German filmmaker Alexander Kluge, who pioneered the 1960s New German Cinema movement and won the Venice Film Festival’s Golden Lion in 1968 with “The Artists in the Big Top: Perplexed,” has died. He was 94.
News of Kluge’s death was confirmed on Wednesday by his publishing company, Suhrkamp Verlag, who said he died in Munich, Germany.
Born in 1932 in the central German town of Halberstadt, Kluge started his career as a lawyer, but soon veered towards literature and cinema. By working as legal counsel at the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt, he developed and close rapport with seminal social philosopher Theodor Adorno, who became his mentor. Then, in 1958, Kluge started working as assistant to German cinema great Fritz Lang.
Kluge subsequently became one of the signatories of the 1962 Oberhausen Manifesto calling for the establishment of a New German Cinema, of which he became one of the most influential figures, paving the way for the artistic blossoming of younger auteurs that followed in his footsteps throughout the 1960s and ’70 such as Edgar Reitz, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Werner Herzog and Wim Wenders.
Kluge’s “Abschied von Gestern,” which was released as “Yesterday Girl” in the U.S., was one of the first films to spring forth from the Oberhausen Manifesto and is often cited as the film that launched the New German Cinema movement. Using manipulated images and a non-sequential narrative, “Yesterday Girl” tells the tale 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, marking the first time a German director scored that honor after World War II.
Kluge followed up in 1968 with another experimental work, “The Artists in the Big Top: Perplexed,” considered a critique of that year’s protest movement and post-war idealism. It’s about a young woman who, after her father’s death, takes over his traditional circus and tries to transform it into a socially conscious spectacle, only to face many dilemmas and financial failure. The film — made as a “collage” of newsreels, fictional interviews and philosophical, text-based intertitles — won the 1968 Venice Golden Lion.
His subsequent films comprise “Strongman Ferdinand,” which was awarded the Fipresci Prize at the 1976 Cannes Film Festival; and “Germany in Autumn” which won a special recognition award from the Berlin Film Festival in 1978.
In 1987, Kluge also founded his own television production company, the Development Company for Television Program (DCTP), in an attempt to bring quality programming to German TV channels that spawned a dozen features and many shorts.
In 2008, Kluge unveiled the more than nine-hour film “News From Ideological Antiquity: Marx-Eisenstein-Capital,” a reinvention of pioneering Soviet filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein’s unfinished project of filming Karl Marx’s Capital. This work, which is considered one of the most complex and monumental films ever made, has been presented in various contexts, including exhibitions at Italy’s Fondazione Prada.
As a writer, Kluge was known mainly for his short stories and works of social criticism. He was awarded many of the top German-language literary awards including the George 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 works and received several tributes during his career from the Berlin Film Festival.
“The Berlinale deeply mourns the loss of Alexander Kluge (1932–2026),” the Berlin fest said in a statement. “As a director, producer and writer, Alexander Kluge was a cherished guest of the Berlinale for decades, accompanying the festival’s long and meaningful history from early on. Through his passion for filmmaking, critical thinking and his powerful storytelling, he shaped German cinema and inspired generations of filmmakers.”
Kluge’s final work is a 2025 visual essay about AI titled “Primitive Diversity,” which made use of AI and reflected on the possible future of moving images. “Primitive Diversity” launched last year from the International Film Festival Rotterdam.
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