(Speech Dr. Christian Schulte on the occasion of the
International Congress "Quality on Television"28. - 30.11.2002, Athen)

"Authors' Television" - The DCTP cultural magazines

Rainer Stollmann already mentioned the project "authors' television". Such "authors' television" is intended to create special windows in television, addressing long-term viewer interests and offering forms of television which counteract the "industrialization of consciousness" inherent in commercial television. In "authors' television" the reflective and the expressive potential of the medium is meant to be expanded in order to stimulate attention and curiosity of the viewers. "Authors' television" is working against the viewers' habitual attitude of mere consumership. Convinced that large parts of reality (as well as large parts of television programming) are constituted of an executive, which is faced more or less helplessly by the individual, authors' television tries to produce more complex forms of awareness, so-called "awareness horizons". This would be true program quality in the sense of authors' television and this is what the DCTP project of Alexander Kluge - film director, author, and lawyer - is working towards.

Before describing the project in more detail, I would like to give you some historical background. When the commercial television channels RTL (then RTLplus) and SAT.1 applied for the much sought-after terrestrial licenses in the foundation phase of the dual broadcasting system in Germany, they never expected to have to offer culture and investigative journalism as part of their program bouquet. But exactly this was made a legal requirement in the new media legislation for any full program desiring to be licensed. Alexander Kluge used this legal clause and established on 12 February 1987 a company named, somewhat polemically, Development Company for Television Program. It was founded together with the Japanese advertising company DENTSU, and joined a year later also by Spiegel-Verlag. Within a short term, DCTP developed a range of programs which the new channels were in dire need of at the time. Since then, the own DCTP license, which has been extended several times since, guarantees complete independence and non-terminability to DCTP and its partners. Programs have been broadcasted weekly since May of 1988. The journalistic formats (reportages, interviews, and documentaries) are produced mainly by Spiegel TV, but also other partners such as Stern, Süddeutsche Zeitung, Neue Zürcher Zeitung, and BBC produce their own journalistic formats. All partners have their own editorial units (in Hamburg, Munich, Zurich, London) where the material is produced in total independence and later broadcast under the DCTP logo. (Since May of 2001 DCTP runs a new channel, XXP, jointly with Spiegel TV. XXP can now be seen in six of the German Federal States.)

The commercial channels present an ambivalent stance towards the DCTP program formats: journalistic magazines such as Stern-TV and Spiegel-TV find a positive resonance with the program responsibles at RTL due to their more traditional style and the good ratings. The cultural magazines produced by Alexander Kluge (10 vor 11, News & Stories, and Prime Time - Spätausgabe), on the other hand, have been labelled "Quotenkiller" (i.e. as having a killing effect on the ratings) and "stone-age tv" by long-time head of RTL, Helmut Thoma. Alexander Kluge was personally labelled "electronic parasite" by the same Thoma. With these over-reactive statements a conflict of interests is articulated, which can hardly be bridged: we see the clashing of standardisation (of main-stream tv) versus multiplicity (which DCTP stands for). Alexander Kluge chooses to counteract the large channels' program strategy, which aims at conquering the biggest possible segment of the television market by means of streamlined, consumption-oriented programming. He does so by producing alternative concepts to conventional television, programs going against the standardization attempts of mainstream television. Alternative productions thus involve "practical criticism", the proving wrong of products by means of other products. The viewer is to compare and select that which concerns him elementarily. And most of all: he is to do this independently, like an author. Kluge's dictum "the film is created inside the spectator's head" is valid for his work in television, too. Authorship in this sense is thus possible only in a collective way, in dialogue and cooperation with the viewers' own experiences. For this reason all aesthetic procedures Kluge uses are directed against the habits of the medium, against the seemingly finished, completed and perfect. "Everything has the character of a construction site", it is fragmentary, the viewer can appropriate for himself whatever touches upon his own experience, his own life. Only by means of a complete awareness, so Kluge, can real self confidence arise.

