Harun Farocki: Filmmaker, Artist, Media Theorist

Author(s): Thomas Elsaesser

Source: Afterall: A Journal of Art, Context and Enquiry, Issue 11 (Spring/Summer 2005),
pp. 54-63
Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of Central Saint Martins College
of Art and Design, University of the Arts London
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20711571
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54 I Afterall

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Inextinguishable Fire, Harun Farocki: Filmmaker, Artist, Media Theorist
25min, b/w, 16mm, ? Thomas Elsaesser
1969 (filmstill)

More than anything else, electronic control technology has a deterritorialising

effect. Locations become less specific. An airport contains a shopping centre,
a shopping centre contains a school, a school offers leisure and recreation
facilities. What are the consequences for prisons, themselves mirrors of society
1 as well as its counter-image and projection surface?1
Harun Farocki, If I ask myself how the technical and, subsequently, the electronic media
'Controlling have transformed civil society, labour and work, politics and the arts in the
Observation', past half-century, I could find no better chronicler of their histories, and no
originally published more intelligent observer of their unexpected connections than Harun Farocki.
in Jungle World, The fact that, besides being a writer, he is also a filmmaker is as much a sign
no.37, 8 Sept 1999. of the times as a vocation. By making images a filmmaker not only adds images
to their stock in the world, but also comments on the world made by these
images with the images that he makes. Aware that the medium chose him,
as much as he chose it, for documenting public life under the rule of the image,
Farocki treats the cinema with the utmost respect. So central are the techno
logies of imaging and vision to the twentieth century that there is little Farocki
talks about that is not, appearances to the contrary, also a reflection of the
cinema itself. In this perspective, however, its role as our culture's prime
story-telling medium is almost secondary. Instead, the cinema is understood
as a machine of the visible that is itself largely invisible. This is why talking
about airports, schools or prisons is as much part of the post-history of the
cinema as a bend in the river and a fork in the road (leading to the foundation
of cities), the Jacquard loom with its programmable sequence of coloured
threads, or the deployment of the Maxim machine gun at the battle of
2 Ondurman are each part of the pre-history of the cinema.2 As perhaps the
These examples most pervasive ? material and mental ? model by which to picture ourselves
are all taken from both in this world and acting upon it, this cinematic apparatus is present
Farocki's Wie man even when camera or projector are absent. Signifying an arrangement of parts,
sieht [As you see]. a logic of self-presence and a geometry of actions, cinema is the reality mortals
are condemned to in Plato's parable of the cave, and it has a technical-prosthetic
afterlife in surveillance videos and body-scans, so that its noble golden age
as the art form of the second industrial age represents only a relatively brief
lease on its life. Or, to put it differently: the cinema has many histories, only
some of which belong to the movies. It takes an artist-archaeologist rather
than a historian to detect, document and reconstruct them.
'Detect, document, reconstruct': the terms are deliberately ambiguous.
They highlight, along with the contested meaning of the word documentary
in cinema history and the somewhat film noir-ish connotations of detection,
a particular form of agency when talking about an artist who also understands
himself as an activist. If the word had not paled into such a cliche, 'intervene'
might be the (Brechtian) term that applies to Farocki's early work and to its
radical ambitions when he started in the 1960s. Since then, he has tested forms
of action with his films that are normally associated more with a social scien
tist, laboratory technician or media theorist than with a political activist. But
he has also been an exceptional witness to his age, especially when he patiently

