Primitive Diversity
Alexander Kluge / Germany / 2025 / 80 min
German avant-garde artist Alexander Kluge has created a visual essay about (and with) AI, based on the cultural history and possible future of images.
As a young filmmaker, Alexander Kluge was one of the most important contributors to the 1960s new wave of German cinema. At the age of 93, he has created a film about (and with) artificial intelligence as the preliminary cutting edge in the long and deep cultural history of the image itself. In the intervening period, he has achieved the status of one of the absolute giants of German intellectual life. ‘Primitive Diversity’ is a visual essay that challenges machine intelligence in a montage of generic and authentic images, texts and edgy and curious interventions like those found in Kluge’s TV productions. Kluge is an avant-gardist in a popular medium, a cultural prophet, a cosmic beacon. ‘Primitive Diversity’ is a taste of what blockbuster entertainment will look like in just a few hundred years.