Harun Farocki's Images of the World

Christopher Pavsek

1. See Thomas Elsaesser (ed.), Harun Farocki: Working on the Sightlines (Amsterdam University Press, 2004).

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2. Nicolas Bourriaud, Postproduction: Culture as Screenplay: How Srt Reprograms the World (New York: Lukas and Sternberg, 2002).

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It is hard to reconcile our received image of Farocki as a scruffy upstart with the rarefied space of the postmodern museum and the highly individualised mode of spectator address encouraged by video installation. Although other engaged filmmakers such as Chris Marker and Chantal Akerman have experimented to varying degrees with the world of video art, they have remained filmmakers first and foremost. Farocki has now established himself as an enduring presence in the art world and his videos have appeared at Documenta, the ZKM in Karlsruhe, and the ICA in London, amongst others. Recent installations – Auge/Machine I, II and III (Eye/Machine, 2001-03) – continue to develop his familiar technique of recycling imagery and sound from a range of sources such as military simulation devices, industrial optometrics, and commercial and penal surveillance technology.

As such, this work seems fully a part of that dominant trend in recent visual arts designated most handily by Nicolas Bourriaud as ‘postproduction’, a trend characterised by the persistent reuse, quotation and refunctioning of pre-existing works of art and prerecorded materials. (2) Though Farocki's recent works have an implicit leftist air about them – be it the product of their emphasis on particular content or the after-effect of Farocki's own reputation as a long-time political filmmaker – one wonders nonetheless about the significance of this move to the museum and whether or not it heralds a retreat from the principles of engagement that influenced Farocki's films and videos well into the ‘90s. Or, rather, does it reflect a change in the status of the social world and its images?

That Farocki's cinema was a cinema engagé was abundantly clear from the very beginning of the first film he made after having been kicked out of the German Film and Television Academy Berlin (DFFB) in 1968, a film which garnered for him his first significant critical notice in European film circles. NICHT löschbares Feuer (Inextinguishable Fire, 1968/69) opens with perhaps the most astonishing scene in the entirely of his oeuvre, a shot of Farocki himself sitting stiffly, even uncomfortably, at a table, reading from a transcript of testimony by a Vietnamese victim of napalm bombing raids during the American war in Vietnam. After finishing his reading, conducted in the most neutral if not indifferent of tones, Farocki raises his head and stares directly into the camera and asks: ‘How can we show you napalm in action and how can we show you injuries from napalm? If we show you an image of napalm injuries, you will close your eyes. First you will close your eyes to the pictures. Then you will close your eyes to the memory. Then you will close your eyes to the facts. Then you will close your eyes to the entire context. If we show you a person with napalm burns, we will hurt your feelings. If we hurt your feelings, you'll feel as if we'd tried napalm out on you, at your expense. We can only give you a weak idea of how napalm works’. As the camera moves in for a closer look, Farocki reaches off-screen, grabs a cigarette and slowly puts it out on the back of his wrist.

The film that then unfolds is a remarkable document from the history of German cinema in particular, and international political cinema more generally. Jill Godmilow, who made a virtually exact replica of NICHT löschbares Feuer as What Farocki Taught (1996), has described it as an exemplary piece of agit-prop cinema. It is also remarkable for its mode of enunciation: ostensibly a film about napalm, the film shuns, as Farocki's opening remarks announce, any direct imagistic representation of the effects of napalm on its human victims; it only barely portrays its uses in Vietnam. It shies away from spectacularly portraying human suffering ‘and turning it into kitsch’, as Farocki will remark in a very different context in his 1988 Bilder der Welt und die Inschrift des Krieges (Images of the World and the Inscription of War, 1988). Instead, the film focuses on the production process of napalm in the United States by restaging this process with the barest of Brechtian cinematic means. The process is broken down into its component parts; the division of labour that subtends the whole process is revealed to have significant ideological effects. The technicians, scientists and workers who make napalm remain unaware of its final use until it is too late to intervene in its production. The film is exemplary in its attempt to combine radical form with a radical message: to simultaneously challenge dominant forms of culture and combat the war in Vietnam at home, in the First World.