What do these programs look like, then, which so overtly seem to contradict our habitual experience of television? The cultural magazines, which we are here concerned with, exist in three different formats with varying lengths of 15, 24 and 45 minutes each, thus being flexible enough to deal with a variety of topics in various degrees of intensity.
The idea of multiplicity is programmatic for them in more than one sense of the word. On the one hand, the cultural magazines dispose of a thematic spectrum of almost encyclopaedic dimensions -emphasized are opera, film, philosophy, sociology, theatre, history, politics, space science, biology, brain research and much more -, on the other hand they dispose of an aesthetic complexity which exhibits so far unknown possibilities of the medium as such. One visual technique which follows the aesthetics of Kluges feature film (as for instance in Der Angriff der Gegenwart auf die übrige Zeit), is "associative montage". Here image, sound, and text fragments from the most diverse cultural traditions are cited and put into new contexts. Beyond just sequential montage (between frames) Kluge also uses montage within the frame: collages of multiple exposures, superimposed words, and figures. Although Kluges films already featured irised images - the image within a black circle or double circle - he now squeezes, tilts, inverts, mirrors, or wraps images in his cultural magazines. He colours, changes between positive and negative, and again and again uses time-lapse images. Intertitles and a running band of words at the bottom of the screen are employed and make reference to silent film. Kluge tries by all means to take away any immediateness of the image as such, he tries to make clear that the origin of the image is media-inherent. These techniques can be traced back to a fundamental scepticism in regards to the image itself and an acute awareness of the high potential for manipulation to the image. Thus there are whole programs without any image at all, instead one sees texts (ballads or street ballads) - graphically manipulated - which can be read from the screen by the viewer. They are accompanied by elegiac, dramatic, or popular music, for example techno beats. Other programs follow the numbers principle, the ideal of primitive diversity as seen in the early films, the minute films, the popular forms of hit-song parade, of vaudeville theatre or circus. The program Eiffel Tower, King Kong and the White Woman narrates in quick sequence the fantastic story of the kidnapping of the Eiffel Tower, which suddenly reappears in the United States and can be brought back to France only by means of magic. As a parallel the story of King Kong is told, who saves himself with the White Woman by scaling the top of the Empire State Building, where he has to defend himself against airplane attacks. The question which is generated by such a montage technique could be: What happens when living creatures or objects which are of importance to mankind, end up in a wrong spot? In another sequence excerpts are shown from old documentaries by the Brothers Lumiere, which redirect the attraction of fantasy back down to earth. Only these combinations of documentary and fiction ("Facts & Fakes"), so Kluge, create the sort of realism with which people - with all their innate desires and wishes - know how to deal.
Instead of setting the individual elements in continuity, as is the accepted standard, and making pretence of a homogeneousness of the materials, Kluges work focuses instead explicitly on fragmentarisation, the "separation of elements" (Brecht). In this way he creates open, unclosed structures which can be picked-up upon and continued with other programs - structures which always intend to trigger the individual activity and the fantasy of the viewer. "Authors' television", as intended by Kluge, is only possible as a work in progress. This is also the reason why Kluge dispenses with any on- or off-moderation. The only information is given by the above-mentioned running band at the bottom of the screen or brief intertitles. These titles often consist of textual images which slightly enigmatise the content to further arouse the viewers' curiosity. One program with the Japanese lyricist Yoko Tawada is called "Raw Fish and Tongue of Beef are on the Phone together". Why this is so, is explained by the title of another program with philosopher Niklas Luhmann, namely: "Caution - do not understand too quickly", a title which indicates that the viewer cannot expect any conclusive information which might be easily consumed. The same is true for Kluge's interviews which are different from all other talk formats in television. Even the talk situation itself creates a sort of dissociation, as Kluge as interviewer can never be seen. He is present only in an auditory way, you hear his voice but the camera focuses on the interview partner, both in long-shot and close-up. By abandoning shot and counter shot positions in filming you only need one camera. Thus Kluge's team consists of no more than one camera and tone man, and, if necessary, a translator. With such a minimum of man-power you can film almost anywhere, even in the smallest spaces. (The room where Kluge generally films his interviews in his Munich office is no larger than maybe 10 square meters.) Many interviews also take place in public spaces, though, such as hotel lobbies, on the grounds of the Frankfurt Book Fair, or in the hustle and bustle of film festivals - thus in places which the viewer can personally relate to. The more clinical atmosphere of a television studio, on the other hand, closes itself off hermetically against the inner experiential landscape of the viewer.

The interviews regularly present experts from the above mentioned disciplines. These experts are able to express their own personal ideas irregardless of the usual limitations specific to television. Alexander Kluge does not play the part of a journalist checking out the expert's standpoint, but instead plays the part of the prompter who sort of assists in the birthing of his interviewee's thoughts. The interview follows a somewhat associative pattern, facts are freely circumscribed, rather than dealt with in a cut and dry way. Kluge's chooses to consciously use detours along seemingly minor important lines, in order to create atmospheric spaces. Again and again he places the thematic focus into wider horizons, in which his interviewees fantasy can roam. There is never a specific leitmotif.
This form of an interview is anti-talk or else a talk-show in the original sense of the word: how someone talks is just as important as what he says. So-called "blunders or slip-ups" (for example extended silences for thinking or slips of tongue) which would be considered to lessen the quality in conventional television programs and thus be deleted, are used by Kluge to make the talk situation more authentic. These are talks which are held in "private form" even though they are shown publicly. They may deal with facts, such as the origins of violence in highly civilized societies, but they might as well be fakes, such as talks about the secret knowledge of the Vatican or sex in space. Each and every interview tries in its own way to collect the mass of experience of the twentieth century, on the level of hard facts as well as on the level of imagination, of fantasy, which of course reacts to empirical reality. Over the years Kluge has thus developed a very special kind of encyclopaedia. An encyclopaedia in which you won't find any academic fetishes which are important to know, but with which you instead gain insight into the processes of cultural production, its motivations and circumstances.

Citing Kluge: "For the most important parts of feeling, there are almost no news. It has never been tested whether man's best qualities might not be anchored in these non-published experiences". To open a window for these experiences, that is the goal of authors' television.