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Harun Farocki: Film-maker, Artist, Media
Theorist
Thomas Elsaesser
Tags: Harun Farocki
Harun Farocki, Between Two Wars, 1978, 16mm film, black-and-white, 83min, still.
Courtesy the artist
More than anything else, electronic control technology has a deterritorialising effect.
Locations become less specific. An airport contains a shopping centre, a shopping centre
contains a school, a school offers leisure and recreation facilities. What are the consequences
for prisons, themselves mirrors of society as well as its counter-image and projection
surface?
1
If I ask myself how the technical and, subsequently, the electronic media have transformed
civil society, labour and work, politics and the arts in the past half-century, I could find no
better chronicler of their histories, and no more intelligent observer of their unexpected
connections than Harun Farocki. The fact that, besides being a writer, he is also a filmmaker
is as much a sign of the times as a vocation. By making images a filmmaker not only adds
images to their stock in the world, but also comments on the world made by these images
with the images that he makes. Aware that the medium chose him, as much as he chose it,
for documenting public life under the rule of the image, Farocki treats the cinema with the
utmost respect. So central are the technologies of imaging and vision to the twentieth
century that there is little Farocki talks about that is not, appearances to the contrary, also a
reflection of the cinema itself. In this perspective, however, its role as our culture's prime
story-telling medium is almost secondary. Instead, the cinema is understood as a machine of
the visible that is itself largely invisible. This is why talking about airports, schools or
prisons is as much part of the post-history of the cinema as a bend in the river and a fork in
the road (leading to the foundation of cities), the Jacquard loom with its programmable
sequence of coloured threads, or the deployment of the Maxim machine gun at the battle of
Ondurman are each part of the pre-history of the cinema.
2
As perhaps the most pervasive -
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material and mental - model by which to picture ourselves both in this world and acting
upon it, this cinematic apparatus is present even when camera or projector are absent.
Signifying an arrangement of parts, a logic of self-presence and a geometry of actions,
cinema is the reality mortals are condemned to in Plato's parable of the cave, and it has a
technical-prosthetic afterlife in surveillance videos and body-scans, so that its noble golden
age as the art form of the second industrial age represents only a relatively brief lease on its
life. Or, to put it differently: the cinema has many histories, only some of which belong to
the movies. It takes an artist-archaeologist rather than a historian to detect, document and
reconstruct them.
'Detect, document, reconstruct': the terms are deliberately ambiguous. They highlight, along
with the contested meaning of the word documentary in cinema history and the somewhat
film noirish connotations of detection, a particular form of agency when talking about an
artist who also understands himself as an activist. If the word had not paled into such a
clich, 'intervene' might be the (Brechtian) term that applies to Farocki's early work and to
its radical ambitions when he started in the 1960s. Since then, he has tested forms of action
with his films that are normally associated more with a social scientist, laboratory technician
or media theorist than with a political activist. But he has also been an exceptional witness
to his age, especially when he patiently and persistently records how, in the second half of
the twentieth century, the visible and the intelligible have drifted ever further apart, just as
did the eye and the hand in the first half. An eye-witness is not at his best when only using
his eyes: 'It is not a matter of what is in a picture, but rather, of what lies behind.
Nonetheless, one shows a picture as proof of something which it cannot prove.'
3
Events,
accidents and disasters, Farocki seems to say, must be turned over to see what lies behind,
and to inspect the recto of the verso: except that even this 'image' belongs to a previous age
when a picture was something you could touch with your hands and fingers. Now it is a
matter of spotting the invisible within the visible, or of detecting the code by which the
visible is programmed.