3. This biographical summary draws on Tilman Baumgärtel's account in his extraordinarily useful and now standard reference work on Farocki's career, Vom Guerillakino zum Essayfilm: Harun Farocki – Werkmonographie eines Autorenfilmers (Berlin, 1998), pp. 18-23.

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The Berlin film scene of the early ‘60s in which Farocki began to develop was an energetic one, strongly influenced by the incipient student movement. The small cinemas and the film club Friends of the German Cinematheque provided a vibrant milieu in which to see and debate international cinema. Theory was not unfamiliar to these students, who were well versed in Marx, Brecht, the Frankfurt School and Situationism. The aesthetic that Farocki developed at this time was emphatically engaged, though attentive to the critiques of committed art familiar from the work of Theodor Adorno. Farocki's early cinema was unabashedly didactic, even heavy-handedly so, something still in evidence in NICHT löschbares Feuer and characteristic of his films at least until the early ‘80s. Two examples from his student films illustrate this well. One, with a title typical for the period, Über einige Probleme des antiautoritären und antiimperialistischen Kampfes in den Metropolen am Beispiel Westberlins, oder: Ihre Zeitungen (On Several Problems of the Anti-Authoritarian and Anti-Imperialist Struggle in the Metropolises Using the Example of West Berlin, or: Your Newspapers, 1968), presents images of bombs falling over Vietnam followed by shots of newspapers falling onto the streets of West Berlin. The montage brings together Vietnam with the other great target of the students' protests, the Springer publishing house, seen to be at the forefront of the media-political construction of the society of the spectacle. In the brief Die Worte des Vorsitzenden (The Words of the Chairman, 1967) a page of Mao's Red Book is folded into an arrow which is then shot at a figure wearing a mask of the Shah of Iran, whose visit to Berlin in 1967 prompted enormous protests. This was the sort of direct image (here, words becoming material weapons of struggle) that Farocki will later reject.

Farocki's uncompromising commitment to radical form set him apart from much of the New German Cinema that was beginning to flourish in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, and it most certainly contributed to his relative lack of notice within the larger European film scene. Though Farocki was familiar with (and in many ways adoring of) the American cinema he had absorbed in Berlin's cinemas and film clubs – as one can see in his later writings for the journal Filmkritik – his films do not show the sorts of American influence that characterised the works of other prominent filmmakers of his generation such Fassbinder and Wenders, who remained committed to the fiction feature in way Farocki never was. Farocki had no Nicholas Ray or Douglas Sirk to adopt as a cinematic father. Stylistically, his work was much closer to the montages of Alexander Kluge, whose formal break with the conventions of commercial narrative cinema was far more substantial, consequent and complete than any other major German filmmaker of the period.

Foreign to Farocki, however, was Kluge's continued dedication to the vocation of high or autonomous art as well as his desire to rescue cinema, at least in part, for those realms – something that very much betrayed his inheritance of a certain Adornian aesthetic tendency within the Frankfurt school. Another major influence on Farocki was Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, beloved of the Filmkritik circle, and traces of their spartan, Brechtian style can be seen in Farocki's work from the period.

The sometimes forced set of equations and oppositions that typify Farocki's early films – between artist and guerilla, imperialist militarism and media corporations, the weapons of art and the weapons of war – were refined and nuanced over the course of the next several decades. But many of the concerns evident in these first films remain constant to this day. Farocki stays committed to repeatedly rethinking the role of, and appropriate form for, cinema; he continues to interrogate cinema and television as institutions. There are few filmmakers who have so consistently and diligently critiqued the nature and function of images in contemporary culture. The role and function of the author, already foregrounded in the passage from NICHT löschbares Feuer cited above, is omnipresent in his work. And in what seems to be as much a matter of chance as of principle, his relationship to commercial cinema and media production, as well as to the more successful art cinema that came to be known as the New German Cinema, has remained utterly unchanged in at least one respect: he has always worked at the periphery of this mainstream, never achieving the celebrity of contemporaries such as Fassbinder and Wenders, and seldom gaining access to the public film funds that they were able to tap. Farocki has had at times to live off the leftovers of the film and television industry in Germany (indeed, NICHT löschbares Feuer was produced with a miniscule 10,000 DM year-end surplus from WDR, the West German television station where Farocki was working at the time), and has produced most of his films through co-productions or contracts with German and French television.

