Harun Farocki Retrospective

With their “audiovisual codes” (AUVICO for short), Hartmut Bitomsky and Harun Farocki conceived a multi-episodic didactic series to teach the conventions and codes of film language. They pursued their idea of knowledge production by creating individual contexts and corresponding processes of cognition. In the end, the series was not made. Two of the prototype spots are are being screened for the first time.

A conversation in a café between Harun Farocki and Vilém Flusser about the design of the Bild Zeitung’s front page. 

This educational film about the political economy sheds light on the mechanisms of exploitation in capitalism. A worker at the conveyor belt of a lightbulb factory makes a profit for the factory owner: “We're creating wealth” – “But it is his wealth.” The model situations are staged in a Brechtian manner and after the screenings Farocki discusses the film in classes and “red cells.”

Harun Farocki and Andrei Ujica discuss the visual material of the 1989 Romanian revolution they used for Videogramme einer Revolution (1992) in a round table discussion with Andrei Pleșu, Romania’s first cultural minister after the revolution, and media scholars Friedrich Kittler, Manfred Schneider, and Peter M. Spangenberg.

A collage of adverts is used to create a fictional daily routine in the life of the German consumer: from brushing one’s teeth in the morning to waking up at night for fear of not having adequate insurance.

Die Umschulung (1994) shows how East German employees are taught sales techniques by a West German trainer and reveals “what was set up in East Germany after 1989: a training camp for the market economy in which techniques for self-representation are learnt” (Stefan Reinecke)

Die führende Rolle (1994) examines images of the fall of the Berlin Wall that were broadcast on East and West German television between October 10 and November 25, 1989.

Back in the 1970s, Farocki had envisaged a “library of images” that would be organized like a public library and would make available documentary material as “visual prints”. In the 1990s, he returned to this idea and made three films dedicated to it. In Arbeiter verlassen die Fabrik, he traces the use of one of cinema’s first topoi, the factory gate, throughout film history. With academics specialized in the media, he sought hermeneutic processes or technical processes based on algorithms for sorting and addressing images. Alongside Der Ausdruck der Hände (1997), the film forms an entry in the fictional dictionary of filmic prints.

Since Nicht löschbares Feuer (1969), Harun Farocki has returned to the Vietnam War and its meaning again and again. Its exemplary investigation of napalm production made it an important film of the Anti-Vietnam War movement and is regarded by many as a model for an aesthetically considered “political film”.

In What Farocki Taught (1998), Jill Godmilow takes the teachings of Nicht löschbares Feuer (1969) literally as the model for a highly detailed remake, which re-appropriates the film nearly 30 years later for successive political struggles.

Alice Creischer, Andreas Siekmann, Josef Strau, and Amelie von Wulffen also carry Farocki’s model into the present day world of Berlin rent speculation in their plasticine figure animation film Die krumme Pranke (1997).

A review of film books old and new as a report for the television series “KINO ’86.”

Harun Farocki gives a commentary on Robert Bresson’s Film L´Argent together with other authors from “Filmkritik” magazine. 

An advertising agency presents a campaign to a client. “In the advertising sector, a linguistic expression is discussed in greater detail than in a poetological seminar and a visual motif is expounded upon at greater length than in an iconographic study.” (Harun Farocki)

School dropouts, the long-term unemployed, and managers attend courses to learn how to extoll their virtues to potential employers. In role plays, they rehearse like actors playing themselves, walking the tightrope between fitting in and retaining their own personalities.

In 1973, Harun Farocki made several episodes for Sesame Street in which he started out with what was experienceable and concrete, essentially focussing on objects of children's reality–tools, means of transport.

Harun Farocki reacts to the central political events of 1968—the anti-Springer campaign and American war crimes in Vietnam—with an agitation film shot as a form of political work.

Helke Sander and Carlos Bustamante, who studied with Farocki at the German Film and Television Academy Berlin (dffb), show interventionist means of politicization similar to Harun Farocki’s own. Helke Sander’s Brecht die Macht der Manipulateure (1968) documents the campaign conducted by Harun Farocki and others to disturb the Federal Press Ball in Berlin.

Carlos Bustamante’s De Opresso Liber (1968) is an agitprop film pamphlet edited in pulsing staccato.

How are objects from daily life depicted in art and advertising? Farocki compares Flemish still life paintings of the 17^th Century to advertising photos from the present.