With Farocki, then, the act of 'documenting' the contemporary world is guided also by
different kinds of authorship, different strategies of probing and testing, and an agency that
is at once forensic and pedagogic. This extends to his published texts, sometimes written to
accompany his films and sometimes to prepare them. The same stance of patient self-
interrogation concealed as matter-of-fact description also informs the director's verbal and
visual presence within the films. Farocki speaks in his own voice and person in Nicht
lschbares Feuer (Inextinguishable Fire), Zwischen zwei Kriegen (Between two wars) and
chnittstelle (Interface); at other times, a multi-layered dialogical situation is set up between
the characters and the filmmaker (Etwas wird sichtbar [Before your eyes. Vietnam]), or a
carefully scripted commentary directs attention and instructs the mind's eye (Wie man sieht
[As you see]), occasionally intoned by an off-screen female presenter (Wie man sieht, Bilder
der Welt und Inschrift des Krieges [Images of the World and the Inscription of War]). At
other times, the camera is a distant and cool observer, and no voice-over tells the viewer
what connections to make, other than to attend to the cuts and connections that the images
make (Leben BRD, Die Schulung [How to live in the FRG; The training]). One could take the
implied distance, the unhurried didacticism and the underplayed irony for the filmmaker's
manner of marking his intellectual involvement while keeping a critical detachment - thus
maintaining his mastery over the material. After all, these are expected positions in the
repertoire of documentary filmmakers since the late 1920s, especially when they are
politically on the left. Their films testify to social injustices or the abuse of power, they show
the world as it is and give glimpses of how it might be or once was; they hold up a mirror to
it in order to shame it into change. But the key impulses of Farocki's work seem altogether
differently motivated. At the limit, they make him an unlikely documentarist, cast neither in
the heroic-constructivist mould of the 1920s and 30s, nor situated on the side of direct
cinema of the 1960s and 70s. In respect of the latter, he has probably remained too much of
an agitator-activist to create the openness that usually gives the viewer the illusion of
entering into the ongoing events as a participant or co-conspirator; and in respect of the
former, he is too much of an artist-artisan to presume to be doing anything other than work
on a reality already constituted: replaying it for the sake of the small differences, small
deferrals, so that something might become visible ('etwas wird sichtbar' ['something
becomes visible']) in the repetition and through the duplication. For Farocki - unlike Freud -
to find an image is to re-find it.
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The symptomatic topicality of Farocki's subjects - Vietnam in the 1970s, Auschwitz in the
80s, surveillance technologies and smart bombs in the 90s, prison regimes, malls and
supermarkets today - is as deceptive as is his detached, didactic or deadpan manner of
treating them. He is extremely selective, monomanic even, in the choice of themes, while his
engagement is total, to the point of requiring careful self-protection, even decoy and
camouflage. In fact, it would appear that Farocki takes up a topic only when it fulfils at least
two minimal requirements: it must allow him to picture it as a process; and it must allow
him to establish a mirror relation with himself. What he chooses are situations in flux or
movement, liable to (sudden, dialectical) reversals, and taking place in several dimensions
at once. One dimension invariably refers back to his own position as filmmaker, artist and
writer, and locates the physical as well as moral space from which he speaks. Take, for
example, his first (surviving) film Nicht lschbares Feuer (Inextinguishable Fire) from
1968/69. The camera, head on, frames Farocki himself in a static medium close-up, sitting
by an empty table in an apparently equally bare room; it could be a teacher's desk, a witness
stand before an investigating magistrate, or the police table at which a statement could be
taken from a suspect. In a monotone voice, Farocki reads a Vietnamese man's eye-witness
report of the methods used by the Americans in their bombing raids. The man is a survivor
of a Napalm attack on his village, Napalm being the 'inextinguishable fire' of the title.
Finishing the report, Farocki now speaks to the camera: 'How can we show you the
deployment of Napalm, and how the burns that it causes? If we show you pictures of the
injuries caused by Napalm, you will close your eyes. At first you will close your eyes before
the pictures, then you will close your eyes before the memory of the pictures, and then you
will close your eyes before the realities the pictures represent.' Then, Farocki takes a
cigarette from the ashtray, draws on it to make it glow. As the camera slowly tracks into a
close-up, he takes the cigarette and extinguishes it on the back of his hand. A voice-over
explains that a cigarette burns at roughly 500C, while Napalm burns at around 4,000C.
