Harun Farocki, activist filmmaker and essayist, was born in 1944 in Novi Jicín (Neutitschein at the time), in what was then a part of Czechoslovakia annexed by the Germans. His mother was German and his father Indian and he made numerous visits to India and Indonesia but spent the majority of his childhood in Germany.

In 1966 he entered the DFFB (Deutsche Film- und Fernsehakademie Berlin), the German film and television school in Berlin, but was expelled after the events of May 1968 with seventeen other politically involved students, including the future activists Holger Meins (Red Army Faction) and Philip Sauber (2 June Movement). For these student radicals, the issue was calling into question not simply the university system but the whole of German society, against the backdrop of the refusal of the U.S. presence in West Germany, opposition to the Vietnam War and the denunciation of the acts of violence committed by U.S. forces there. The war and the opposition to it were to have a profound influence on Farocki’s work.

Between 1974 and 1983 he ran the magazine Filmkritik, in which he developed a considerable body of theory around the image. This magazine of film theory and criticism was, according to Christa Blümlinger, “the only revue in Germany which, in terms of its aesthetic and political positions and its trying polemical discussions, was comparable to the Cahiers du cinema” in France. [1] Since 1984, he has been analysing the image in the context of contemporary civilisation through a variety of media and in many publications.

He began making films and TV movies in 1966 (more than 90 in all) and in the mid-1990s turned to video installations for museums as well. He has occasionally conceived fiction films and episodes of German TV series for children. [2] He taught at the University of California in Berkeley from 1993 to 1999 and at the Hochschule der Kunste in Berlin in 2000-2001.

Farocki’s first, resolutely militant films were marked by a commitment to the leftist revolutionary movement of the time. Often described as agit-prop, they reveal many influences common to numerous leftist filmmakers of the period (Jean-Luc Godard, Chris Marker etc.), such as the theories of French Situationism, the strategies of Third World guerrilla movements and ideas of cultural revolution. [3] Of Brechtian inspiration, these films cannot be reduced to pure agit-prop because Farocki maintains a highly sophisticated critical spirit, in both political and historical terms and that of the images themselves and their reading. Politics and aesthetics are never separate and Farocki handles and analyses them with the same meticulousness.

In his book on Farocki, Vom Guerillakino zum Essayfilm [From guerrilla cinema to essay film], Tilman Baumgärtel uses the idea of 'artistic self-determination' to speak of the director’s first film, Nicht löschbares Feuer [Unextinguishable fire] (1969). [4] In this work on the Vietnam War, Farocki methodically deconstructs the production chain of napalm and its use, thus reflecting the didactic concerns of the 1968 protesters. He attempts to shock viewers into awareness, going so far as to burn his own hand with a cigarette in front of the camera.

The works which followed during the 1980s and 1990s included author films, observation films and “film essays” (according to Baumgärtel’s typology, which is at once chronological and thematic). In his 1986 Wie man sieht [As is seen], he assembles and combines various kinds of images (drawings, photographs, paintings, etc.) in order to offer a critical vision of the history of technology. In Bilder der Welt und Inschrift des Krieges [Images of the world and inscription of the war] (1988), he demonstrates how much the image must be read – and not just seen – in order to be understood. Here, his analysis draws on aerial photos from the Second World War showing the concentration camps which the Allies had not identified or images of the camps taken by the SS, among others.

For Leben BRD [Life – West Germany] (1990), Farocki went to many training centres in Germany (insurance company, school for midwives, police academy, etc.) in order to reveal how such bodies function and thus bring out the rules governing West German society at the end of the 1980s. The same uses are analysed seven years later in Die Bewerbung [Learning to sell onself] which deals mainly with a centre for training courses for learning how to apply for a job: “Teachers, academics, long-term job-seekers, former drug addicts, middle managers all have to learn to present themselves, to sell themselves, in the name of self-management. Maybe this concept is only a metaphysical hook on which social identity is hung,” stresses Farocki.

