Harun Farocki: Don't believe the hype
Place: Toronto
The smell of Harun Farocki's Toronto hotel room is pure Hamburg train station, as clouds of aromatic second-hand smoke billow from his wife Antje's hand-rolled cigarettes (she is in the corner working on her computer). The scene has a command central feel to it, with books and papers scattered around and the bed unmade -- headquarters for a very different kind of counter-intelligence work. The German filmmaker is in town for Images Festival, where he is the featured filmmaker, and the coming days will bring a string of gallery openings, speaking engagements and screenings.
His presence in Toronto is timely. After all, Farocki has a reputation for being one of the most potent critics of the media and its coercive role in society, having the coined the phrase "the industrialization of thought" to describe our subservience to received ideas. Here in his hotel room, we have met to watch CNN together as he recovers from his day. He looks a little frayed, having spent the afternoon shunting between the Art Gallery of Ontario (where his film work I Thought I Was Seeing Convicts is set to open) and the CBC for interviews. His expression is amused and intelligent, and he wears a dark khaki T-shirt emblazoned with a red cross. The look of it reminds me of a weathered, canvas-clad army ambulance circa 1914. I have come here to watch the war through his eyes. "This is astonishing!" he says, as we witness U.S. Colonel Fred Swann describing for the camera how he dropped four 2,000-pound bombs on a Baghdad target in a bid to exterminate Saddam. From tip-off to smouldering crater: just 45 minutes. "We were told, this might be the big one," Swann recalls with nervous pride, going on to describe the mission that was now only a few hours old.
"Incredible," Farocki says. "Think how long it was before we talked to the soldiers who dropped the bombs on Hiroshima. It used to be that you wanted anonymity. There was some shame around the killing." His voice trails off as he resumes his viewing. An embedded reporter chatters away about a battle nearby. "This is very interesting," says Farocki. "They always report things that they have heard about, not things they have experienced themselves. What we are really looking at now is multiple studios all over Iraq. It's just a series of different backgrounds." Images begin to repeat themselves: the bulldozer lifting the white block of concrete from the ruins of the bomb site, Saddam (or is it?) shaking hands in the street with throngs of admirers. "The crisis is really palpable when they play the same scene over and over again," he says, seeing in the repetition a playing out of America's worst fears about this elusive, chameleon enemy. "Again and again they show us this. It's beyond intention." Those things that are beyond intention, but profoundly revealing, are Farocki's domain. He has made a career of taking the things we think we understand and making them strangely new. In I Thought I Was Seeing Convicts (his new work, being shown at the AGO as a two-panel projection), he draws a parallel between the way malls are designed to control the pace and behavior of shoppers, thus maximizing profits, and the surveillance and control of prisoners in a California penitentiary, where all the inmates' social interactions can be tracked via electronic ankle bracelets registered on a computer screen.
Sometimes, the film tells us, the prison guards observe these social patterns to place bets on the prison fights, intentionally placing known adversaries in the yard at the same time. The work culminates with found footage of a fight between inmates terminated by the warden's fatal gunshot, and the interminable nine-minute lapse before medical help arrives. For How to Live in the Federal Republic of Germany (1990), he and his crew recorded a wide range of everyday training scenarios, splicing them together into a sequence of how-to's that becomes increasingly more absurd. How to sell life insurance. How to cross the street. How to handle violent domestic disputes. Also how to cry. How to have sex. How to give birth. Nothing can be left to chance; there is a right way to do everything. Almost immediately we start to experience these encounters as something else: social interactions aimed at controlling or eliminating the messy elements of chance -- a chilling vision of social conformity.
Farocki's masterpiece, though -- Images of the World and the Inscription of War (1989) -- is the work that seems most relevant these days, dealing as it does with the phenomenon of military surveillance and the tradition of mastering the world through visual scrutiny that dates back to Durer's Instructions for Measurement. "It was so interesting, that the whole idea of smart bombs came up in the last Gulf War," he remembers today. "But the idea of putting a camera in a bomb was not new in 1991. It had been tested already in the Second World War as a way of checking up on the accuracy of the pilots. This was the first time that the camera was used to document worker efficiency. Even though the missiles in 1991 were for the most part not really self-guiding, they needed the idea of a smart bomb for propaganda purposes. Now it has shifted again, and we are calling them precision-guided weapons."