The scene, in retrospect, contains all of Farocki, and prefigures the fundamental
preoccupations of his filmmaking. It shows the director taking sides with the Vietnamese, in
a gesture of what one might call self-inflicted solidarity. Its moral power derives from the
implied inadequacy and radical incommensurability. Farocki distances himself from the
false pathos of so much self-proclaimed solidarity with the victims amongst the student
radicals at the time, without giving hostage to their critics. At the same time, the inadequacy
in scale and consequence of comparing a cigarette with a Napalm bomb, and the back of a
hand with a burnt village is itself the point: 'we' will never know how 'they' suffer. And
because of this incommensurability, the act makes the case for a poetic: the poetics of
metaphor. You need to make one thing stand for another when bringing the unimaginable
'into the picture' and making it visible. Farocki's self-mutilation in Nicht lschbares Feuer
(Inextinguishable Fire) is an act of self-initiation with regards to being an artist. Renouncing
direct political activism, he stages a symbolic 'action' that must be read as the very definition
of the political in the language that is art, whose ultimate metaphor is the artist's own body.
Farocki, in other words, sketches a self-portrait that in modified form also characterises his
author's films of the 1970s and early 80s. He shows us the film director as partisan, learning
from the enemy, whose films are acts of resistance against conventional media and
mainstream cinema, produced with 'guerrilla tactics'.
4
Yet they reach their audience only on
condition that they are also directed against the director himself.
*
Ever since revolutions exist, there is enthusiasm, followed by disappointment. 'How could I
have been so blind as to believe that the Vietcong would create a better regime?' One says
'blind' because love is blind. But to be faithful to an idea means not to exchange it right away
for another, more opportune one. Perhaps one has to be prepared even to endure the death
of an idea, without running away. To be faithful means to be present even in the hour of
death.
5
So prominent is the habit of thought to express one thing through another and to see the self
in the other, it must be considered the founding gesture of Farocki's body of work and the
signature of his mind at work. Whether point of departure or finishing line, the moment of
metaphoric 'conversion' marks the pull of gravity on his imagination. Juxtaposing apparent
opposites and, if necessary, torturing them until they yield a hidden identity or an
unsuspected similarity, provide the (invariably temporary) moments of closure for his trains
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of thought. In this sense, metaphoric equivalence and (almost as often) metaphoric
discrepancy (catachresis) establish Farocki's poetics as well as his politics. But metaphor
also defines what can be an image as well as its limits, and metaphor passes back to
language the responsibility for taking care of the image, as well as for making it accountable.
If in his early films the metaphoric principle is verbalised, and applied somewhat externally
by way of political slogans ('mass-battles are like factory-work, the trenches are the
assembly lines'), the later ones integrate their metaphors by providing the implicit structure
for an entire film. Thus, Leben BRD (How to live in the FRG) consists of a series of
vignettes, each showing a different group of people or locations, where an exercise, a
rehearsal, a training programme or a demonstration takes place: schoolchildren are taught
to safely cross a busy road; pensioners rehearse an amateur theatrical performance; trainee
midwives are shown how to deliver babies; soldiers are taken through their paces with tanks
on open terrain; police rehearse the arrest of a resisting suspect; and so on. Each vignette is
itself cut into different segments so that the film can return to them several times, even to
the point where the second appearance retrospectively explains the first. But intercut into
the segments are also scenes of mechanical tests: a metal weight falls rhythmically on an
armchair to test the durability of the internal springs; car doors are mechanically opened
and slammed shut; robots insert car keys into locks, give them half a turn and pull them out
again; toilet seats are raised and lowered; washing machines are rumbled and tilted until
they crash into corners. Machines impersonate the human users who brutalise the object
world. The metaphor is evident, and if understood as an exact equivalence, it is highly
polemic: today, people are nothing but objects, commodities that, in order to stay in the
market place as consumer goods, have to be regularly and mechanically tested as to their
utility, durability and stress resistance.
