Harun Farocki Retrospective

Arsenal Cinema

Year by Year: 1966–1981

Side by Side: A lexicon of filmic expression

 

Admission: ticket (€ 7,50; members Arsenal and n.b.k.: € 5)

> Kino Arsenal, Potsdamer Straße 2, 10785 Berlin

 

 

September 15, 2017

8pm

Opening

with films by Harun Farocki from 1966–1969, presented by the Harun Farocki Institut

Zwei Wege (Director: Harun Farocki, 1966, OV/EnS, 3 min)

Jeder ein Berliner Kindl (Director: Harun Farocki, 1966, OV/EnS, 4 min)

Die Worte des Vorsitzenden (Director: Harun Farocki, 1967, OV/EnS, 3 min)

Der Wahlhelfer (Director: Harun Farocki, 1967, OV/EnS, 14 min)

Faroqhi dreht (Director.: Irena Vrkljan, 1967, 15 min)

Ihre Zeitungen (Director: Harun Farocki, 1968, OV/EnS, 17 min)

White Christmas (Director: Harun Farocki 1968, OV/EnS, 3 min)

Nicht löschbares Feuer (Director: Harun Farocki, 1969, OV/EnS, 25 min)

 

 

September 16, 2017

4pm

Die Teilung aller Tage (Director: Hartmut Bitomsky, Harun Farocki, 1970, OV/EnS, 65 min)

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.”

 

Eine Sache, die sich versteht (Director: Hartmut Bitomsky, Harun Farocki, 1971, OV/EnS, 64 min)

An educational film which explains Marxist theory in short episodes. The aim was “to introduce the process of understanding the theory of value of work and the law of values, alienation and fetish,” using terms such as “use value, barter value and labor as a commodity” and visualizing them in acted scenes and explaining them in question-and-answer games.

 

 

6.30pm

Berlin, 1978/79

Ein Bild von Sarah Schumann (Director: Harun Farocki, 1978, OV/EnS, 30 min)

Ein Bild von Sarah Schumann shows how a picture by the painter Sarah Schumann takes shape over a period of nine weeks. The film was made for the WDR series “Kunstgeschichten”.

 

Der Geschmack des Lebens (Director: Harun Farocki, 1979, OV/EnS, 29 min)

Impressions of a Berlin summer, fleeting, unintentional sketches of daily life. “For two and a half weeks, I walked around different parts of the city with my camera and collected images for the film.” (Harun Farocki)

 

Followed by a discussion with Sarah Schumann (artist, Berlin) and Michaela Melián (artist and musician, Munich and Hamburg)

 

9pm

Die Arbeit der Autorschaft

Erzählen (Director: Ingemo Engström, Harun Farocki, 1975, OV/EnS, 60 min)

Erzählen was made with the filmmaker Ingemo Engström and initially described as a “filmessai”. It will be screened alongside two of Farocki's films for children’s TV. It is about two researchers, played by Ingemo Engström and Harun Farocki, who are looking for a form for their research and reflecting upon the structures of narration, supported by Hanns Zischler.

 

Der Weg des Geldes (Director: Harun Farocki, OV/EnS, 1973)

Followed by a discussion with Hanns Zischler (actor and author, Berlin)

 

 

September 17, 2017

4pm

Auvico-Spots (Director: H. Bitomsky, Harun Farocki, 1970, ca. 20 min)

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.

 

Remember Tomorrow Is the First Day of the Rest of Your Life (Reg.: Harun Farocki, 1972, 10 min)

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”.

 

Die Sprache der Revolution (Director: Harun Farocki, 1972, 45 min)

A film essay about revolutionary language based on excerpts from speeches by the French revolutionaries Danton and Saint-Just, as well as those of Fidel Castro, Malcolm X, Lenin and Rudi Dutschke.

 

 

Kinderfilme

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.

 

Baggerlied (Director: Harun Farocki, 1973, 4 min)

Container 1 (Director: Harun Farocki, 1973, 3 min)

Container 2 (Director: Harun Farocki, 1973, 3 min)

Dock (Director: Harun Farocki, 1973, 3 min)

 

6pm

Kinderfilme

Hammer (Director: Harun Farocki, 1973, 3 min)

Sägen (Director: Harun Farocki, 1973, 3 min)

Transport I (Director: Harun Farocki, 1973, 3 min)

Transport II (Director: Harun Farocki, 1973, 3 min)

Der Weg des Geldes (Director: Harun Farocki, 1973, 3 min)

Make Up (Director: Harun Farocki, 1973, OV/EnS, 29 min)

“The make-up artist Serge Lutens is shown covering a model's face with powder then working it into her face over several minutes. The face becomes a canvas, primed for painting. Flesh is turned into something different, looking like marble.” (Harun Farocki)

 

Brunner ist dran (Director: Harun Farocki, 1973, 17 min)

Harun Farocki was commissioned by the SFB (Sender Freies Berlin) to shoot a short film based on Charles Baudelaire's prose poem “Le mauvais vitrier”. Instead he made a film about a worker blackmailed by his boss.