In the decade after NICHT löschbares Feuer, Farocki made a number of films in collaboration with Hartmut Bitomsky, another figure who has remained an outsider to the New German Cinema; as well as a number of contributions for various West German television series, including several short pieces for the German Sesamstrasse. About this period of real financial struggle, Farocki himself has said that he made ‘hardly anything of interest’ and it is difficult to see any of the material he produced in those years. It was also during this period that Farocki began the editorship of the important German film journal, Filmkritik, which had been founded in the late ‘50s by Theodor Kotulla and the critic and film historian Enno Patalas. In the late ‘60s it became a gathering point for leftists on the fringes of the emergent New German Cinema, and filmmakers as diverse as Farocki and Bitomsky, as well as Rudolph Thome, Ingemo Engström, and Wim Wenders published there more or less frequency. Much like their more famous predecessors at Cahiers du cinéma, this talented and energetic group saw little division between the production of their highly descriptive, even manic criticism, and their efforts to produce their own films. Filmkritik was indeed filmmaking by other means. The journal sadly ceased publication in 1984, and to this day Farocki figures as its unofficial archivist.

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4. Harun Farocki, ‘Notwendige Abwechhslung und Vielfalt’, Filmkritik 8 (1975), p. 368.

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5. Cited in Vom Guerillakino zum Essayfilm, p. 115.

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6. Interview with Tilman Baumgärtel in Vom Guerillakino zum Essayfilm, p. 211.

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7. Rembert Hüser, ‘Nine Minutes in the Yard: A Conversation with Harun Farocki’, in Working on the Sightlines, pp. 292-314.

Four years later, Farocki followed with his second feature, Etwas wird Sichtbar (Before Your Eyes, Vietnam, 1982), this time made with a comparatively generous budget from the second German television channel, ZDF. This film marks a definitive turning point in Farocki's career. Here he returns to the topic of the Vietnam War, to take stock of the legacy of the student movement, his own earlier ideal of guerilla film production, and the dream of a certain form of didactic cinema. The earlier goal (most evident in Zwischen zwei Kriegen) of a cinema that could ‘bring everything together’ in a totalising act of cognition has given way to a sense that the given and visible world is too complex and inherently ambiguous for such an aesthetic; guerilla tactics and techniques are shown to be recuperable within the logic of capital; and the ultimate fantasy of the student movement, to reshape the world in the image that it projected, is shown to be an almost arrogant fantasy. It is not without reason that Farocki referred to these films in 1995 as a kind of Abschlussarbeit (roughly, ‘final thesis film’) from his unfinished film-school days. (6)

Farocki has said that he is still ‘hung over’ from May '68, and has had a hard time unlearning some of its lessons. In terms that interestingly bring together the realms of the political and the aesthetic, he has found that he and his comrades suffered from the illusion that they could ‘make history’. (7) In aesthetic terms, as in Zwischen zwei Kriegen, this amounted to an attempt to make the filmed world conform to a theoretical insight. With the completion of his first two fiction features, Farocki came to the realisation that he ‘had no business being in front of the camera’ working with actors and props and so on; he had no business, in other words, making history, and instead decided to stay behind the camera and film the world as he found it before him.

8. Farocki has also co-written the screenplays for Christian Petzold’s fiction features Cuba Libre (1996), The State I’m In (2000) and Gespenster (2005).

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What this meant then was a dramatic turn, beginning in 1983 with Ein Bild (An Image), to various forms of non-fiction filmmaking and a period of intensive engagement with the real in the form of found footage, found situations and found contexts. Indeed, Farocki would make only one more foray (as a director) into the realm of the fiction feature, the rather forgettable and conventional thriller Betrogen (Betrayed, 1985), in which a young man kills his girlfriend only to replace her with her identical-looking sister, who is more than happy to assume her sister's identity and cover up the crime. (8) Since 1983, Farocki has been inordinately productive, turning out some thirty forty films and videos in twenty-five years, including four or five major works for which he has become best known outside of Germany.