6
Precisely because no commentary is offered, and no
verbal paraphrase links either the sequences to each other, or compares the animate with
the inanimate, viewers are given ample room for their own reflection. They may build up a
troubling image of parallels as well as differences between the groups, or they may go
through a whole gamut of recognition- and estrangement-effects, as daily life takes on the
contours of a permanent fire-drill, a coaching lesson, a therapy session, a job interview and
awareness training. Are these dress-rehearsals, sensibly taking out behavioural insurance-
cover against a risky and uncertain future, or do they confirm just the opposite: the
foolishness of believing that life is a script that can be learnt by heart or by rote? Thus,
approaching the central metaphor (that human beings are like commodities, and the social
system is like a stress-testing machine) from the other side, from its verso - the patchy
analogies, the ironic asymmetry and the painful rather than cynical equivalences - one sees
the film more as a series of Chinese boxes. A sort of mental mise-en-abime begins to connect
the segments, potentially undercutting and even inverting the paratactic (but pointedly non-
chronological) succession of segments produced by Farocki's mimicry of the observational,
direct-cinema editing style.
7
In his most recent works, notably the installation pieces, the metaphors become strikingly
bold and revealing in other respects: bringing together prisons and shopping malls, for
instance, provokes in quite a different way than does the comparison of World War I
trenches with Fordist assembly lines. Precisely because some of the visual analogies no
longer fully support the wide-ranging argument - such as the juxtaposition of a surveillance
video of a prison visiting hour with one of shoppers pushing carts through supermarket
aisles - the comparisons between the architecture of prisons, modern theatres of war and the
design of shopping malls remain conceptually sound. The Benthamite panopticon prison
that he shows in the opening scenes of Ich glaubte Gefangene zu sehen (I Thought I was
Seeing Convicts), with its tight alignment of camera eye and gun-sight, as he himself
remarks, is already obsolete in light of new tagging, tracking and 'deterritorialising'
surveillance technologies. Farocki's very point is to indicate the limits of the visible itself in
the new commercially high-profit, but politically low-profile, economies-of-scale or synergy
industries emerging from the alliances struck between computer software firms, security
specialists and consumer service industries.
Farocki's cinema, as well as his video work, amount to an impressive meta-cinema without
meta-language. As such, each of his works mimics a certain ensemble, a certain apparatus -
even when this dispositif is not necessarily identical with the cinema. For instance, an early
film of Farocki's, Zwischen zwei Kriegen (Between Two Wars), was built around the model
of a Verbund (an apparatus generating 'synergy'): that between steel production and the
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coking plants of the Ruhr valley in order to recycle otherwise wasted energy. This Verbund
(as apparatus) serves in the film as a metaphor for the alliance between German heavy
industry and the Nazi bureaucracy of death. But such is Farocki's thinking that the same
Verbund also serves as an allegory of the cinema, or rather of the film-author in the culture-
industries. For it shows, as its negative imprint, the portrait of the director as freelancer,
television sub-contractor and 'independent' filmmaker under conditions of the German
subsidy system as it was in the 1970s. By contrast, Leben BRD (How to live in the FRG) and
Was ist los (What's up?) mimic the instructional training films that form their subject,
giving a hint that these generally despised or even ignored genres of film history have
something to offer even to the serious film artist.
8
Wie man sieht (As you see) on the other
hand, takes the logic of the computer (with its yes/no, fork-in-the-road switching and
branching structure) as its mental model, and expands it in several different directions, not
forgetting that Farocki already then regarded the binary yes/no of modern technology and
digitisation as in need of being complemented by a more 'organic' model following the
natural contours of a given terrain rather than the straight line of the ruler. Pleading for the
both/and of his own praxis of keeping two images in mind simultaneously, he uses the
Jacquard loom and Konrad Zuse's drawings after watching Metropolis as the imaginary twin
screens of a conceptual installation piece, in order to figure the origins of the computer.