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and persistently records how, in the second half of the twentieth century,
the visible and the intelligible have drifted ever further apart, just as did the
eye and the hand in the first half. An eye-witness is not at his best when only
using his eyes: Tt is not a matter of what is in a picture, but rather, of what
lies behind. Nonetheless, one shows a picture as proof of something which
it cannot prove.'3 Events, accidents and disasters, Farocki seems to say, must 3
be turned over to see what lies behind, and to inspect the recto of the verso: Passage of dialogue
except that even this 'image' belongs to a previous age when a picture was by 'Robert' from Before
something you could touch with your hands and fingers. Now it is a matter Your Eyes ? Vietnam.
of spotting the invisible within the visible, or of detecting the code by which
the visible is programmed.
With Farocki, then, the act of'documenting' the contemporary world is
guided also by different kinds of authorship, different strategies of probing
and testing, and an agency that is at once forensic and pedagogic. This extends
to his published texts, sometimes written to accompany his films and some
times to prepare them. The same stance of patient self-interrogation concealed
as matter-of-fact description also informs the director's verbal and visual
presence within the films. Farocki speaks in his own voice and person in
Nicht l?schbares Feuer (Inextinguishable Fire), Zwischen %wei T^riegen (Between
two wars) and Schnittstelle (Interface); at other times, a multi-layered dialogical
situation is set up between the characters and the filmmaker (Etwas wird
sichtbar [Before your eyes. Vietnam]), or a carefully scripted commentary
directs attention and instructs the mind's eye (Wie man sieht; [As you see]),
occasionally intoned by an off-screen female presenter (Wie man sieht, Bilder
der Welt und Inschrift des Krieges [Images of the World and the Inscription
of War]). At other times, the camera is a distant and cool observer, and no voice
over tells the viewer what connections to make, other than to attend to the cuts
and connections that the images make (Leben BRD, Die Schulung [How to live
in the FRG; The training]). One could take the implied distance, the unhurried
didacticism and the underplayed irony for the filmmaker's manner of marking
his intellectual involvement while keeping a critical detachment ? thus main
taining his mastery over the material. After all, these are expected positions
in the repertoire of documentary filmmakers since the late 1920s, especially
when they are politically on the left. Their films testify to social injustices
or the abuse of power, they show the world as it is and give glimpses of how
it might be or once was; they hold up a mirror to it in order to shame it into
change. But the key impulses of Farocki's work seem altogether differently
motivated. At the limit, they make him an unlikely documentarist, cast neither
in the heroic-constructivist mould of the 1920s and 30s, nor situated on the side
of direct cinema of the 1960s and 70s. In respect of the latter, he has probably
remained too much of an agitator-activist to create the openness that usually
gives the viewer the illusion of entering into the ongoing events as a participant
or co-conspirator; and in respect of the former, he is too much of an artist
artisan to presume to be doing anything other than work on a reality already
constituted: replaying it for the sake of the small differences, small deferrals,
so that something might become visible ((etwas wird sichtbar1 ['something
becomes visible']) in the repetition and through the duplication. For Farocki
? unlike Freud ? to find an image is to re-find it.
The symptomatic topicality of Farocki's subjects ? Vietnam in the 70s,
Auschwitz in the 80s, surveillance technologies and smart bombs in the
90s, prison regimes, malls and supermarkets today ? is as deceptive as is
his detached, didactic or deadpan manner of treating them. He is extremely
selective, monomanic even, in the choice of themes, while his engagement
is total, to the point of requiring careful self-protection, even decoy and
camouflage. In fact, it would appear that Farocki takes up a topic only when
it fulfils at least two minimal requirements: it must allow him to picture it
as a process; and it must allow him to establish a mirror relation with himself.
What he chooses are situations in flux or movement, liable to (sudden, dialecti
cal) reversals, and taking place in several dimensions at once. One dimension
invariably refers back to his own position as filmmaker, artist and writer,

