Harun Farocki on the web and in London

Image above taken from The Interview (Video, Harun Farocki, 1997):

'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 retrained, 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 hang a social identity. It was Kafka who Iikened being accepted for 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 Farocki on The Interview)

Film Studies For Free can testify that there is no better written introduction to the fascinating work of Berlin-based, visual artist and writer Harun Farocki's films and video installation work than a 2002 essay that Thomas Elsaesser (also editor of the 2004 collection Harun Farocki: Working on the Sight Lines - see HERE) wrote for Senses of Cinema. Here are a few insights from the conclusion to this piece in which Elsaesser sets out the reach of Farocki's artwork:

[...] Farocki has also noticed for us how prisons and supermarkets, video-games and theatres of war have become 'work-places' – of subjects as much as of commodities. They are spaces that are converging, once one appreciates how they all fall under the new pragmatics of the time-space logic of optimising access, flow, control. These sites a filmmaker has to take cognisance of and recognise him/herself implicated in, but so has the spectator, whose role has changed so much.

As one walks through Farocki's works, which have become our worlds, one realises that he may be one of the few filmmakers today capable of understanding the logic of this convergence, contesting its inevitability and yet feeling confident enough to continue to believe in the wit, wisdom and the poetry of images. This certainly makes Harun Farocki an important filmmaker: probably Germany's best-known important filmmaker.

Inspired by Farocki's films -- which seem more and more relevant to our daily lives -- as well as by Elsaesser's many perceptive words about them, Film Studies For Free wanted to publicize the ongoing exhibition "Harun Farocki, 3 Early Films" at the Cubitt Gallery, London (17 January – 22 February 2009), as well as the surrounding events to be held at the Goethe-Institut and Cubitt Gallery (31 January-20 February).

For those of you in search of more information about, or analyses of Farocki's work, FSFF decided to produce as extensive a list of live links as it could to some relevant online resources of note:

• Harun Farocki Dossier at Senses of Cinema, Issue 21, July 2002, compiled by Thomas Elsaesser, including:

• 'Introduction: Harun Farocki', by Thomas Elsaesser

  
  

  Painting Pavements by Volker Siebel

  
  

  Passage along the Shadow-Line: Farocki and others - approaching a certain Filmkritik-style by Olaf Möller

  
  

  The Green of the Grass: Harun Farocki in Filmkritik by Rainer Knepperges

  
  

  Image(circum)volution: On the Installation Schnittstelle (Interface) by Christa Blümlinger

  
  

  Nine Minutes in the Yard: A conversation with Harun Farocki by Rembert Hüser

  
  

  Workers Leaving the Factory by Harun Farocki (Translation by Laurent Faasch-Ibrahim)

  
  

  Harun Farocki - biography, filmography, exhibitions and Retrospectives by Farocki-Filmproduktion

• 'Harun Farocki's Images of the World', Rouge 12, 2008, by Christopher Pavsek


• 'A Road Not Taken: Films by Harun Farocki' by Jonathan Rosenbaum


• 'Remaking History [on SHULIE]' by Jonathan Rosenbaum


• 'Welcome to Google Earth' by Anna Munster


• 'Contemplative Cinema: Harun Farocki (1)' by Zach Campbell at Elusive Lucidity, January 11, 2007


• 'Molecular Processes of Becoming' by Patricia Pisters, 1999


• 'Harun Farocki's challenging documentaries take an unorthodox look at European life' by Steven A. Erickson


• 'The Revolution Was Televised: Harun Farocki and Andrei Ujica's Videograms of a Revolution', Central Europe Review, Vol 1, No 1718, October 1999, by Ray Privett


• 'Harun Farocki and the Politics of Found Footage with William Burroughs on Cut-Ups', in The Recycled Cinema weblog, January 4, 2008, by Eli Horwatt
• Harun Farocki's Ein Bild / an image (1983, c. 25 Min., D), at the transport weblog, by Jessie Emkic added Feb 3


• 'Towards an Archive of Visual Concepts' by Wolfgang Ernst and Harun Farocki


• 'Notes on the New German Cinema', Vertigo Magazine, Vol.4 No.1 - Autumn / Winter 2008, by Ekkehard Knörer


• 'Dziga Vertov - a media artist? On the contemporary relevance of the Russian avant-garde filmmaker', DOCUMENTA MAGAZINE, by Christa Blümlinger


• 'How Real is the Reality in Documentary Film', Jill Godmilow, in Conversation with Ann-Louise Shapiro, 1997


• 'The Cinema of Identification Gets on my Nerves: An Interview with Christian Petzold', Cineaste, Vol. 33 No.3 (Summer 2008).


• 'Film Excursions / films about, besides and despite the lost moment' (scroll down to: 'Monday, June 25, 2007 Zwischen zwei Kriegen (Between two wars) by Harun Farocki Germany, 1978')', in The Lost Moment weblog, 12 June 2007, by Tobias Hering


• 'Introduction' to Projecting History: German Nonfiction Cinema, 1967-2000 (University of Michigan Press, 2002) by Nora M. Alter


• 'Farocki's images of the world: the inscription of subjectivity in the essay film', (abstract only) by Laura Rascaroli


• Harun Farocki Official Website


• 'I don't think I was the right seminar leader', by Harun Farocki, in Tilman Baumgärtel (ed.), Kino-Sine: Philippine-German Cinema Relations (Goethe-Institut, Manila/Anvil Publishing Inc., 2007), PDF pp. 22-24


• Harun Farocki page at the Internet Movie Database


• Video Data Bank: Harun Farocki


• Farocki resources at Cinefiles (detailed filmographic information, clippings, press kits, etc. from Pacific Film Archive database)


• Harun Farocki material at YouTube


• Harun Farocki: Working on the Sight-lines at Google Books


• 'Harun Farocki: Working on the Sight-Lines, edited by Thomas Elsaesser', Review, by Acquarello, at Strictly Film School, May 2005


• Other Harun Farocki material at Google Books


• Harun Farocki material at Strictly Film School, by Acquarello


• Some text (in German) from Speaking About Godard (New York University Press, New York and London 1998) on Jean-Luc Godard's Le mépris, Passion and Weekend, by Kaja Silverman and Harun Farocki (via Cinema=Godard=Cinema by Glen W. Norton)


• 'More Histoire(s) du Cinema?' Review of Speaking About Godard, Film-Philosophy Vol. 4, 2000, by Paul Sutton