There was also a practical element to this turn to documentary in Farocki's work. Having found himself in significant debt after producing the self-financed Zwischen zwei Kriegen, and dissatisfied with his dependence on television contract work, Farocki sought out a mode of filmmaking that could be done with little financial investment. He found it in the form of his observational documentaries. Many of these works were produced as contract work or in co-productions with German television stations; other films were made by recycling material from corporate jobs or prior contracts, or even his own old films. Farocki is now able to work with his own equipment and a few regular co-workers, most notably his cinematographer Ingo Kratisch, in an arrangement that allows him to be flexible as well as financially efficient. He has become, in his own words, a filmic Handwerker who arranges his own means of production.

9. Vom Guerillakino zum Essayfilm, p. 138.

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The long takes activate an attentive participation on the part of the viewer, who finally has the time to take a look around and see just what is going on. There is a certain wonder or almost Ernst Bloch-like sense of astonishment in all of this. The fundamental estrangement that these documentaries perform comes from the way they rejuvenate a curiosity about things that have become all-too-familiar. Simultaneously, they instill something of the pleasure one might get from a popular science magazine or wildlife film, where access is granted to normally hidden worlds.

Like Kluge before him, who loved to film public rituals and their acts of staging, Farocki also likes to portray situations where life is staged – although his subjects are usually less emphatically public, rather more intimate. And here his work is at its most Brechtian. During the filming of Die Schulung (Indoctrination, 1987), Farocki had an epiphany. Die Schulung documents a course for mid-level managers in which the participants, who want to improve their management skills, engage in a variety of role plays (a later film, an ironic ‘remake’ of Die Schulung entitled Die Umschulung [Re-Education, 1994] documents the same instructor training and ‘re-educating’ former East Germans who want to break into business). Farocki has said of the experience:

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10. Interview with Tilman Baumgärtel in Vom Guerillakino zum Essayfilm, p. 221. My translation.

Each of Farocki's observational films in some way engage in a pedagogy of denaturalisation or de-reification: processes that we assume to be natural or (in Lukács' notion) ‘second nature’ are revealed to be the product of an intense educational process and training, matters less of instinct than of ingrained habit and ideological indoctrination.

This lesson reaches a highpoint in Farocki's finest film, Leben BRD (How to Live in the German Federal Republic, 1990). Over the course of six months, from January through August 1989 – mere months before the fall of the Wall – Farocki and his small team filmed more than thirty instructional and training workshops of various types: children learn to safely cross the street (at one point the pedantic instructor scolds a young child for looking at the ground, ‘No, don't look down! There are only ants down there!’); midwives learn to deliver babies; couples learn to bear children; women learn to wash them; a Weight Watchers group organises a collective meal of cabbage and meat; a therapy group for anorexic women eat imaginary meals; soldiers train to repel a Soviet invasion; a young woman learns to remove her panties for a strip tease act … on and on for more than an hour.

The construction of the film is as impressive as the situations it documents. The montage is at times quite playful: in one scene a student learns to drive in a computerised automobile simulator and someone steps into the virtual ‘street’, causing a crash; in the next scene, the young children learn to look both ways before crossing. At other times, the montage establishes a series of associations based on apparently superficial similarities among images: a midwife's lesson with mannequins is followed by a woman speaking with a social worker about her own, real, pregnancy, as well as the beatings that her husband gives her. This is followed by a shot of police officers learning to intervene in a domestic dispute. Thus the montage builds not only series of associations amongst images, but also micro-narratives: pregnancy to birth to domestic violence. Kluge once said, in advocating for a renewed realism in fiction film, that a love story would be realistic only if it showed the abortion and break-up that followed. The power of Farocki's realism lies in the fact that he tells such a story with actuality footage.

The impression that slowly accumulates in Leben BRD is one of a collective bound together not so much by the libidinal energies of nationalism – which would soon be so prominently on display in the wake of German reunification – but rather by a series of praxes that are eerily similar in the very manner in which they are learned, staged and performed. Leben BRD provides an image of a human collective devoid of anything spontaneous or natural in any emphatic sense: all activity is the product of a form of constant training. If Brecht identified the purpose of the Lehrstück to be the education of the actors themselves and not the public, here any distinction between actor and viewing public is erased: it is precisely the viewing public who come to understand themselves as actors playing the roles for which they – as well as their fellow citizens – have been all too well rehearsed.