Bilder der Welt und Inschrift des Krieges (Images of the World and Inscription of War)
mimics the dispositif that today ties military and medicine, police work and portrait
photography together by investigating several privileged moments of its historical
conjuncture. Videogramme einer Revolution (Videograms of a Revolution) mimics the
apparatus of democracy at the status nascendi: the power vacuum as the paradoxical
moment of legitimating democratic power, and the double-edged sword that the media
represents in democracies as well as dictatorships. These and other such configurations are
important to Farocki in locating the filmmaker in the life of his society: besides confirming
that there is no outside to the inside of the image-media world, they also give his vocation,
his work a 'place' from where it becomes operational - even if this place is nothing but the
cut, the vertiginous opening, the negative lever I have called the 'Archimedean point'. His
recto/verso thinking, his poetic sense of metamorphosis and his baroque eye for the
conceptual trompe l'oeil have not only protected Farocki from keeping to fixed positions -
whether Cartesian, structuralist or deconstructivist - they have also given him a kind of
optimism or confidence in the power of reversals. So much so that his melancholy, paired
with a highly ironic self-reflexivity, is clearly distinguished from the disappointed idealism
and slightly hysterical fundamentalism of Jean Baudrillard or Paul Virilio, with whom his
ideas about modern warfare, prosthetic perception and the cinematic apparatus as a
simulacrum of social life have sometimes been compared.
Can I be more specific about this Archimedean point around which, I claim, his work turns?
Yes and no: its very point is to remain hidden, its causes lie in its effects, its mode of action
is self-reference. It is the serpent swallowing its tail - to pick up an image from Between Two
Wars. But one can identify some moments and motifs: an Archimedean point of Images of
the World, for instance, would be the gap that opens up only in retrospect when one takes
the images in the beginning (which are repeated at the end) of ebb-and-tide wave
simulations in a research lab water tank, and connects them with a slogan, also twice visible:
'Block the access routes'. The film turns, it would seem, on an oblique analogy between the
bombing by the Allies of the gas chambers in Auschwitz (which did not take place), and the
blocking of the access routes to the nuclear bunkers of NATO (which should take place).
What connects them is the possibility of mobilising both resistance and an alternative
strategy in a political or ethical situation where what is known is not what is seen, and what
is seen is not all there is to be known. Wave energy might replace nuclear energy, and we
might learn from a history that is counterfactual, hypothetical. But, as Farocki remarked,
Images of the World itself had unintended consequences, in that its international success
'returned' the film to him with a different title ('Images' instead of 'Pictures'), as well as with
a different meaning. What had intervened between the making and its reception, and had
changed the relation between cause and effect, was the year 1989, the fall of the Berlin wall,
and end of the Cold War. The 'message' about nuclear energy had all but got lost in the
historic upheavals and the transatlantic crossing, while several other discourses - of the
Holocaust, war and cinema, feminist issues of representation, body and voice - did come
back, now felt to be more urgent and therefore suddenly visible.
9
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Perhaps a similar hidden reference point exists in his later work. Farocki is in the vanguard
of those artists and thinkers willing to name the forces that hollow out liberal democracy
from within, for instance, by commodifying public space and simulating good citizenship in
gated communities. But as a filmmaker he knows that the zones of exclusion created on
either side are policed in equal measure by fantasy and violence. If this analysis is inspired
neither by a nostalgia for bourgeois individualism ('humanism'), nor by the ideals of
socialism that used to be its obverse, a core concern does link him to one aspect of this
tradition and to the key theme of one of its dissident thinkers: Intellectual and Manual
Labour, the lifelong preoccupation of Alfred Sohn-Rethel, one of Farocki's acknowledged
authors.
