Films by Harun Farocki
Tuesday,
March 17 and Wednesday, March 18 2009, 6 p.m.
Presentation at the Cinema KINO, Budapest, 1136, Szent Istvan krt. 16.
Harun Farocki is a German documentum- and experimental filmmaker writer and theorist. His works reveal the invisible images, intentions and power relations behind the pictures, as well as the social and political connotations of image-reading and film viewing. He frequently uses archive materials, found (and re-found) footages, writes film essays on the editing-table, in which the metaphorically or didactically constructed image-relations mutually interpret each-other.
The films will be introduced by Bert Rebhandl, film theoretician, Berlin. All films screened with English subtitles.
Program: Tuesday, March 17, 6 p.m.
Respite / Aufschub, 2007, 40min, beta, bw, silent
Harun Farocki’s Respite resurrects film footage shot by Rudolf Breslauer,
a temporary inmate of the Dutch transit camp for Jews, Westerbork. Commissioned
by the camp’s SS commandant, Breslauer films the unloading and loading
of incoming and outgoing trains, footage of prisoner processing, and devotes
much of his footage to the varied work and activities of the inmates. The surviving,
mostly unedited footage and Farocki’s silent intertitle commentary is
ambiguous despite the simplicity of content and the surprising specificity of
the filmmaker’s research—from a barely visible stamp on a suitcase
the titles identify not only the person in the image, but the specific date
the footage was taken as well as the woman’s place and date of death.
What the footage initially seems to show is a rare concentration camp that relatively
free of violence, death, and an oppressive atmosphere of pain and suffering.
That Breslauer was a victim, and eventually a fatality, of the concentration
camp system yet somehow was able to produce a documentary, however compromised,
of the daily make-up of camp life is remarkable in itself. Farocki’s appreciation
and commentary on this footage not only serves a possible purpose of re-consideration
of generally accepted visual understandings and impressions of the concentration
camp system, but also speaks for how the possible revelations and new knowledge
to be found in Breslauer’s work will be forever compromised due to the
hyper-prevalence of images that speak counter to this documentary work.
(source: http://www.farocki-film.de/)
Prison Images / Gefängnisbilder, 2000, 60 min, beta, bw + colour
A film composed of images from prisons. Quotes from fiction films and
documentaries as well as footage from surveillance cameras. A look at the new
control technologies, at personal identification devices, electronic ankle bracelets,
electronic tracking devices. The cinema has always been attracted to prisons.
Today's prisons are full of video surveillance cameras. These images are unedited
and monotonous; as neither time nor space is compressed, they are particularly
well-suited to conveying the state of inactivity into which prisoners are placed
as a punitive measure. The surveillance cameras show the norm and reckon with
deviations from it. Clips from films by Genet and Bresson. Here the prison appears
as a site of sexual infraction, a site where human beings must create themselves
as people and as a workers. In Un Chant d'amour by Jean Genet, the guard looks
in on inmates in their cells and sees them masturbating. The inmates are aware
that they are being watched and thus become performers in a peep show. The protagonist
in Bresson's Un Condamné à mort s'est échappé turns
the objects of imprisonment into the tools of his escape. These topoi appear
in many prison films. In newer prisons, in contrast, contemporary video surveillance
technology aims at demystification. (source: http://www.farocki-film.de/)
Program: Wednesday, March 18, 6 p.m.
Between two Wars / Zwischen zwei Kriegen, 1978, 83min, 16mm, bw
"A film about the time of the blast furnaces - 1917-1933 - about
the development of an industry, about a perfect machinery which had to run itself
to the point of its own destruction. This essay... on heavy industry and the
gas of the blast furnace, convinces through the author's cool abstraction and
manic obsession and through the utilization of a single example of the self-destructive
character of capitalistic production: 'The image of the blast furnace gas is
real and metaphoric; an energy blows away uselessly into the air. Guided through
a system of pipes, the pressure increases. Hence, a valve is needed. That valve
is the production of war material.' Between Two Wars is also a film about the
strains of filmmaking and a reflection on craft and creation. Farocki distances
himself radically from the thoughtless sloppiness of average television work.
The clarity and the precise ordering of his black and white images, which do
not illustrate thoughts but are themselves thoughts, are reminiscent of late
Godard. The poverty of this film - its production took six years - is at the
same time its strength."
-- Hans C. Blumenberg, Die Zeit (2 February 1979) (Source: Video Data Bank)
As you see / Wie man sieht, 1986, 72min, 16mm, bw + colour
" My film As You See is an action-filled feature film. It reflects upon
girls in porn magazines to whom names are ascribed an about the nameless dead
in mass graves, upon machines that are so ugly that coverings have to be used
to protect the workers eyes, upon engines that are to beautiful to be hidden
under the hoods of cars, upon labor techniques that either cling to the notion
of the hand and the brain working together or want to do a way with that. My
film As You See is an essay film. The contemporary opinion industry is like
a huge mouth, or maybe a paper shredder. I compose a new text out of these scraps
and thus stage a paper-chase. My film is made up of many details and creates
a lot of image-image and word-image and word-word relationships among them.
So there's a lot to chew on. I searched for and found a form in which one can
make a little money go a long way." (source: http://www.farocki-film.de/)
The event accompanes the exhibition VacuumNoise on view in Trafo Gallery till
the 29th March.
In the frame of the project “Land of Human Rights”.
Tickets:
One film: 600 HUF
One day – two films: 1000 HUF
Two days – four films: 1800 HUF
Address: Cinema KINO, 1136 Budapest, Szent István krt.
16 http://akino.hu/
Further Information: www.trafo.hu