In Images of the World we see archival aerial photographs of Auschwitz in 1944, unwittingly taken by American pilots bent on documenting nearby factories. It wasn't until 1977 that two CIA men recognized the rows of barracks, the crematoria and the long lines of blurry figures in the snow for what they were. Through a simple shift in context, an image can reveal itself in a surprising, sometimes even horrific, new light. Farocki's own relationship to history is predictably complex. He was born in Germany in 1944, as the Allied bombs were falling. His father, a conservative who had been opposed to Jawaharlal Nehru's socialist independance movement, had come to Germany from India. (Unlike Nehru, he believed that Indian independence could be achieved through collaboration with Germany.) Once in Germany, he personified the immigrant attitude of deference to the West, remembers Farocki, while at the same time harbouring a deep longing for the culture he had left behind.
In 1958, Farocki happened upon a performance of Bertolt Brecht's St. Joan of the Stockyards in a Hamburg theatre. "I remember this was a very great influence on me," he remembers, "this idea in distanciation." Other influences were soon to follow: the Pop art of Andy Warhol (with its deadpan representation of consumer products and media imagery); the collages of German dadaist Kurt Schwitters ("He is playing with a certain deconstructive approach, I think. He sets up a certain sense or meaning, but then he lets it fall apart"); and, most significantly, the films of Jean-Luc Godard. "Godard seemed to prove that you could have the reflexivity of the novelist and still make films," says Farocki, who has written a book on the great French filmmaker. "Films were supposed to be entertaining, and be just about attractive people. Suddenly Godard was doing just the opposite." When a film school opened in Berlin in 1966, he jumped at the opportunity.
Since then, Farocki has crafted more than 80 films, a number of which involve recombining the raw material of contemporary media in new ways. All of his work militates against the idea of traditional narration, in which, as he says, "the world is reduced to a nutshell." His astonishing Videogram of a Revolution (1992), for example, brilliantly edits together found archival footage from the 1989 Romanian overthrow of Nicolae Ceausescu (including shots of live TV broadcasts made during the revolution). It is a vivid document of history emerging from the maelstrom of conflicting rumour, turmoil, dread and passionate high hopes. Watching it, we hold our breath and pray (even if we know the outcome), caught up in the sensation of apocalyptic uncertainty that Farocki so skillfully engineers.
Is he planning to make a film about the current crisis in Iraq? "I am very slow," he says. "Only now am I starting to understand the Gulf War." He is noticing, though, that the visual texture of war coverage has changed dramatically. First of all, the embedded cameras have made for endless eventless tracts of videotape, which serve as backdrops for teams of expert commentators in the studio back home. "It's like they borrowed the idea from the pre-game coverage of sports events," he says. During the Vietnam War, he remembers, the images were so charged, like distilled pellets of human drama. Here, by and large, we have experienced no drama, just infinite boredom and second-hand speculation.
The screen also looks different now, he says, all broken up into little zones, each one with its own imagery, plus the words scrolling across the bottom -- a concrete metaphor for our hyper-vigilant anxiety. "I suppose it has to do with the interface with the computer," he muses. "There is that desire to know. There is never enough to fill the desire, you must have four, five, six images at the same time. You must have coffee, and beer, and schnapps, and wine, all at once! You can't stop!" He pauses to consider, and then resumes with a laugh. "It's like those walls of surveillance monitors," he says. "You know, in the movies you see 40 of them all playing together at the same time and the guard is sleeping? But at least, the guard -- he is paid! We are not."
Harun Farocki's I Thought I Was Seeing Convicts is on show at the AGO. A panel discussion with Canadian artist David Rokeby, titled Parameters of the Image Between Art and Terror, will be held tomorrow at 3 p.m. at Innis Town Hall, followed at 9:15 p.m. by a screening of How to Live in the Federal Republic of Germany. On Monday, Farocki will speak at 2 p.m. on the topic of Bombs That Take Pictures, at The Goethe Institut Inter Nationes (free lecture). On Thursday, Images of the World and the Inscription of War will be shown at 7:30 p.m., also at The Goethe Institut (tickets: 416-593-5257).
