Twenty-six stories, and a zigzag instead of a line

The notes open on Alexander Kluge’s own remark about the film The Power of Emotion: what matters is not feeling in itself, but how a feeling proceeds — by chance, by a strange influence from outside, by a killing, by fate — and how it tries to reach the happiness it is after. For that work, they write, Kluge put together twenty-six short stories of different kinds, in the manner of a mosaic. He does not set them out in the order of a single plot. His usual way of making things strange, they say, is a zigzag: in the middle of one story he turns to tell another, quite different one.

He also cuts in pictures taken from elsewhere, by montage: a scene from an opera by Giuseppe Verdi, a film by Fritz Lang whose title the notes leave blank, and documentary images of the First and Second World Wars. Time and place are not kept apart. A view of 1918, in the First World War, may be followed by a modern city in the 1980s, then by 1944, then by an opera performed in Prague in 1920. The dates belong to those fragments, as the notes list them.

Two kinds of ending, and a pair named Betty and Schilahi

What the twenty-six pieces share, in this telling, is some form of feeling and the ending that follows it. The notes divide those endings into two kinds: a passion that closes in tragedy, and a feeling that starts slowly, with difficulty, and leads on to happiness. Kluge’s basic thought, they write, is that every human feeling wants to move toward happiness. The film, they add, keeps asking why there are also feelings that bring unhappiness, and the human tragedies that come with them.

Betty and Schilahi — the notes give only those names — are shown, in an episode, as a pair who stand for a genuine feeling and an ending that can still lead to happiness. They fall under the startled sense that they may be drawn into a murder they did not commit, yet they do not lose their reason. They work together, think as clearly as they can, and manage to look for the best way out that is open to them. For Kluge, the notes say, feeling and reasonable thought have to be joined before happiness can truly be met; feeling alone may bring tragedy.

A small feeling, a large one, and a viewer who is asked to take part

The feeling found in Betty and Schilahi is, they write, a small and personal one when it is set beside the patriotism and love of nation that Germans showed in the two world wars — a large, collective feeling. Kluge, as they quote him, calls the small feelings highly productive, and fit for an exit that leads to happiness, while feelings on a large scale are, in their essence, fit for ruin. In making a film he also tries, they say, to have the viewer take part: not as a mere receiver of a finished work, but as someone who keeps thinking from the meanings on the screen. If that way of watching is unfamiliar, or if a meaning cannot be made concrete as a picture, the notes record his view that the scenes may have to be told again in words. His film-text, they add, should not be read only as an appendix; it can also work as a literary work of its own. The same Korean report, at fuller length, is on CampusDown.

Sources

1. The notes’ account of Alexander Kluge’s The Power of Emotion, including the twenty-six stories and the names Betty and Schilahi

Last updated: 14 November 2026