A final series of films are made from archival material, the most famous of which are Videogramme einer Revolution [Videograms of a revolution] (1992) and Arbeiter verlassen die Fabrik [Workers leaving the factory] (1995). In Videogram, he juxtaposes “official” images (live TV) and “unofficial” ones (amateur camera) of the Romanian revolution and the fall of Ceausescu in 1989 in order to “reconstruct the visual chronology of those days”. As for Arbeiter verlassen die Fabrik, it traces the visual treatment reserved for the working class through the way they are shown leaving the factory over one century of film, beginning with the Lumière brothers’ pioneering Sortie d’usine [Workers leaving the factory] (1895). “By comparing the images, by repeating them in order to place them in context, Farocki goes back to the abortive encounter of work and filmic narration, based on ‘imbalance and counterbalance”. The cinema begins when the worker leaves the factory and escapes from surveillance systems and ‘obstruction mechanisms’ and it ends when alienation and authoritarianism impose themselves. [5]

In all of his documentaries, Farocki uses the editing and the composition of the sequences he shoots himself or reappropriates to produce a commentary which reveals the technical, socio-political and cultural context of the production, distribution and reception of the images. Vidéogramme d’une révolution, for example, allows him to create a new narrative and thus demonstrate the interactions between historical processes and their representation in the media. 

Since the mid-1990s, Farocki has also made video works for exhibition in art institutions, often in the form of installations. Schnittstelle [Section] (1995) was the first installation presented in a museum. In 1997, he produced the film Stilleben [Still life] for presentation at Documenta X in Kassel. In 2001 he developed the installation I Thought I Was Seeing Convicts dealing with video surveillance in American prisons. The theme of surveillance and control, which recalls his interest in the work of Michel Foucault, is also at the centre of Eye/Machine, another installation from 2001. [6] It explores the use of tools of technological control and surveillance in the army as well as the way propaganda images were used during the first Gulf War. The same year, Farocki conceived a video on shopping malls in the United States entitled Die Schöpfer des Einkaufswelten [The creators of shopping worlds]. His progressive shift from film and television to the artistic context brings out his increasingly reflexive approach, where the exhibition space provides him with a new distance to represent his aesthetic and political interrogations.

In each of his works, Farocki undertakes a systematic observation of the mechanisms of capitalist society by focusing on one of its aspects (war, the prison, work, revolution, consumption, etc.) and studying the status of the related images. His analysis most often involves the repetition and reframing of images, each of which, along with each of his shots, encourages the viewer/visitor to take a closer look, to attempt to detect the hidden significance of the images, to read between the lines. For Christa Blümlinger, “culturally, Harun Farocki belongs to that ‘modern’ European cinema which has redefined the relationship between word and image but also the use of sound. The sound track now has a new autonomy relative to the image track. The art of producing mental images from editing makes Farocki’s films similar to those of Godard or Straub and Huillet. With Farocki, the succession of two shots is not enough to set off the charge of meaning; the ‘shock’ of the images, on the contrary, emerges from their repetition, their circulation with other images, accompanied by a distanced commentary.” [7]

Émilie Benoit
Translation: Miriam Rosen

[1]Christa Blümlinger, “Harun Farocki ou l’art de traiter les entre-deux”, in Harun Farocki, Reconnaître et poursuivre, Paris: Théâtre Typographique, 2000, p. 13. Christa Blümlinger is a professor and researcher working in Berlin and Paris. She has curated film and video programmes and published articles in revues such as Trafic, Iris, Cinémathèque, Meteor, Blimp, Eikon and Camera Austria, notably on aesthetic issues related to documentary film, experimental film and the avant-garde.

[2] Betrogen (1985), Sesamstrasse (1973, 1978) and Sandmännchen (1978).

[3] The term “agit-prop” comes from the Russian agitatsija-propaganda, “agitation-propaganda”.

[4] Tilman Baumgärtel, Vom Guerillakino zum Essayfilm: Harun Farocki-Werkmonographie eines Autorenfilmers, Berlin: b_books, 1999.

[5] Mathieu Capel in Images de la culture, catalogue of documentary films prepared by the Centre national de la cinématographie: http://www.cnc.fr/intranet_images/data/Cnc/index.htm

[6] Tilman Baumgärtel, “Der kleine Ausschlag für eine große Entscheidung, Interview mit Harun Farocki über den deutschen Herbst”, http://www.infopartisan.net/archive/1977/7717.html

[7] Christa Blümlinger, “Harun Farocki ou l’art de traiter les entre-deux”, in Harun Farocki, Reconnaître et poursuivre, op. cit., p. 15.