Completely translated, the title of Kluge's twenty-eighth film-"The Assault of the Present on the Rest of Time"-summarizes a concern animating his artistic practice since the beginning. Kluge fears that our experience of time, our ability to remember and to imagine the future, is being liquidated-or scrapped, to use one of his favorite metaphors-by a society fixated on the immediate demands and gratifications established by the mass media, "the consciousness industry".... The Blind Director explicitly thematizes this issue. An anthology of vignettes portrays emblematic contemporary characters entirely consumed by their present work: rushing business executives, calculating foster mothers, and obsessive computer programmers. The last story, about a director who goes blind during the filming of his sixty-third feature but continues to shoot his film anyway, ironically poses an alternative. The director can only "see" things that either were or have never been, but these memories or imaginings are so vivid and satisfying that he happily survives his loss of the perceptible world. The figure of the director is itself a sly composite portrait: of Kluge himself superimposed on that of his friend and mentor, the philosopher Theodor Adorno, who used to mock the cinema by saying the he loved to go to the movies, the only thing that bothered him were the images on the screen. Stuart Liebman