“The first close-ups in film history were aimed at the human face, the next ones at the hands. Hands are often supposed to reveal something which the expressions of the face seek to hide; such as, when a hand crushes a glass without any trace of agitation being visible in the face.” (Harun Farocki)

A look at the apparatus behind the scenes of talk shows: “The most important raw material of this industrial branch, which is so new that its costs and supplementary costs, profits and additional profits cannot yet be reliably predicted, are everyday human beings. They are cheap and want to come to the fore, but do they have visual appeal?” (Harun Farocki)

Faroqhi dreht (1967) is an early “making of” by director Irena Vrkljan.

With their "audiovisual codes" (AUVICO for short), Hartmut Bitomsky and Harun Farocki conceived a multi-episodic didactic series to teach the conventions and codes of film language. They pursued their idea of knowledge production by creating individual contexts and corresponding processes of cognition. In the end, the series was not made. Two of the prototype spots are being screened.

This road movie, a TV commission about the American Forces Network (AFN), shows Farocki at the wheel of a Citroën DS. The trip takes him through empty side streets from the AFN studio in Berlin past elevated railways to the forest and to the highway at night. It ends in front of a US base. An emphatically factual commentary contrasts with pop songs that are played in "heavy rotation".

“A contribution examining the methods television presenters use to link from one item to the next and thus to prove the evidence of the previous item, the following item, all the items, themselves etc.” (Harun Farocki) The film was supposed to be part of WDR's “Telekritik” series but was never broadcast.

A review of film books old and new as a report for the televosion series “KINO ‘86”.

Harun Farocki gives an introduction to Slatan Dudow’s film.

In Filmtip: Der Tod des Empedokles (1987), Harun Farocki speaks as, as it were, from one colleague to another with Andreas von Rauch, who plays the role of Empedocles in the film by Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet.

Gefängnisbilder is another component in an archive that would be dedicated to “filmic prints” and their iconography, economics and politics. The prison gate recalls the factory gate and the prisoners are taught discipline through manual labor that is supposed to improve them morally. Farocki was taken by Michele Mancini and Giuseppe Perrella's “Pier Paolo Pasolini: Corpi e Luoghi”, which uses the Italian filmmaker's films like an “image bank” in a similar way and organizes them according to motifs. They categorized an inordinate amount of pictures from his films according to similarity and difference.

Supermarkets and shopping centers are meticulously planned to optimize the purchase behavior of their customers. In discussions about the aesthetic effects and profit calculations, Farocki observes the complex decision-making processes between architects, clients, and analysts.

Taking the first public images ever shot with the cameras built into guns in 1991, the film illuminates the relationship between industrial production and military strategy.

A two-day negotiation about the awarding of risk capital: haggling is all about the right performance, about sophisticated deception, threats, and provocations.

The film consists of historical footage of the Westerbork transit camp, which was shot by internee Rudolf Breslauer in 1944 at the request of the camp commandant and remained an unedited fragment. A reflection about the substance and intention of images.

In Zum Vergleich (2009), Harun Farocki produces a subjective cinematographic atlas of working processes based on brickworking facilities in India, Switzerland, Burkina Faso, France, and other places. Work by hand. Industry work. Computer work. Without commentary. A global history of brick production.

In front of flipcharts displaying brightly colored scribblings, a consultancy firm creates new working worlds for the planning of new buildings. “Farocki’s film shows that alongside computer simulations of space, their work consists of searching for new words that the companies being advised can use to portray their staff and clients as modern.” (Volker Hummel)

An observation of working processes at a Berlin architecture office by way of six projects at different stages of development.

In Einschlafgeschichten: Brücken (1977), produced for the children’s program “Sandmännchen”, objects receive the status of actors via the use of childish, infectious typology.

One of the recurring motifs in Farocki’s work are images of bridges and books as objects to convey certain ideas. Both motifs come together in Wie man sieht (1986)—the filmmaker’s essayistic, constellational film on image, war, and traffic technologies and their progressive computerization.

Die Schulung observes a seminar for executives. Sales statistics are transposed onto the individual; as body language, gestures, and facial expressions are practised, psychology and modern capitalism merge. 

Die Umschulung (1994) shows how East German employees are taught sales techniques by a West German trainer and reveals “what was set up in East Germany after 1989: a training camp for the market economy in which techniques for self-representation are learnt” (Stefan Reinecke)