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 and locates the physical as well as moral space from which he speaks. Take,
for example, his first (surviving) film Nicht l?schbares Feuer (Inextinguishable
Fire) from 1968/69. The camera, head on, frames Farocki himself in a static
medium close-up, sitting by an empty table in an apparently equally bare room;
it could be a teacher's desk, a witness stand before an investigating magistrate,
or the police table at which a statement could be taken from a suspect. In a
monotone voice, Farocki reads a Vietnamese man's eye-witness report of the
methods used by the Americans in their bombing raids. The man is a survivor
of a Napalm attack on his village, Napalm being the 'inextinguishable fire' of
the title. Finishing the report, Farocki now speaks to the camera: 'How can we
show you the deployment of Napalm, and how the burns that it causes? If we
show you pictures of the injuries caused by Napalm, you will close your eyes.
At first you will close your eyes before the pictures, then you will close your eyes
before the memory of the pictures, and then you will close your eyes before the
realities the pictures represent.' Then, Farocki takes a cigarette from the ashtray,
draws on it to make it glow. As the camera slowly tracks into a close-up, he takes
the cigarette and extinguishes it on the back of his hand. A voice-over explains
that a cigarette burns at roughly 5oo?C, while Napalm burns at around 4ooo?C.
The scene, in retrospect, contains all of Farocki, and prefigures the funda
mental preoccupations of his film-making. It shows the director taking sides
with the Vietnamese, in a gesture of what one might call self-inflicted solidarity.
Its moral power derives from the implied inadequacy and radical incommen
surability. Farocki distances himself from the false pathos of so much self
proclaimed solidarity with the victims amongst the student radicals at the
time, without giving hostage to their critics. At the same time, the inadequacy
in scale and consequence of comparing a cigarette with a Napalm bomb, and
the back of a hand with a burnt village is itself the point: 'we' will never know
how 'they' suffer. And because of this incommensurability, the act makes the
case for a poetic: the poetics of metaphor. You need to make one thing stand
for another when bringing the unimaginable 'into the picture' and making
it visible. Farocki's self-mutilation in Nicht l?schbares Feuer (Inextinguishable
Fire) is an act of self-initiation with regards to being an artist. Renouncing
direct political activism, he stages a symbolic 'action' that must be read as
the very definition of the political in the language that is art, whose ultimate
metaphor is the artist's own body. Farocki, in other words, sketches a self
portrait that in modified form also characterises his author's films of the
1970s and early 1980s. He shows us the film director as partisan, learning
from the enemy, whose films are acts of resistance against conventional
4 media and mainstream cinema, produced with 'guerrilla tactics'.4 Yet they
Tilman Baumg?rtel,
reach their audience only on condition that they are also directed against
the director himself.
'Bildnis des K?nstlers
als junger Mann', in
R. Aurich and U. Kriest
(eds.), Der ?rger mit
den Bildern, Konstanz:
Ever since revolutions exist, there is enthusiasm, followed by disappointment.
UKV Medien, 1998, 'How could I have been so blind as to believe that the Vietcong would create
p.156. a better regime?' One says 'blind' because love is blind. But to be faithful to
an idea means not to exchange it right away for another, more opportune one.
Perhaps one has to be prepared even to endure the death of an idea, without
5 running away. To be faithful means to be present even in the hour of death.5
'Conversation with So prominent is the habit of thought to express one thing through another
Harun Farocki', and to see the self in the other, it must be considered the founding gesture of
Information sheet Farocki's body of work and the signature of his mind at work. Whether point
no.15: Internationales of departure or finishing line, the moment of metaphoric 'conversion' marks
Forum des jungen the pull of gravity on his imagination. Juxtaposing apparent opposites and,
Films, Berlin, 1982. if necessary, torturing them until they yield a hidden identity or an unsuspected
similarity, provide the (invariably temporary) moments of closure for his
trains of thought. In this sense, metaphoric equivalence and (almost as often)
metaphoric discrepancy (catachresis) establish Farocki's poetics as well as his
politics. But metaphor also defines what can be an image as well as its limits,

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Between two wars, and metaphor passes back to language the responsibility for taking care of
83min, b/w, 16mm, the image, as well as for making it accountable.
1978 (filmstills) If in his early films the metaphoric principle is verbalised, and applied
somewhat externally by way of political slogans ('mass-battles are like factory
work, the trenches are the assembly lines'), the later ones integrate their
metaphors by providing the implicit structure for an entire film. Thus, Leben
BRD (How to live in the FRG) consists of a series of vignettes, each showing a
different group of people or locations, where an exercise, a rehearsal, a training
programme or a demonstration takes place: schoolchildren are taught to safely
cross a busy road; pensioners rehearse an amateur theatrical performance;
trainee midwives are shown how to deliver babies; soldiers are taken through
their paces with tanks on open terrain; police rehearse the arrest of a resisting
suspect; and so on. Each vignette is itself cut into different segments so that
the film can return to them several times, even to the point where the second
appearance retrospectively explains the first. But intercut into the segments
are also scenes of mechanical tests: a metal weight falls rhythmically on an
armchair to test the durability of the internal springs; car doors are mechani
cally opened and slammed shut; robots insert car keys into locks, give them
half a turn and pull them out again; toilet seats are raised and lowered; washing