 

Einmal wirst auch du mich lieben. Über die Bedeutung von Heftromanen (Director: Hartmut Bitomsky, Harun Farocki, 1973, 44 min)

The film tells two kinds of stories, which each have their own aesthetic form—events from the lives of people one could describe as readers of dime novels (manual laborers and factory workers) and stories from a dime novel.

 

 

8pm

Farocki / Weiss

Zur Ansicht: Peter Weiss (Director: Harun Farocki, 1979, OV/EnS, 44 min)

“We were visiting Peter Weiss in Stockholm on 17th and 18th June 1979. We talked about his work on the book “The Aesthetics of Resistance”. Weiss has performed an unbelievable amount of research, studied the lives of people serving as models down to the tiniest detail, and attaches great importance to visiting the scenes of the action. The film gives an impression of his work.” (Harun Farocki)

 

Gespräch zwischen Carles Guerra und Harun Farocki (2011, ca. 20 min)

Followed by a discussion with Carles Guerra (director Fandació Antoni Tàpies, Barcelona)

 

 

September 19, 2017

8pm

Überwachen and beraten

Horst Grothus – Unternehmensberater (Hörfunk / Radio, WDR, 1975, 29 min)

The discussion Horst Grothus. Unternehmensberater (1975), which was made for WDR radio, is a clear example of how early Harun Farocki became interested in questions around organizing and optimizing labor. The measuring and quantification of work processes that Farocki discusses with the author of “Motiviert, engagiert, produktiv“ (1972) and “Die totale vorbeugende Instandhaltung” (1974) went on to play an important role 40 years later in Ein neues Produkt (2012), an observation of Quickborn Team consultants at work.

 

Ein neues Produkt (Director: Harun Farocki, 2012, OV/EnS, 37 min)

Followed by a discussion with Nina Möntmann (Prof. Art Theory and History of Ideas, Royal Institute of Art, Stockholm) and Sabeth Buchmann (Prof. History of Art, Academy of Fine Arts Vienna)

 

 

September 20, 2017

7pm

Bilderschatz (1)

Arbeiter verlassen die Fabrik (Director: Harun Farocki, 1995, OV/EnS, 36 min)

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.

 

Der Ausdruck der Hände (Director: Harun Farocki, 1997, OV/EnS, 30 min)

Followed by a discussion with Michael Baute (film theorist and author, Berlin) and Jörg Becker (film theorist and author, Berlin)

 

9pm

Bilderschatz (2)

Gefängnisbilder (Director: Harun Farocki, 2000, OV/EnS, 60 min)

Gefängnisbilder is another component in an archive that would be dedicated to “filmic prints” and their iconography, economics and politics. Both early films find themselves here again: 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.

 

Followed by a discussion with Benedikt Reichenbach (graphic desisigner and editor, Berlin) and Volker Pantenburg (Harun Farocki Institut, Berlin)

 

 

September 21, 2017

7.30pm

Der Ärger mit den Bildern. Eine Telekritik von Harun Farocki (Director: Harun Farocki, 1973, OV/EnS 48 min)

A critique of television features in which “the noise of the commentary prevents perception” and random images are allocated a role of illustration. “I want to demonstrate that most feature films are of the sort that make people lose their interest and appetite for the real world.” (Harun Farocki)

 

Moderatoren im Fernsehen (Director: Harun Farocki, 1974, 22 min)

“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.

 

 

 

September 22, 2017

7pm

Die Arbeit mit Bildern. Eine Telekritik von Harun Farocki (Director: Harun Farocki, 1974, 44 min)

An examination of the images used in television information broadcasting. Using concrete examples, Farocki shows how distant the world of television is from reality, the lack of curiosity and care in the use of images and sounds and the poverty of the filmic language.

 

Über „Song of Ceylon“ von Basil Wright (Director: Harun Farocki, 1975, OV/EnS, 30 min)

In a contribution for the TV series “Telekritik”, Farocki showed and commented extracts from Basil Wright’s Song of Ceylon (GB 1934), going back into film history to create models for another way of depicting reality.

 

 

9pm

Erzählen (Director: Ingemo Engström, Harun Farocki, 1975, OV/EnS, 60 min)

“A program in which the work of authorship takes place.” Ideas about filmic narration crystalize in discussions between the three protagonists (Ingemo Engström, Harun Farocki, Hanns Zischler).

 

Die Schlacht. Szenen aus Deutschland (Director: Harun Farocki, Hanns Zischler, 1976, 52 min)

In 1976, Harun Farocki and Hanns Zischler directed Heiner Müller’s theater play “The Battle” at the Stadttheater Basel. It was also filmed for television.

 

 

 

September 23, 2017

8pm

Farocki / Müller

Ost-West: Gespräch mit Heiner Müller (Director: Harun Farocki, 1981, 10 min)

In the early 1980s, Harun Farocki published a lengthy discussion that he had had with Heiner Müller in the magazine “Filmkritik”. What is hardly known is that part of this discussion was broadcast in 1981 in the television program “Kino '81”. What is even less known is the television version of the production of Müller's play Die Schlacht. Szenen aus Deutschland (1976) that Farocki and Hanns Zischler directed in Basel at the Theaterbühne in the same year. Both films will be presented alongside Die Hamletmaschine (1978), a joint radio production by Heiner Müller and Harun Farocki, to discuss the Farocki/Müller duo and Harun Farocki's continued interest in the developments in the GDR.