10
Filmmaking - Farocki's kind of film-making - might be the last kind of work
deserving that name, serving as an allegory of so many other kinds of work no longer needed
nor valued. When Farocki had placed himself, in Before your Eyes - Vietnam, between
'working like a machine' and 'working like an artist', he qualified both as ultimately too easy:
'it is not a question of doing either one or the other, but of joining the two.' However, while
at that point in 1981 his cinema still provided a critical commentary on filmmaking in West
Germany, it has since become a meta-cinema about the end of cinema - and of cinema's
beginning. Farocki's films and installations now focus on the problems of 'work' as not only
categories of the economic - how a society materially produces and ideologically reproduces
the means of its survival - but as the very condition of what it means to remain human. Now
he notes the fatal role that the cinema might have played in abstracting human beings from
their basic condition. For the organisation of the Fordist factory, experiments were carried
out [in the form of time and motion studies]. These tests present a picture of abstract work
while the pictures from the surveillance cameras yield a picture of abstract existence.
From abstract work to abstract existence: if Farocki's installations seem to record how
mankind is becoming obsolete among its own creations, it is worth locating the (non-)place
from which he speaks. For that, we have to remember his remark about love, and how it is
sometimes necessary to remain faithful to an idea one has loved, even if one knows this idea
to be dying. Might the idea, at whose deathbed Farocki's films hold their long vigil and keep
a sorrowful wake, be that it is work that defines and dignifies human existence, and protects
it from both fantasy and violence? For instance, what is so crucial about the Lumieres'
Workers Leaving the Factory (the central reference point of Farocki's Arbeiter verlassen
die Fabrik [Workers leaving the factory]) is the convergence of a particular technology, the
cinematograph, with a particular site, the factory. It stands as the emblem for the fact that,
ever since these two made contact, collided and combined, more and more workers have
been leaving the factory. With the advent of cinema, and paradoxically in no small measure
because of it, the value of human productivity along with the function of work, labour and
creativity have undergone decisive mutations. What their futures might be can only be
guessed at, immobilised as Western societies seem caught between the ever-longer queues
of the unemployed outside, and the ever more numerous computer terminals - techno-
mutants of the cinematograph- inside the workplace and in our homes. Might Workers
leaving the Factory - the title of the first moving images made for the cinema - be the secret
motto of Farocki's work, because in it he sees himself allegorised amongst the last of the
'makers' of moving images?
- Thomas Elsaesser
Footnotes
1. Harun Farocki, 'Controlling Observation', originally published in Jungle World, no.37, 8
Sept 1999 !
2. These examples are all taken from Farocki's Wie man sieht (As you see). !
3. Passage of dialogue by 'Robert' from Before Your Eyes - Vietnam. !
4. Tilman Baumgrtel, 'Bildnis des Knstlers als junger Mann', in R. Aurich and U.Kriest
(eds.), Der rger mit den Bildern, Konstanz: UKV Medien, 1998, p.156 !
5. 'Conversation with Harun Farocki', Information sheet no.13: Internationales Forum des
jungen Films, Berlin, 1982 !
6. The film was refused a certificate that would have made it eligible for financial subsidy
on the grounds that 'it tries to prove the thesis that all the citizens of the Federal
Republic are conformist and remote-controlled' in their personal lives and social
activities. !
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7. H. Farocki: 'We tried to be like waiters, in whose presence the masters of the manor felt
free to converse without reserve.' Quoted in Der rger mit den Bildern, op. cit., p.16 !
8. 'In the 1950s, I too, was shown instructional films at school. Silent, black and white,
screened with a noisy projector. Films about fallow deer and glassblowing. We high-
school kids with tastes formed by the photo journal Magnum ... didn't like these films,
and even today in discussions many say "like a school instruction film". It is clear that it
is meant to be the very dregs. But to me that is not clear at all.' Harun Farocki,
Filmkritik, no.274, October 1979, p.429 !
9. See Kaja Silverman, 'What Is a Camera? Or: History in the Field of Vision', Discourse,
vol.15, Spring 1993, pp.3-56 !
10. Alfred Sohn-Rethel, Intellectual and Manual Labour: A Critique of Epistemology, New
Jersey: Humanities Press, 1978 !