6 machines are rumbled and tilted until they crash into corners. Machines
The film was refused impersonate the human users who brutalise the object world. The metaphor
a certificate that is evident, and if understood as an exact equivalence, it is highly polemic: today,
would have made it people are nothing but objects, commodities that, in order to stay in the market
eligible for financial place as consumer goods, have to be regularly and mechanically tested as to
subsidy on the groundstheir utility, durability and stress resistance.6 Precisely because no commentary
that 'it tries to prove is offered, and no verbal paraphrase links either the sequences to each other,
the thesis that all or compares the animate with the inanimate, viewers are given ample room
the citizens of the for their own reflection. They may build up a troubling image of parallels as
Federal Republic well as differences between the groups, or they may go through a whole gamut
are conformist and of recognition- and estrangement-effects, as daily life takes on the contours of
remote-controlled' a permanent fire-drill, a coaching lesson, a therapy session, a job interview and
in their personal livesawareness training. Are these dress-rehearsals, sensibly taking out behavioural
and social activities. insurance-cover against a risky and uncertain future, or do they confirm just

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the opposite: the foolishness of believing that life is a script that can be learnt Images of the world
by heart or by rote? Thus, approaching the central metaphor (that human and the inscription
beings are like commodities, and the social system is like a stress-testing of war, 75min, colour
machine) from the other side, from its verso ? the patchy analogies, the ironic and b/w, 16mm, 1988
asymmetry and the painful rather than cynical equivalences ? one sees the film (filmstills)
more as a series of Chinese boxes. A sort of mental mise~en~abime begins to
connect the segments, potentially undercutting and even inverting the paratactic
(but pointedly non-chronological) succession of segments produced by Farocki's
7
mimicry of the observational, direct-cinema editing style.7
In his most recent works, notably the installation pieces, the metaphors Farocki: 'We tried
become strikingly bold and revealing in other respects: bringing together to be like waiters,
prisons and shopping malls, for instance, provokes in quite a different way in whose presence the
than does the comparison of First World War trenches with Fordist assembly masters of the manor
felt free to converse
lines. Precisely because some of the visual analogies no longer fully support
the wide-ranging argument ? such as the juxtaposition of a surveillance without reserve.'
video of a prison visiting hour with one of shoppers pushing carts through Quoted in Der ?rger
supermarket aisles ? the comparisons between the architecture of prisons, mit den Bildern, p.16.
modern theatres of war and the design of shopping malls remain conceptually
sound. The Benthamite panopticon prison that he shows in the opening scenes
of Ich Raubte Gefangene zu sehen (I Thought I was Seeing Convicts), with its
tight alignment of camera eye and gun-sight, as he himself remarks, is already
obsolete in light of new tagging, tracking and 'deterritorialising' surveillance
technologies. Farocki's very point is to indicate the limits of the visible itself
in the new commercially high-profit, but politically low-profile, economies
of-scale or synergy industries emerging from the alliances struck between
computer software firms, security specialists and consumer service industries.
Farocki's cinema, as well as his video work, amount to an impressive
meta-cinema without meta-language. As such, each of his works mimics
a certain ensemble, a certain apparatus ? even when this dispositif is not
necessarily identical with the cinema. For instance, an early film of Farocki's,
Zwischen %wei Tfyiegen (Between Two Wars), was built around the model of a
Verbund (an apparatus generating 'synergy'): that between steel production and
the coking plants of the Ruhr valley in order to recycle otherwise wasted energy.
This Verbund (as apparatus) serves in the film as a metaphor for the alliance
between German heavy industry and the Nazi bureaucracy of death. But such
is Farocki's thinking that the same Verbund also serves as an allegory of the
cinema, or rather of the film-author in the culture-industries. For it shows, 8
as its negative imprint, the portrait of the director as freelancer, television 'In the 1950s, I too,
sub-contractor and 'independent' filmmaker under conditions of the German was shown instruc
subsidy system as it was in the 1970s. By contrast, Leben BRD (How to live tional films at school.
in the FRG) and Was ist los (What's up?) mimic the instructional training Silent, black and
films that form their subject, giving a hint that these generally despised or white, screened with
even ignored genres of film history have something to offer even to the serious a noisy projector.
film artist.8 Wie man sieht (As you see) on the other hand, takes the logic Films about fallow
of the computer (with its yes/no, fork-in-the-road switching and branching deer and glassblowing.
structure) as its mental model, and expands it in several different directions, We high-school kids
with tastes formed
not forgetting that Farocki already then regarded the binary yes/no of modern
technology and digitisation as in need of being complemented by a more by the photo journal
'organic' model following the natural contours of a given terrain rather than Magnum [...] didn't
the straight line of the ruler. Pleading for the both/and of his own praxis like these films, and
of keeping two images in mind simultaneously, he uses the Jacquard loom even today in discus
and Konrad Zuse's drawings after watching Metropolis as the imaginary twin sions many say "like
screens of a conceptual installation piece, in order to figure the origins of a school instruction
the computer. film". It is clear that
it is meant to be the
Bilder der Welt und Inschrift des Krieges (Images of the World and
Inscription of War) mimics the dispositif that today ties military and medicine, very dregs. But to me
that is not clear at all.'
police work and portrait photography together by investigating several privi
leged moments of its historical conjuncture. Videogramme einer Involution Harun Farocki,
(Videograms of a Revolution) mimics the apparatus of democracy at the Filmkritik, no.274,
status nascendi: the power vacuum as the paradoxical moment of legitimating October 1979, p.429.

