Serious Games I: Watson is Down. 2010.
Christa Blümlinger writes: "Culturally, Harun Farocki belongs to this 'modern' cinema that has redefined the relationship not only between words and images, but also the use of sound. There is a new autonomy of the soundtrack in relation to the image track. The art of producing mental images from the montage makes Farocki's films similar to those of Godard or Straub-Huillet. In Farocki's work, the succession of two shots is not enough to free the charge of meaning, the 'shock' of the images comes instead through their resumption, their circulation with other images, accompanied by a distanced commentary."
The inextinguishable fire, 1969
It has been said that Harun Farocki is a sort of intersection between the imagination of Chris Marker and the rigor of Alexander Kluge. Or the opposite, I don't know. In any case, he is one of the filmmakers and thinkers of the image, for whom cinema has always remained a praxis, a "language that allows us to show the world and the way it functions through the cinema machine.
The hundred of his films, incorporating a multiplicity of means of expression - photography, drawing, documentary image - and different forms - essay, fiction, direct cinema, installation - has never ceased to analyze the convergences of war, economy and politics within the social space, and their reframing through the production, use and reception of images in our societies. Hence his focus on operative images - military, industrial, penal - that do not involve the operator's body: those of the army's simulation tools (including in the context of "care" for the traumas of soldiers in Iraq); industrial optical technologies and surveillance techniques in prisons - cf. Auge/Machine I, II, III (2001-03) or Serious Games I-IV (2009-10), which positions video game technologies in the military context that constitutes their origin.
Farocki has been a political filmmaker since he was kicked out of the Berlin Academy in 1968. The Inextinguishable Fire (1969) begins with Farocki himself in front of the camera, sitting at a table reading the testimony given in Stockholm before the Vietnam War Crimes Tribunal. It describes the horrific experience of a Vietnamese man whose village was destroyed by napalm bombs and whose skin was badly burned. The narration of this experience says nothing about the conditions under which it happened or the conditions that allowed this image to be produced. Farocki posits of a here and now, he picks up a cigarette and crushes it against his wrist. "Harun Farocki's raised fist: an elevating thought to the height of an anger. Inextinguishable fire: the fist on the table and the cigarette burn."(Georges Didi-Huberman). When the napalm burns, it is too late to stop it. We must fight napalm where it is produced: in the factories. Dow Chemical. Michigan, USA. The film shows the process of the division of labor between technicians, scientists and workers who are unaware of the final result. The film fights the war in Vietnam from its root: the Western world.
The factory, he will return to it often, including when he uses the "primitive scene" of the cinema as a source. "The Lumière brothers' film Sortie d'usine (Factory Exit) lasted about forty-five seconds and showed the personnel of a photographic factory in Lyon-Montplaisir, about a hundred people, leaving the establishment through two exits, and during these last twelve months, I have been looking for all the variants to which this theme - "the employees leaving their place of work" - could give rise in the cinema. I found them in documentaries, factory documents and propaganda films, in weekly newsreels and feature films," he explains. It's an installation.
Harun Farocki did not only film the work in and out of the factories. He also filmed the making of images, the making of a Playboy photograph, as well as all kinds of entrepreneurial situations. "Endoctrination" (1987) tells of "managerial" training and its 1991 remake, "Re-education", takes up this theme in relation to the retraining of people in the former East Germany. More recently, he also filmed the negotiations between a venture capital company and a company that needed resources to develop a new product. The entrepreneur needs credit to launch the serial sale of a technical invention, the financial group wants to know if its money will be well invested. This anthropological look at a cell of today's economy was used.
"The autumn of 1989 has remained in our memory with its succession of visual events: Prague, Berlin, Bucharest. From the images, it was the return of History. We saw revolutions. And the most completed revolutionary scenario was delivered to us by Romania, units of time and place included. From December 21, 1989 (Ceaucescu's last speech) to December 26, 1989 (the first televised summary of his trial), the events in Bucharest were filmed in their almost entirety. We gathered these different documents with the intention of reconstructing the visual chronology". With Andrej Utica, Farocki makes a film that puts the Romanian revolution into a new perspective and what the cameras make of it, those of hundreds of journalists and amateur videographers, who film the events of a revolution being realized through its media exposure.
With Farocki, it is a question of giving a second life to the image within a film, whether it is a photogram, an industrial document, or a historical archive. For this new approach to be possible, he allows a distance from the archives in order to see them in relation to each other. Everything is performed by confrontation, by assonance, by telescoping, by repetition, repeatedly.
Thus the resumption of "Images of the world and inscription of the war" (1988), associated with "In reprieve" (2007). "From different devices, the two films of Harun Farocki invite to this crossing of the visible" (Sylvie Lindeperg).
Harun Farocki's signature film, 'Images of the world and the inscription of war', is an essay, introduced by the invention of photogrammetry, whose central motif is the aerial photograph of the Auschwitz camp taken by an American reconnaissance plane on April 4, 1944. In the photograph, analysts identified the blocks of the Buna industrial zone but not the extermination camp. "In Reprieve" exhumes rushes of an unfinished film shot in the camp of Westerbork (Netherlands) in 1944 by a Jewish prisoner. In contrast to the televisual transformation of the archive, the film draws on the minute traces left by the image and summons their off-field. The two bodies of images thus constitute an "in-between" and an entry point for questioning the place of visual knowledge in our knowledge of history and our ignorance.
"As early as 1942 in Germany, a television camera was installed on a remotely operated weapon. At that time, there was no technical means of recording electronic images and all that remained was the recording of a technician who filmed the monitor during a test flight. It is not till 1991, on the occasion of the allied war against Iraq, that we could see for the first time images taken by cameras placed at the end of the projectiles. Camera bombs, suicide cameras aimed at their target. The images mostly showed deserted military installations or civilian bridges. No man in sight. It was later proven that many men were killed during this war and that in certain images that were not broadcast, there were men to be seen in the impact radius. (Harun Farocki, The View of War, Traffic #50)
Under the gaze of war, the production of images is intimately linked to both testimony and destruction.
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