It is instructive to consider that this film was released in the very year of German reunification. It avoids any reference to this apparent historical rupture and is consistent with the remainder of an oeuvre that barely addresses the issue of the East/West divide. I would suggest that there is a historical lesson here as well: the punctuated upheavals that garner such notice in newscasts and historical accounts are less significant markers of historical change than the slower movements of history manifest in the creeping spread of instrumental reason and depersonalised social logics portrayed in Leben BRD. The fall of the Wall and the rapid process of reunification, with all the political changes they entailed, are almost insignificant in the face of the fact that somehow, somewhere along the line, we have devolved to the point where we need to take a course to learn how to give our children a simple bath.

In addition to these observational films, Farocki has made several essayistic films during the decade spanning the mid ‘80s and ‘90s. Stylistically quite similar to his observational films, Farocki's essays are supplemented by a prominent voiceover commentary that recalls the more didactic moments of his earlier films. In these films, however, the commentary stands at an oblique angle to the images; it is seldom clear the degree to which the image supports the assertions of the audio track, or whether the audio track is there to provide an explanation for what we see, to ‘fill out’ the image. His first film in this vein, Wie man sieht (As/How You See, 1986), once again takes up the question of the image, but places it emphatically within the context of a history and critique of technology. What is at stake in this film is not so much an active interpretation of the images that Farocki lays before the viewer, but more an investigation of the industrial and technical processes which create and exploit imagery for purposes of profit, control and the exertion of power.

These themes are still present in Farocki's next essay film, Bilder der Welt und die Inschrift des Krieges, a masterful film that has become a classic. It is this film which solidified Farocki's international reputation more than any other and achieved for him the status of film essayist on a par with Godard, Marker and Akerman. The montage in Bilder is much like that in Wie man sieht, and for that matter quite similar to the editing of his observational films. Absent is any form of linear argumentation; rather, the film proceeds at times almost whimsically in constructing its associations. The materials here are not subjected to an ideological line to be conveyed, or a theoretical stance to be furthered; one has the impression that the materials only slowly reveal themselves to the viewer, and never quite completely – as if this project so obviously oriented toward an exposé of the notion of Enlightenment was intent on retaining some sense of mystery for its materials beyond the grasp of the reasoning spectator.

11. Hüser, ‘Nine Minutes in the Yard’.

Bilder opens with a long take of a massive wave machine at an industrial research centre in Hannover, Germany. A perfect description of Bilder's form is provided by the accompanying commentary: ‘When the sea surges against the land, irregularly, not haphazardly, this motion binds the gaze without fettering it and sets free the thoughts’. Indeed, the rhythm of the film seems to have just such an effect, making the spectator quite receptive to the remarkable array of materials that follow. Most generally, one could say the film is about the concept of Enlightenment, as it exploits the ambiguity of the term in German, Aufklärung, in order to launch an investigation into the relationship between the history of visual technologies and the control of the world. Aufklärung, as the voiceover reminds us, is a ‘word in the history of ideas’ that can mean alternately ‘Enlightenment’ in the realms of history and philosophy, ‘reconnaissance’ in military terms, and ‘to clear things up’ in the context of a police investigation. Through a number of excurses on the earliest uses of photography to document and measure architectural monuments, the history of aerial photography for military purposes, industrial uses of robotic cameras, and photographic documentation of Auschwitz, the film demonstrates the simple, horrid fact that ‘one annihilates what one makes an image of’ in the most metaphorical and literal of senses. (11) Images, it becomes clear, are integral to the exercise of instrumental reason, to the domination of the world and nature.

The film, however, is not without its Utopian moment, which becomes clear in a rather unlikely manner. A recurrent, structuring motif in the film is comprised of a series of images of the Auschwitz death camps. In one sequence, Bilder shows aerial reconnaissance photos taken by Allied bombers in the spring of 1944, which, unbeknownst to the intelligence agencies at the time, inadvertently included images of Auschwitz. This was only discovered in the late ‘70s, when CIA workers pored over the images and reinterpreted them, confirming the presence of the camp in the photographs. The pictures had originally been taken to reconnoiter industrial installations in the area and, as is widely known now, the Allies refused to bomb the camps despite requests from Jewish groups. In the closing sequence of the film, Farocki shows a book of numerically coded messages from Auschwitz prisoners setting the date for an uprising in the camp. A brief narration then follows, recounting how on October 7, 1944, prisoners managed to destroy one of the gas chambers and crematoria, something Allied B-52's could not or would not do. Amazingly enough, Farocki then shows us yet another reconnaissance photo that confirms the destruction of the gas chamber. The final commentary reads: ‘Despair and a heroic courage made out of these numbers a picture’. A picture not really seen at the time, it was a picture nonetheless that documented for unseeing eyes a collectively organised act of resistance.

