Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Introduction
- Image In(ter)ventions
- Filming as Writing, Writing as Filming, Staking One's Life
- Between Wars, Between Images
- Documenting the Life of Ideas? – Farocki and the 'Essay Film'
- Images of the World and the Inscription of War
- Film: Media: Work: Archive
- From the Surveillance Society to the Control Society
- Acknowledgement
- Farocki: A Filmography
- Notes on Contributors
- Index of Names
- Index of Film Titles / Subjects
- Film Culture in Transition General Editor: Thomas Elsaesser
- Plate Section
The Political Im/perceptible: images of the world...
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 26 January 2021
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Introduction
- Image In(ter)ventions
- Filming as Writing, Writing as Filming, Staking One's Life
- Between Wars, Between Images
- Documenting the Life of Ideas? – Farocki and the 'Essay Film'
- Images of the World and the Inscription of War
- Film: Media: Work: Archive
- From the Surveillance Society to the Control Society
- Acknowledgement
- Farocki: A Filmography
- Notes on Contributors
- Index of Names
- Index of Film Titles / Subjects
- Film Culture in Transition General Editor: Thomas Elsaesser
- Plate Section
Summary
The essay's innermost formal law is heresy. Through violations of the orthodoxy of thought, something in the object becomes visible which is orthodoxy's secret and objective aim to keep invisible.
Theodor W. Adorno, ‘The Essay as Form’Once more, but in a different sense, filmmaking has to go underground, disperse itself, make itself invisible. Only by turning itself into ‘writing’ in the largest possible sense can film preserve itself as [what Harun Farocki calls] ‘a form of intelligence’.
Thomas Elsaesser, ‘Working at the Margins’Just as weapons and armour developed in unison throughout history, so visibility and invisibility now began to evolve together, eventually producing invisible weapons that make things visible.
Paul Virilio, War and CinemaDuring the 1970s and ‘80s, Harun Farocki was not as well known as Fassbinder, Schlöndorff, and Kluge – the group that came to be known as New German Cinema. Yet Farocki's films constituted more of a departure from or radical alternative to dominant cinematic practice. Farocki was a member of the first year class of the Deutsche Film und Fernsehakademie Berlin (DFFB), and his classmates included Helke Sander, Hartmut Bitomsky,Wolfgang Peterson, and former protester and activist Holger Meins. Though Farocki was not an active member of the RAF, he, like many of his colleagues, clearly sympathised with RAF politics, and during the late 1960s he produced several collaborative agitational films, such as NICHT LÖSCHBARES FEUER (INEXTINGUISHABLE FIRE, 1969); ANLEITUNG, POLIZISTEN DEN HELM ABZUREIßEN (INSTRUCTIONS ON TAKING AWAY SECURITY/POWER FROM THE POLICE, 1969); and Drei SCHÜSSE AUF RUDI (THREE SHOTS AT RUDI, 1968). In 1975, he paid a direct tribute to Meins with an experimental memorial film, ES STIRBT ALLERDINGS EIN JEDER (EVERYBODY MUST DIE), and in 1981, Farocki made ETWAS WIRD SICHTBAR (BEFORE YOUR EYES – VIETNAM), a meditation on two students who meet each other at an anti-Vietnam War demonstration in Berlin and discuss the possibilities of political resistance and activismwithin the parameters of acceptable behaviour. Farocki has been producing films for the past thirty years, many of the earlier ones in collaboration with filmmakers such as Hartmut Bitomsky. Most of Farocki's films problematise technologies of visual representation and reproduction, generally exposing the views inculcated by mass media and/or contrasting them with more independent coverage of the same events.
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- Harun FarockiWorking on the Sightlines, pp. 211 - 234Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2004