When The Assault of the Present on the Rest of Timewas made, sixteen years had passed since the student protest movement. 'An organic and fractured, yet humorous, intuitive, and poetic rumination on the integral – and correlative – nature of technology and (urban) identity, the intersection of film and new media in the creation of art, and the delusive quest to manipulate time.' – Miriam HansenĪ novel periodisation of Kluge's own invention situates the two works in a sequence of historical events.

The Assault of the Present on the Rest of Time Nikhil Vettukattil with Ana Berkenhoff, Javon Bennett and Tanya SinghĬosmopolitan Universal Cinemauses the architecture of the cinema theatre as a context for a live performance that reflects on cinematic experience divorced from the technical specificities of its apparatus as a way of seeing, remembering, and anticipating abstracted into elements of sound, light, and time. Whilst Alexander Kluge’s film deals with the relation between cinema and the city, Cosmopolitan Universal Cinema is a performative reflection on the relationship between cinema and cosmopolitanism in its broadest sense, drawing upon writers such as Kluge, Cesar Aira, and Rae Armantrout to present a fractured narrative on what such a cinema might be. They can each be situated by the question 'What does one decline advise the next to do?' Both works take different approaches in considering what Miriam Hansen has described as 'the historical significance – and imminent loss – of the cinema as a site of different temporalities'. The performance will be followed by a screening of Kluge's The Assault of the Present on the Rest of Time. We are delighted to host a performance by artist and writer Nikhil Vettukattil, Cosmopolitan Universal Cinema based on Kluge's text The Cosmos as Cinema. 24 September 2016: Cosmopolitan Universal Cinema

Universal cinema