The smell of Harun Farocki's Toronto hotel room is pure Hamburg train station, as clouds of aromatic second-hand smoke billow from his wife Antje's hand-rolled cigarettes (she is in the corner working on her computer). The scene has a command central feel to it, with books and papers scattered around and the bed unmade -- headquarters for a very different kind of counter-intelligence work. The German filmmaker is in town for Images Festival, where he is the featured filmmaker, and the coming days will bring a string of gallery openings, speaking engagements and screenings.
His presence in Toronto is timely. After all, Farocki has a reputation for being one of the most potent critics of the media and its coercive role in society, having the coined the phrase "the industrialization of thought" to describe our subservience to received ideas. Here in his hotel room, we have met to watch CNN together as he recovers from his day. He looks a little frayed, having spent the afternoon shunting between the Art Gallery of Ontario (where his film work I Thought I Was Seeing Convicts is set to open) and the CBC for interviews. His expression is amused and intelligent, and he wears a dark khaki T-shirt emblazoned with a red cross. The look of it reminds me of a weathered, canvas-clad army ambulance circa 1914. I have come here to watch the war through his eyes. "This is astonishing!" he says, as we witness U.S. Colonel Fred Swann describing for the camera how he dropped four 2,000-pound bombs on a Baghdad target in a bid to exterminate Saddam. From tip-off to smouldering crater: just 45 minutes. "We were told, this might be the big one," Swann recalls with nervous pride, going on to describe the mission that was now only a few hours old.
"Incredible," Farocki says. "Think how long it was before we talked to the soldiers who dropped the bombs on Hiroshima. It used to be that you wanted anonymity. There was some shame around the killing." His voice trails off as he resumes his viewing. An embedded reporter chatters away about a battle nearby. "This is very interesting," says Farocki. "They always report things that they have heard about, not things they have experienced themselves. What we are really looking at now is multiple studios all over Iraq. It's just a series of different backgrounds." Images begin to repeat themselves: the bulldozer lifting the white block of concrete from the ruins of the bomb site, Saddam (or is it?) shaking hands in the street with throngs of admirers. "The crisis is really palpable when they play the same scene over and over again," he says, seeing in the repetition a playing out of America's worst fears about this elusive, chameleon enemy. "Again and again they show us this. It's beyond intention." Those things that are beyond intention, but profoundly revealing, are Farocki's domain. He has made a career of taking the things we think we understand and making them strangely new. In I Thought I Was Seeing Convicts (his new work, being shown at the AGO as a two-panel projection), he draws a parallel between the way malls are designed to control the pace and behavior of shoppers, thus maximizing profits, and the surveillance and control of prisoners in a California penitentiary, where all the inmates' social interactions can be tracked via electronic ankle bracelets registered on a computer screen.
Sometimes, the film tells us, the prison guards observe these social patterns to place bets on the prison fights, intentionally placing known adversaries in the yard at the same time. The work culminates with found footage of a fight between inmates terminated by the warden's fatal gunshot, and the interminable nine-minute lapse before medical help arrives. For How to Live in the Federal Republic of Germany (1990), he and his crew recorded a wide range of everyday training scenarios, splicing them together into a sequence of how-to's that becomes increasingly more absurd. How to sell life insurance. How to cross the street. How to handle violent domestic disputes. Also how to cry. How to have sex. How to give birth. Nothing can be left to chance; there is a right way to do everything. Almost immediately we start to experience these encounters as something else: social interactions aimed at controlling or eliminating the messy elements of chance -- a chilling vision of social conformity.
Farocki's masterpiece, though -- Images of the World and the Inscription of War (1989) -- is the work that seems most relevant these days, dealing as it does with the phenomenon of military surveillance and the tradition of mastering the world through visual scrutiny that dates back to Durer's Instructions for Measurement. "It was so interesting, that the whole idea of smart bombs came up in the last Gulf War," he remembers today. "But the idea of putting a camera in a bomb was not new in 1991. It had been tested already in the Second World War as a way of checking up on the accuracy of the pilots. This was the first time that the camera was used to document worker efficiency. Even though the missiles in 1991 were for the most part not really self-guiding, they needed the idea of a smart bomb for propaganda purposes. Now it has shifted again, and we are calling them precision-guided weapons."