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democratic power, and the double-edged sword that the media represents in
democracies as well as dictatorships. These and other such configurations are
important to Farocki in locating the filmmaker in the life of his society: besides
confirming that there is no outside to the inside of the image-media world,
they also give his vocation, his work a 'place' from where it becomes operational
? even if this place is nothing but the cut, the vertiginous opening, the negative
lever I have called the 'Archimedean point'. His recto/verso thinking, his poetic
sense of metamorphosis and his baroque eye for the conceptual trompe Voeil
have not only protected Farocki from keeping to fixed positions ? whether
Cartesian, structuralist or deconstructivist ? they have also given him a kind
of optimism or confidence in the power of reversals. So much so that his
melancholy, paired with a highly ironic self-reflexivity, is clearly distinguished
from the disappointed idealism and slightly hysterical fundamentalism of
Jean Baudrillard or Paul Virilio, with whom his ideas about modern warfare,
prosthetic perception and the cinematic apparatus as a simulacrum of social
life have sometimes been compared.
Can I be more specific about this Archimedean point around which,
I claim, his work turns? Yes and no: its very point is to remain hidden, its
causes lie in its effects, its mode of action is self-reference. It is the serpent
swallowing its tail ? to pick up an image from Between Two Wars. But one
can identify some moments and motifs: an Archimedean point of Images
of the World, for instance, would be the gap that opens up only in retrospect
when one takes the images in the beginning (which are repeated at the end)
of ebb-and-tide wave simulations in a research lab water tank, and connects
them with a slogan, also twice visible: 'Block the access routes'. The film turns,
it would seem, on an oblique analogy between the bombing by the Allies of
the gas chambers in Auschwitz (which did not take place), and the blocking
of the access routes to the nuclear bunkers of NATO (which should take place).
What connects them is the possibility of mobilising both resistance and an
alternative strategy in a political or ethical situation where what is known is
not what is seen, and what is seen is not all there is to be known. Wave energy
might replace nuclear energy, and we might learn from a history that is coun
terfactual, hypothetical. But, as Farocki remarked, Images of the World itself
had unintended consequences, in that its international success 'returned' the
film to him with a different title ('Images' instead of'Pictures'), as well as with
a different meaning. What had intervened between the making and its recep
tion, and had changed the relation between cause and effect, was the year 1989,
the fall of the Berlin wall, and end of the Cold War. The 'message' about nuclear
energy had all but got lost in the historic upheavals and the transatlantic
crossing, while several other discourses ? of the Holocaust, war and cinema,
feminist issues of representation, body and voice ? did come back, now felt
to be more urgent and therefore suddenly visible.9 9
Perhaps a similar hidden reference point exists in his later work. Farocki See Kaja Silverman,
is in the vanguard of those artists and thinkers willing to name the forces 'What Is a Camera?
that hollow out liberal democracy from within, for instance, by commodifying Or: History in
public space and simulating good citizenship in gated communities. But as the Field of Vision5,
a filmmaker he knows that the zones of exclusion created on either side are Discourse, vol.15,
policed in equal measure by fantasy and violence. If this analysis is inspired Spring 1993,
neither by a nostalgia for bourgeois individualism ('humanism'), nor by the pp.3 ?56.
ideals of socialism that used to be its obverse, a core concern does link him to
one aspect of this tradition and to the key theme of one of its dissident thinkers:
Intellectual and Manual Labour, the lifelong preoccupation of Alfred Sohn 10
Rethel, one of Farocki's acknowledged authors.10 Film-making ? Farocki's Alfred Sohn
kind of film-making ? might be the last kind of work deserving that name, Rethel, Intellectual
and Manual Labour:
serving as an allegory of so many other kinds of work no longer needed nor
valued. When Farocki had placed himself, in Before your Eyes ~ Vietnam, A Critique of
between 'working like a machine' and 'working like an artist', he qualified Epistemology,
both as ultimately too easy: 'it is not a question of doing either one or the other, New Jersey:
but of joining the two.' However, while at that point in 1981 his cinema still Humanities Press,
provided a critical commentary on film-making in West Germany, it has since 1978.