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12. Elsaesser, ‘Harun Farocki: Filmmaker, Artist, Media Theorist’, in Working on the Sightlines, pp. 11-42.

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13. Baumgärtel interview in Vom Guerillakino zum Essayfilm, p. 228.

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14. Hüser, ‘Nine Minutes in the Yard’.

Similar questions, however, are implicitly asked about the found footage that fills his videos, a fact which raises the rather thorny issue of just what distinguishes the images of video art from those of commercial and industrial images. His prison video, Ich glaubte, Gefangene zu sehen (I Thought I was Seeing Convicts, 2000), draws heavily on surveillance video from penitentiaries in the US. As always, the meditation is about the status of images, their interpretation, their centrality in the administration of power, and the ways they mediate industrial processes including the clearly industrial organisation of prison life. The distrust of the image is there, as well, as the video's title makes perfectly clear. No convicts are shown here, but their representations appear in multiple forms: as video images, data sets and digital traces, all nevertheless quite useful in controlling real, physical bodies.

This also continues an old theme in Farocki's work: namely, the literal dehumanisation of the world and the consequent evacuation of the possibility of human agency, an ongoing event which often appears as the result of the spread of industrial and market processes to larger realms of the social. In NICHT löschbare Feuer, the nefarious effect of the division of labour hobbles resistance to the Vietnam War. In Zwischen zwei Kriegen, the rise of fascism is an effect of the development of the material base. In Images of the World, this dehumanisation is attributed directly to the spread of image-making technologies. Yet in each of these films – as well as in Still Life, which reinvests the image-making process itself with the labour that is effaced in its products, and in Videogramme einer Revolution, which asserts a collective agency that defies the ambivalence of the image – there is a sense of the possibility of actual human resistance to this process. It is precisely the sense of this possibility that gives Farocki's films their (lasting) political urgency, and justifies Farocki's art as itself just such an act of resistance.

His recent videos, however, give the sense that this process of dehumanisation has intensified. These works revolve around a void present in the social as it is now coming into being: paradoxically, that void consists of the absence of effective human beings, social agents, political actors, and workers producing, organising and resisting and more. His earlier work still sustained a sense that such subjects once existed and that some might emerge anew; in the recent work, such agents do not seem to exist and none seem about to enter the picture. In Die Schöpfer der Einkaufswelten (The Creators of Shopping Worlds, 2001), about the design of shopping malls and supermarkets, humans are mere customers, reduced to data sets of their consumption tendencies. Shoppers appear as so many automata, oblivious (if not indifferent) to the dematerialised manipulations that go on around them all the time. In the Eye/Machine series, virtual humans murdered in military simulators are mere pixels on a screen; by extension, the real humans who will eventually be killed by the real war machines are similarly reduced. The perpetration of the (first) war in Iraq appears as little more than an effect of a progressive spread of imaging and simulation technologies and their associated logics of destruction. No human act seems to have initiated the dropping of a bomb, and no human being is present to resist; actual war seems as much a ‘simulation without humans’ (to cite an intertitle) as the digital war games played by the various machines that populate the video.

This is a statement about the condition of the world, a world which Farocki is at pains to document. But it is not clear how his work can differentiate itself from the images of the world that surround us every day, apparently immune to any resistance, yet capable of being resampled in endlessly new arrays, seamlessly integrated into the white-walled, arid spaces of the contemporary museum. Farocki's work, and with it the world, has come a long way from its agit-prop beginnings; one wonders, does it now suggest to us that there is no collective subject to agitate? And if that is the case, then the question begs itself: what distinguishes this new video art from propaganda for the merely existent?