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
Light Weapons
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
… Scan Freeze, arrêt sur image.
Paul Virilio, Guerre et Cinéma
Lights on
One of the Jewish prisoners forced to work in a so-called ‘special detail’ at Auschwitz told Claude Lanzmann in Shoah, a film that contained no historical or archival images, what happened when a new transport arrived at the station and the SS was notified:
Now one SS man woke us up and we moved to the ramp.We immediately got an escort and were escorted to the ramp – say we were about two hundred men. And the lights went on. There was a ramp, around the ramp were lights, and under those lights were a cordon of SS. […] Now when all this was done – everybody was there – the transport was rolled in.
Harun Farocki, reading from the caption of an image of this ramp, asks: First thought: why all these spotlights? Is a film being shot?
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Farocki's film, BILDER DER WELT UND INSCHRIFT DES KRIEGES (IMAGES OF THE WORLD AND THE INSCRIPTION OF WAR) focuses on found photographs and documentary or industrial images. It answers the question of ‘why the lights’ with an analysis of some of the film being shot: images, and the light that made them possible. IMAGES OF THEWORLD is a film of light and disaster, of exposure and its time, or more properly its timing and hence its speed. It is not a film of montage, of cutting and sequencing, nor one of zooms and pans and travellings. The title makes it clear: what is at stake are images, the stilled traces left over after light has etched itself on film, the remnants of the silver that turns to black in the grain of a photograph. And yet, IMAGES OF THE WORLD is not exactly a film about seeing, either. One does not simply see an image, it says; its light is always shadowed by something that does not belong to the perception or intuition of the visible (which is to say, finally, to the aesthetic). Of necessity there could never be enough seeing to saturate an image.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Harun FarockiWorking on the Sightlines, pp. 203 - 210Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2004