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 become a meta-cinema about the end of cinema ? and of cinema's beginning.
Farocki's films and installations now focus on the problems of'work' as
not only catego-ries of the economic ? how a society materially produces and
ideologically reproduces the means of its survival ? but as the very condition
of what it means to remain human. Now he notes the fatal role that the cinema
might have played in abstracting human beings from their basic condition.
For the organisation of the Fordist factory, experiments were carried out [in
the form of time and motion studies]. These tests present a picture of abstract
work while the pictures from the surveillance cameras yield a picture of
abstract existence.
From abstract work to abstract existence: if Farocki's installations seem to
record how mankind is becoming obsolete among its own creations, it is worth
locating the (non-) place from which he speaks. For that, we have to remember
his remark about love, and how it is sometimes necessary to remain faithful
to an idea one has loved, even if one knows this idea to be dying. Might the idea,
at whose deathbed Farocki's films hold their long vigil and keep a sorrowful
wake, be that it is work that defines and dignifies human existence, and protects
it from both fantasy and violence? For instance, what is so crucial about the
Lumieres' Workers leaving the Factory (the central reference point of Farocki's
Arbeiter verlassen die Fabrik [Workers leaving the factory]) is the convergence

Workers leaving
the factory, 36min,
colour and b/w,
video-Beta SP, 1996

of a particular technology, the cinematograph, with a particular site, the factory.

It stands as the emblem for the fact that, ever since these two made contact,
collided and combined, more and more workers have been leaving the factory.
With the advent of cinema, and paradoxically in no small measure because
of it, the value of human productivity along with the function of work, labour
and creativity have undergone decisive mutations. What their futures might
be can only be guessed at, immobilised as Western societies seem caught
between the ever-longer queues of the unemployed outside, and the ever
more numerous computer terminals ? techno-mutants of the cinematograph
? inside the workplace and in our homes. Might Workers leaving the Factory
? the title of the first moving images made for the cinema ? be the secret
motto of Farocki's work, because in it he sees himself allegorised amongst
the last of the 'makers' of moving images?

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