With its German title literally translated as ‘The Assault of the Present on the Rest of Time,’ Kluge’s film, made in 1985, is an episodic and fractured essay on time, history and the way in which the present tyrannizes both past and future. Depicting people who ‘plan their lives in an ad hoc fashion,’ the film concludes with the blind director who works on, fuelled by the store of images in his mind’s eye.