Willi Tobler and the Decline of the 6th Fleet (Alexander Kluge, 1972) (Patreon)

Having recently watched Orphea, the odd film-collage Kluge co-directed with Khvan, I wondered whether the decades-long stint in television had somehow warped Kluge's sense of how images actually worked. Like the TV work I've seen, Orphea is baldly declarative, even when it seems to be striving for genuine affect. However, I am no Kluge expert, and having seen Willi Tobler I understand that this bizarre evolution away from hard Brecht / Godard into something more shambolic was well underway while he was still making feature films. Willi Tobler is a defiantly cheap, disorienting work that openly parodies the "space opera" concept. (There are clear references to Frank Herbert, Robert Heinlein, and others.) Kluge simultaneously mocks the idea of cinema as a device for envisioning the future, and provides a fairly serious critique of bureaucratic warfare and its dead-eyed company men.

It is 2040, and almost every star and planet is an outpost of global capital. They have periodic trade wars and ethnic conflicts, all seemingly controlled by and Empire-like central command. Early on we meet Willi Tobler (Alfred Edel), a smarmy middle-manager determined to weasel his way into a cushy government position. He's sort of a German Alan Partridge, with his faux-intellect, ingratiating nature, and one of the galaxy's most punchable faces. He abandons his wife and kids so he can blast off into space and do "man's" work. He becomes an official spokesman for the 6th Fleet, a mostly unseen battalion of peacekeepers and "history erasers."

Most of what Tobler actually does is screw up, then breathlessly defend his actions. The story, such as it is, moves at a breakneck pace, with whole wars and double- and triple-crosses detailed in quick, handmade intertitles. Whenever we actually witness some military action in space, Kluge shows us spaceships made of random auto parts, fixed in place while the "cosmos" (a black paper with pinholes) scrolls behind them, offering a primitive suggestion of warp-drive. Trying to follow the plot is pointless, although Tobler and his dullard commandant, the Admiral of the 6th Fleet (Hark Bohm), frequently scrawl the troop movements and planet names on blackboards, Joseph Beuys-style.

Willi Tobler really resembles nothing quite so much as Craig Baldwin's Tribulation 99. Like that film, Tobler uses stock footage and preposterous "space" effects to produce that specific brand of critical cringe that comes with outdated ideas about the future. Kluge even goes so far as to send Willi on a ten-cent version of the 2001 stargate corridor, with the stranded media mouthpiece nervously hoping someone will save his skin. The nonsense plot is just fine because Tobler is really a character study, a suggestion that a certain kind of Dunning-Kruger institutional fuckup will always be with us, and until further notice, the power structure rewards these cockroaches. The Force is with them, never us.