The films of Harun Farocki
The work of Harun Farocki, director and theoretician of German cinema, a key figure in militant, documentary and experimental cinema, is being celebrated this week on Tënk.
Associated with the development of a rhetoric of the image, the filmmaker's work invites us to emancipate ourselves from the meaning, the discourse and the dominant use that we attribute to them. Harun Farocki demonstrates through written or oral narration superimposed on the editing of archival excerpts, that each image originally serves one or more specific purposes, which serve a power, or even an ideology. His films unravel and decipher the processes that underlie the making and processing of images in order to uncover new possibilities, both in terms of meaning and function. An Image is a case in point, as we discover the behind-the-scenes process of making a commercial image for Playboy magazine. To make these implicit devices readable, the filmmaker plays with the horizon of expectation, refusing the type of editing and narration that viewers are usually confronted with. In particular, he leaves room for silence rather than the expected voice-over to deal with a historical subject in Respite, a film in which the filmmaker exhumes the rushes of an unfinished film shot in the Westerbork camp. Using documentary and fictional film archives, he reveals and relates the common motifs he detects in the cinematic representation of workers leaving the factory in Workers Leaving the Factory.
By an anti-pedagogical approach, the filmmaker does not try to affix a fixed and unique meaning to the images that he delivers, but instead leads us to consider them so that we question ourselves about their function, their meaning, and the potential detour that we could project onto them. It is not only a question of assimilating a knowledge which would result from the only contents of the film but to acquire a form of meta-knowledge which would tool and would make it possible to free oneself from the "armour" which cements the images. In this sense, Harun Farocki's films can be approached as a socio-political praxis, in that they express the way our societies function, notably by bringing to light the system of signs that governs images.
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Workers Leaving the Factory
The workers leave the Lumière factory. The first film in history frames the industry itself and tells us in its modest language: "Look, we can record our image in motion". This first document gives us an outline of what, from then on, will be made possible thanks to cinema. Telling this story, *Workers Leaving the Factory* shows similar sequences shot in a hundred years of cinema.
Respite
Harun Farocki resurrects the images shot by Rudolf Breslauer, a photographer, of the Westerbork camp during the Second World War in the Netherlands. This camp was first created by the Dutch authorities to take in Jewish refugees from Germany in 1939 and finally became a "transit camp" in 1942 following the German occupation. These images do not reveal the horror but underline a certain "calm", ...
An Image
The making of the "centerfold", the poster of a naked woman in the center of a Playboy magazine, is the object of all the attention. In the magazine's Munich studios, Harun Farocki films the creation of this photograph for four days, from the making of the sets to the obtaining of a convincing shot. This work mobilizes workers, stage managers, decorators, prop makers, make-up artists, models, p...
Workers Leaving the Factory
The workers leave the Lumière factory. The first film in history frames the industry itself and tells us in its modest language: "Look, we can record our image in motion". This first document gives us an outline of what, from then on, will be made possible thanks to cinema. Telling this story, *Workers Leaving the Factory* shows similar sequences shot in a hundred years of cinema.
Respite
Harun Farocki resurrects the images shot by Rudolf Breslauer, a photographer, of the Westerbork camp during the Second World War in the Netherlands. This camp was first created by the Dutch authorities to take in Jewish refugees from Germany in 1939 and finally became a "transit camp" in 1942 following the German occupation. These images do not reveal the horror but underline a certain "calm", ...
An Image
The making of the "centerfold", the poster of a naked woman in the center of a Playboy magazine, is the object of all the attention. In the magazine's Munich studios, Harun Farocki films the creation of this photograph for four days, from the making of the sets to the obtaining of a convincing shot. This work mobilizes workers, stage managers, decorators, prop makers, make-up artists, models, p...
