[4] Kluge directed his first film in 1960, Brutality in Stone, a twelve-minute, black and white, lyrical montage work which, against the German commercial (Papa's Kino) cinematic amnesia of the prior decade, inaugurated an exploration of the Nazi past.

[5] He went on to direct a number of films which have an inherent critique of commercial cinema and television through the creation of a counter-public sphere and their deployment of experimental forms, including montage.

They include Abschied von Gestern (Yesterday Girl) (1966), an adaptation of Kluge's story "Anita G."; Die Artisten in der Zirkuskuppel: Ratlos (Artists under the Big Top: Perplexed) (1968); and The Assault of the Present on the Rest of Time (1985).

The film, which focuses around the Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg, Germany, includes debate between Kluge and Morris on architecture, music, and the religious philosophy of American academic James P.

Much of the DCTP programs consist of television documentaries by Kluge (often characterized by the lack of spoken narration and a heavy reliance upon text as well as graphical montages and image editing) as well as many interviews Kluge leads with various international personalities from the fields of arts, entertainment, science, philosophy, and politics.

Some of the interviewed are fictitious characters portrayed by professional actors Helge Schneider and Peter Berling, or factual people parodied by the two, including, but not limited to, Adolf Hitler, historical Roman generals, Napoleon's political advisors, or the lawyer of Michael Jackson.

His fictional works, which tend toward the short story form, are significant for their formal experimentation and insistently critical thematics.

Constituting a form of analytical fiction, they utilize techniques of narrative disruption, mixed genres, interpolation of non-literary texts and documents, and perspectival shifts.

In an interview with 032c magazine, Kluge described his point of view on writing with a quote by Georg Büchner: "I've always wanted to see what my head looks like from above."

"Geschichte und Eigensinn" continues this project and tries to rethink the very nature of proletarian experience and develops a theory of "living labour" grounded in the work of Karl Marx.

In 2000, he published Chronik der Gefühle (Chronicle of Feelings), which critic Matthew D. Miller describes as a "modern epic".