After the screening of IMAGES OF THE WORLD AND THE INSCRIPTION OF WAR (1988) at the documentary film festival in Lyon, I was so disturbed that I was unable to say anything to Harun Farocki other than to ask him what Hartmut Bitomsky was up to, whose intelligent compilation films had similarly impressed me. As a kind of damage control, I conducted an interview with Harun two days later, which was to mark the beginning of our friendship and was to change my view of the essay film as a genre. Documentaries that both think for themselves and present themselves as works in progress are not only produced in France, nor are they the exclusive domain of Marker, Varda, or Godard.

Many years ago one could encounter the Berlin filmmaker Harun Farocki regularly during the Berlin Film Festival, behind the counter of the coat check in the lobby of the Akademie der Künste, where he offered back issues of the journal Filmkritik for sale. Until a short time ago, one of his many varied biographies offered the following: ‘1973-84 editor and author of the journal Filmkritik, which was driven to financial ruin because it attempted to write about a given film without telling the viewer what to think about it’. Farocki's films have remained as marginal and radical as Germany's best film journal, whose editorial board included Frieda Grafe, Helmut Färber andWimWenders, and later, Hartmut Bitomsky and Hanns Zischler.

Filmkritik gathered together a group of filmmakers as writers and was, as such, not dissimilar to Cahiers du cinéma, the contents of which often found their way, in German translation, into Filmkritik. Key texts by Bazin or discussions between Rivette and Delahaye and Barthes and Levi-Strauss belonged to Filmkritik's repertoire as much as cinéphile addenda like material on Godard's FRANCE TOUR DÉTOUR or special issues on John Ford and VERTIGO. Farocki has a great deal in common with Hartmut Bitomsky, whose compilation films are of historical importance, both cinematically and culturally. They shared directorial credits on several film projects; both belonged to Filmkritik's editorial collective; in more recent years they both enjoyed renown as the essayists of the (new) German film.