Harun Farocki

Google translated description from the Harun Farocki’s site:
Harun Farocki’s film Something Becomes Visible does not want to explain why a war in such a distant country could for a moment spill over to the whole western world. It’s about distances, relationships between. Nor does he explain, he just reminds us that never before has a war been so massively covered. But it would be too much to say that the pictures helped determine its course. It shows the aftermath, the effects of the war. He combines a historical motif with a romantic one. Vietnam and a couple in love.Read More »

“In the summer of 1996, we filmed application training courses in which one learns how to apply for a job. School drop-outs, university graduates, people who have been retained, the long-term unemployed, recovered drug addicts, and mid-level managers – all of them are supposed to learn how to market and sell themselves, a skill to which the term ‘self management’ is applied. The self is perhaps nothing more than a metaphysical hook from which to hand a social identity. It was Kafka who likened being accepted to a job to entering the Kingdom of Heaven; the paths leading to both are completely uncertain. Today one speaks of getting a job with the greatest obsequiousness, but without any grand expectations.” Harun FarockiRead More »

According to Harun Farocki, today’s photographers working in advertising are, in a way, continuing the tradition of 17th century Flemish painters in that they depict objects from everyday life – the “still life”. The filmmaker illustrates this intriguing hypothesis with three documentary sequences which show the photographers at work creating a contemporary “still life”: a cheese-board, beer glasses and an expensive watch.Read More »

Quote:
Images of the World and Inscription in War is an essay whose central motif is the aerial photograph of the camp at Auschwitz taken on April 4, 1944 by an American reconnaissance plane. On this photo, analysts identified the surrounding factories but not the concentration and extermination camp. Dialectic montage and a distanced commentary compose this film which analyses the conditions under which an image becomes readable. The gap from “seeing” to “knowing”, interlacing the polysemy of words and photographs.Read More »

Quote:
The head of a Berlin advertising agency explains his proposed strategy to his potential client, a Danish optical company. The communication strategy that we ultimately came up with as a basis or any creative act or means of communication has three headings.

The first is ‘relevant, not arrogant’; the second, ‘varied, not uniform’; and the third is, ‘creative, not pushy’. These are essentially translations, strategic translations of your basic requirements and your analysis of the market, as well.Read More »

The installation THE SILVER AND THE CROSS by media artist Harun Farocki examines the 1758 painting “Depiction of the Cerro Rico and the Imperial City of Potosí” by Gaspar Miguel des Berrío (in the Museo Colonial Charcas de la Universidad San Francisco Xavier, Sucre, Bolivia). Farocki uses the medium of video to dissect the painting and its historical layers. In addition to artistic aspects, Farocki also looks at historical context and colonialism.Read More »

Dietrich Leder, Film-Dienst 24/92 wrote:
In Europe in the fall of 1989, history took place before our very eyes. Farocki and Ujica’s “Videograms” shows the Rumanian revolution of December 1989 in Bucharest in a new media-based form of historiography. Demonstrators occupied the television station [in Bucharest] and broadcast continuously for 120 hours, thereby establishing the television studio as a new historical site. Between December 21, 1989 (the day of Ceaucescu’s last speech) and December 26, 1989 (the first televised summary of his trial), the cameras recorded events at the most important locations in Bucharest, almost without exception. The determining medium of an era has always marked history, quite unambiguously so in that of modern Europe. It was influenced by theater, from Shakespeare to Schiller, and later on by literature, until Tolstoy.Read More »

Arnold Hohmann wrote:
Peter Lorre achieved international fame for his performance in the myth-making role in M. This character has held a peculiar fascination for generations of cinephiles. However, at the time, whilst such success meant recognition, it also weighed on the Hungarian actor as a constrictive burden. Using photographs and film extracts, Das doppelte Gesicht reconstructs the ups and downs of Lorre’s career, taking into consideration the economic imperatives and workings of the film industry at the time.Read More »

Quote:
The city today is as rationalised and regulated as a production process. The images which today determine the day of the city are operative images, control images. Representations of traffic regulation, by car, train or metro, representations determining the height at which mobile phone network transmitters are fixed, and where the holes in the networks are. Images from thermo-cameras to discover heat loss from buildings. And digital models of the city, portrayed with fewer shapes of buildings or roofs than were used in the 19th century when planned industrial cities arose, amongst them the Lille agglomeration. Despite their boulevards, promenades, market places, arcades and churches, these cities are already machines for living and working. I too want to “remake” the city films, but with different images. Limited time and means themselves demand concentration on just a few, archetypal chapters. Fragments, or preliminary studies. (Harun Farocki)Read More »