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Harun Farocki: Critical Strategies
- Edited by Thomas Elsaesser
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- Book:
- Harun Farocki
- Published by:
- Amsterdam University Press
- Published online:
- 26 January 2021
- Print publication:
- 09 June 2004, pp 315-322
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Summary
In his analysis of media coverage of the first Gulf War for the newspaper Libération, French film critic Serge Daney proposed a conceptual distinction between the ‘image’, which he qualified as cinematic, and the ‘visual’, which he attributed to the media (television, advertising, techno-military images). Daney defined this distinction as follows:
The visual, then, is the optical verification that things are functioning on a purely technical level: there are no reverse shots, nothing is missing, everything is sealed in a closed circuit, rather like the pornographic spectacle which is no more than the ecstatic verification that the organs are functioning. The opposite would be true for the image – the image that we have adored at the cinema to the point of obscenity. The image always occurs on the border between two force fields; its purpose is to testify to a certain alterity, and although the core is always there, something is always missing. The image is always both more and less than itself.
If one observes how Harun Farocki incorporates elements that might be considered ‘visual’ (images of civilian or military surveillance, advertisements, propaganda films) into his essay films and installations, one might conclude that the filmmaker's aim is to confront them with the possibility of the image, which is restored by his writing.
Since his early days as an activist in the late 1960s, the Berlin-based Farocki has always been a profoundly contemporary artist, capable of grasping – indeed of anticipating – the symptoms of discontent in civilisation, either by capturing on-the-spot action or by reworking existing images. This emerges quite clearly from his installation I THOUGHT I WAS SEEING CONVICTS (2000), where there is a difference between the recording of the gestures repeated by the trainee guards, freely observed by the filmmaker, and the ways in which prison ‘reality’ is presented by the surveillance cameras. The difference lies in the system of observation that is established in a supervised area such as this. The filmmaker's ‘re-view’ of a prison visit (which comes to an abrupt end after the prisoner's unsuccessful attempt to conceal his gesture of affection) demonstrates the omnipresence of a form of observation that knows no bounds. The prisoner leaves the room without so much as a backward glance for his visitor; the surveillance has blinded him to all else.
Incisive Divides and Revolving Images: On the Installation SCHNITTSTELLE
- Edited by Thomas Elsaesser
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- Book:
- Harun Farocki
- Published by:
- Amsterdam University Press
- Published online:
- 26 January 2021
- Print publication:
- 09 June 2004, pp 61-66
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In desiring machines everything functions at the same time, but amid hiatuses and ruptures, breakdowns and failures, stalling and short circuits, distances and fragmentations, within a sum that never succeeds in bringing its various parts together so as to form a whole. That is because the breaks in the process are productive, and are reassemblies in and of themselves. Disjunctions, by the very fact that they are disjunctions, are inclusive.
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-OedipusHow does a filmmaker approach a museum art form like video installation? Harun Farocki finds himself among a small, but eminent group of like-minded directors – Chris Marker, Chantal Akerman, Raul Ruiz and Peter Greenaway – whose films negotiate the relationship between word and image in equally radical fashion, and conduct in their installations similar inquiries into their own images and those of others. They try to account for the metamorphoses cinema has undergone in recent audio-visual configurations, by restaging its public mise-en-scène.
Perhaps what is at issue here is giving images back their distance, so that a question like ‘what is an image?’, for example, threads its way like a leitmotif through Farocki's films and videos so that it can be posed anew, and whose formulation is to be found – somewhat programmatically – in film titles such as Ein Bild (ANIMAGE, 1983) or WIE MAN SIEHT (AS YOU SEE, 1986). It is a question Farocki has long linked to the aesthetic changes in information technology, and is now more relevant to cinema than ever before.With the installation SCHNITTSTELLE (SECTION/INTERFACE, 1995) an essential element of this issue is touched upon, namely how moving pictures are formally organised. And this from the perspective of an auteur who now presents himself more as an engineer than as a creator: ‘What happens at the editing table, is this comparable to a scientific experiment?’
SCHNITTSTELLE is a double challenge to the spectator's capacity to remember and to perceive. Like the editor at his editing table, the spectator is first confronted with sequences of parallel images simultaneously shown on two monitors. The twin image tracks are, in the following step (which is also a temporal one, because the visitor has to enter another space), re-integrated on a third monitor, which presents them for a rereading.
Slowly Forming a Thought While Working on Images
- Edited by Thomas Elsaesser
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- Book:
- Harun Farocki
- Published by:
- Amsterdam University Press
- Published online:
- 26 January 2021
- Print publication:
- 09 June 2004, pp 163-176
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Summary
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.