Primitive Diversity

Premiered at the 2025 International Film Festival Rotterdam, Primitive Diversity employs filmed footage, text, interview, found images, and—prominently—Kluge’s experiments with graphics mediated by generative AI to explore themes of cinematic history, the circus, war (past, present, and future), the cultural force of algorithms, and much else besides. The film takes its title from Kluge’s favored description of the polymorphous forms and open potentialities of cinema at its beginnings, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.