 

Die Hamletmaschine (Hörfunk / Radio, Harun Farocki, Heiner Müller, Süddeutscher Randfunk, 1978, 21 min)

Die Schlacht. Szenen aus Deutschland (Director: Harun Farocki, Hanns Zischler, 1976, 52 min)

 

Followed by a discussion with Thomas Heise (filmmaker, Berlin) and Jan Ralske (filmmaker, Berlin)

 

 

September 24, 2017

6.30pm

Einschlafgeschichten (Director: Harun Farocki, 1976/77, OV/EnS, ca. 30 min)

At the center of two television shorts are two girls (Farocki’s daughters) who fill the time before bed by using their imagination.

 

Ein Bild von Sarah Schumann (Director: Harun Farocki, 1978, OV/EnS, 30 min)

Ein Bild von Sarah Schumann shows how a picture by the painter Sarah Schumann takes shape over a period of nine weeks. The film was made for the WDR series “Kunstgeschichten.”

 

 

8pm

Das große Verbindungsrohr (Hörfunk / Radio, Harun Farocki, WDR 3, 1976, 75 min)

The radio play Das große Verbindungsrohr resulted from the research for Zwischen zwei Kriegen (1978). A montage of original quotes narrates the invention of the connecting tube in the 1920s to introduce energy freed by steel production back into the production process–a method that Harun Farocki applied to his own working processes.

 

Industrie and Fotografie (Director: Harun Farocki, 1979, OV/EnS, 44 min)

Industrie und Fotografie was the result of work on Zwischen zwei Kriegen using the images and recordings for a reflection on image and representation as well as on the use of private and commercial images.

 

 

 

September 26, 2017

8pm

Zwischen zwei Kriegen (Director: Harun Farocki, 1978, OV/EnS, 83 min)

Zwischen zwei Kriegen was perhaps Farocki’s most important film in the 1970s. It took six years to make. It examines the development of heavy industry between 1917 and 1933 and the economic causes of fascism, as well as the filmmakers' own working conditions.

 

Zu Zwischen zwei Kriegen (Director: Harun Farocki, 1978, 10 min)

 

 

September 27, 2017

8pm

Gebaute Räume

Stadtbild (Director: Harun Farocki, 1981, 44 min)

For this television report, Harun Farocki explored the relationship between old and new architecture in post-war Germany. He showed photographs of Berlin's architecture, speaking with local historians and historians of architecture, as well as photographers and writers. 

 

Industrie and Fotografie (Director: Harun Farocki, 1979, OV/EnS, 44 min)

Industrie und Fotografie was the result of work on Zwischen zwei Kriegen using the images and recordings for a reflection on image and representation as well as on the use of private and commercial images.

 

Followed by a discussion with Wilfried Kühn (architect, Berlin)

 

 

September 28, 2017

7.30pm

Single. Eine Schallplatte wird produziert (Director: Harun Farocki, 1979, OV/EnS, 49 min)

Harun Farocki observes and documents the recording of a three-minute-long pop song in a record studio. His interest in work processes is directed at the culture industry, in which music production is understood as a process based on the division of labor.

 

Zur Ansicht: Peter Weiss (Director: Harun Farocki, 1979, OV/EnS, 44 min)

“We were visiting Peter Weiss in Stockholm on June 17 and 18, 1979. We talked about his work on the book The Aesthetics of Resistance. Weiss has performed an unbelievable amount of research, studied the lives of people serving as models down to the tiniest detail, and attaches great importance to visiting the scenes of the action. The film gives an impression of his work.” (Harun Farocki)

 

 

 

September 29, 2017

8pm

Alphabetisierung des Blicks

Die Arbeit mit Bildern. Eine Telekritik von Harun Farocki (Director: Harun Farocki, 1974, 44 min)

An examination of the images used in television information broadcasting. Using concrete examples, Farocki shows how distant the world of television is from reality, the lack of curiosity and care in the use of images and sounds and the poverty of the filmic language.

 

Über „Song of Ceylon“ von Basil Wright (Director: Harun Farocki, 1975, OV/EnS, 30 min)

In a contribution for the TV series “Telekritik”", Farocki showed and commented extracts from Basil Wright’s Song of Ceylon (GB 1934), going back into film history to create models for another way of depicting reality.

 

Followed by a discussion with Michael Baute (film theorist and author, Berlin) and Stefan Pethke (filmmaker, Berlin)

 

 

September 30, 2017

7pm

Der Geschmack des Lebens (Director: Harun Farocki, 1979, OV/EnS, 29 min)

Impressions of a Berlin summer, fleeting, unintentional sketches of daily life. “For two and a half weeks, I walked around different parts of the city with my camera and collected images for the film.” (Harun Farocki)

 

Stadtbild (Director: Harun Farocki, 1981, 44 min)

For this television report, Harun Farocki explored the relationship between old and new architecture in post-war Germany. He showed photographs of Berlin's architecture, speaking with local historians and historians of architecture, as well as photographers and writers.