed on Wednesday by his publisher Suhrkamp Verlag, who announced that he died in Munich, Germany.
Born in 1932 in the central German town of Halberstadt, Kluge began his career as a lawyer, but quickly turned toward literature and film. Working as a legal advisor at the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt, he developed a close relationship with the influential social philosopher Theodor Adorno, who became his mentor. Then, in 1958, Kluge began working as an assistant to German film giant Fritz Lang.
Kluge went on to become one of the signatories of the Oberhausen Declaration of 1962, which called for the establishment of a New German Cinema, and became one of its most influential figures, paving the way for the artistic flourishing of the young filmmakers who followed in his footsteps in the 1960s and 1970s, including Edgar Reitz, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Werner Herzog, and Wim Wenders.
Kluge’s Abshid von Gestern, released in the United States as Yesterday Girl, was one of the first films to come out of the Oberhausen Declaration and is often cited as the film that started the New German Cinema movement. “Yesterday Girl” uses manipulated images and a discontinuous narrative to tell the story of a Jewish East German refugee and her attempts to find a place in the West. The experimental film won the Silver Lion at the 1966 Venice Film Festival, the first time a German director had won that honor after World War II.
Kluge published another experimental work in 1968, The Artists in the Big Top: Perplexed, which was seen as a critique of that year’s protests and postwar idealism. It is the story of a young woman who takes over a traditional circus after her father’s death and tries to turn it into a socially conscious spectacle, but faces many dilemmas and financial setbacks. Created as a “collage” of newsreels, fictional interviews, and philosophical text-based intertitles, the film won the 1968 Venice Golden Lion.
His later films include Strongman Ferdinand, which won the Fiplessis Award at the 1976 Cannes Film Festival. “Autumn Germany” won the special prize at the Berlin Film Festival in 1978.
In 1987, Kluge also founded his own television production company, Development Company for Television Programming (DCTP), which produced 12 features and many shorts, in order to provide quality programming for German television channels.
In 2008, Kluge released the more than nine-hour film “News from Ancient Ideology: Marx, Eisenstein, and Das Kapital.” It is a reinvention of pioneering Soviet filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein’s unfinished project to film Karl Marx’s Das Kapital. The film is considered one of the most complex and monumental films ever made and has been shown in various settings, including an exhibition at Fondazione Prada in Italy.
As a writer, Kluge was primarily known for his short stories and works of social criticism. He received many of the top German-language literary awards, including the Georg Büchner Prize (2003), the Heinrich Böll Prize (1993), and the Heinrich von Kleist Prize (1985).
Kluge was honored by the Venice Film Festival in 2007 with a special program dedicated to his work, and also received several accolades during his career from the Berlin Film Festival.
“Berlin deeply mourns the death of Alexander Kluge (1932-2026),” the Berlin Festival said in a statement. “Alexander Kluge has been a valued guest of the Berlinale for decades as a director, producer and writer, and has been part of the festival’s long and meaningful history since the beginning. Through his passion for filmmaking, critical thinking and powerful storytelling, he shaped German cinema and inspired generations of filmmakers.”
Kluge’s last work was “Primitive Diversity,” a 2025 visual essay on AI that leverages AI and reflects on a possible future for video. “Primitive Diversity” started at the Rotterdam International Film Festival last year.
