For Kluge, Hollywood cinema, like nineteenth-century opera, is a "power-house of emotions" that produces tragic results. According to Kluge, our feelings, which are infallible and "always believe in a happy end," are deceived by Hollywood's illusory images and the streamlined logic of its plots and seduced into the service of technocratic (un)reason. The Power of Emotion ruminates on these notions and on ways the undeniable power of emotions can be redeemed through and for cinema... Technical devices such as fast-motion or colorization contest the authority of "realistic" images of the world. Impossible stories defy all ordinary dramatic logic. Stage tricks are unmasked and one of the most poignant moments in opera-the mistaken killing of Rigoletto's daughter-is cooly analyzed by a wardrobe mistress. On the other hand, the film develops a web of references and allusions even more mysterious and hard to grasp than is usually the case in Kluge's films. The radical openness of its structure stimulates spectators to discriminate between feelings, make intuitive distinctions, and trace emotional as well as rational connections in order to compose "the films in their heads" which Kluge regards as the necessary path to cinematic enlightenment. Stuart Liebman