In Images of the World we see archival aerial photographs of Auschwitz in 1944, unwittingly taken by American pilots bent on documenting nearby factories. It wasn't until 1977 that two CIA men recognized the rows of barracks, the crematoria and the long lines of blurry figures in the snow for what they were. Through a simple shift in context, an image can reveal itself in a surprising, sometimes even horrific, new light. Farocki's own relationship to history is predictably complex. He was born in Germany in 1944, as the Allied bombs were falling. His father, a conservative who had been opposed to Jawaharlal Nehru's socialist independance movement, had come to Germany from India. (Unlike Nehru, he believed that Indian independence could be achieved through collaboration with Germany.) Once in Germany, he personified the immigrant attitude of deference to the West, remembers Farocki, while at the same time harbouring a deep longing for the culture he had left behind.
In 1958, Farocki happened upon a performance of Bertolt Brecht's St. Joan of the Stockyards in a Hamburg theatre. "I remember this was a very great influence on me," he remembers, "this idea in distanciation." Other influences were soon to follow: the Pop art of Andy Warhol (with its deadpan representation of consumer products and media imagery); the collages of German dadaist Kurt Schwitters ("He is playing with a certain deconstructive approach, I think. He sets up a certain sense or meaning, but then he lets it fall apart"); and, most significantly, the films of Jean-Luc Godard. "Godard seemed to prove that you could have the reflexivity of the novelist and still make films," says Farocki, who has written a book on the great French filmmaker. "Films were supposed to be entertaining, and be just about attractive people. Suddenly Godard was doing just the opposite." When a film school opened in Berlin in 1966, he jumped at the opportunity.
Since then, Farocki has crafted more than 80 films, a number of which involve recombining the raw material of contemporary media in new ways. All of his work militates against the idea of traditional narration, in which, as he says, "the world is reduced to a nutshell." His astonishing Videogram of a Revolution (1992), for example, brilliantly edits together found archival footage from the 1989 Romanian overthrow of Nicolae Ceausescu (including shots of live TV broadcasts made during the revolution). It is a vivid document of history emerging from the maelstrom of conflicting rumour, turmoil, dread and passionate high hopes. Watching it, we hold our breath and pray (even if we know the outcome), caught up in the sensation of apocalyptic uncertainty that Farocki so skillfully engineers.
Is he planning to make a film about the current crisis in Iraq? "I am very slow," he says. "Only now am I starting to understand the Gulf War." He is noticing, though, that the visual texture of war coverage has changed dramatically. First of all, the embedded cameras have made for endless eventless tracts of videotape, which serve as backdrops for teams of expert commentators in the studio back home. "It's like they borrowed the idea from the pre-game coverage of sports events," he says. During the Vietnam War, he remembers, the images were so charged, like distilled pellets of human drama. Here, by and large, we have experienced no drama, just infinite boredom and second-hand speculation.
The screen also looks different now, he says, all broken up into little zones, each one with its own imagery, plus the words scrolling across the bottom -- a concrete metaphor for our hyper-vigilant anxiety. "I suppose it has to do with the interface with the computer," he muses. "There is that desire to know. There is never enough to fill the desire, you must have four, five, six images at the same time. You must have coffee, and beer, and schnapps, and wine, all at once! You can't stop!" He pauses to consider, and then resumes with a laugh. "It's like those walls of surveillance monitors," he says. "You know, in the movies you see 40 of them all playing together at the same time and the guard is sleeping? But at least, the guard -- he is paid! We are not."
Harun Farocki's I Thought I Was Seeing Convicts is on show at the AGO. A panel discussion with Canadian artist David Rokeby, titled Parameters of the Image Between Art and Terror, will be held tomorrow at 3 p.m. at Innis Town Hall, followed at 9:15 p.m. by a screening of How to Live in the Federal Republic of Germany. On Monday, Farocki will speak at 2 p.m. on the topic of Bombs That Take Pictures, at The Goethe Institut Inter Nationes (free lecture). On Thursday, Images of the World and the Inscription of War will be shown at 7:30 p.m., also at The Goethe Institut (tickets: 416-593-5257).
by Sarah Milroy
April 12, 2003
April 12, 2003
info@toronto.goethe.org
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