Event series
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Revisiting Harun Farocki: Images & War, Acting & Indoctrination
Film Series | A Three-Part Film Programme Marking the 10th Anniversary of the Death of Harun Farocki
In the middle of this year’s summer, on 30th July to be exact, it was 10 years since Harun Farocki (1944–2014) had unexpectedly died near Berlin, where he had lived since 1962. This is a programme to remember the influential filmmaker, media and cultural critic, lecturer, and curator through revisiting one of his most important works, Images of the World and the Inscription of War as well as several lesser-known films brought together under the title Acting & Indoctrination by filmmaker Cathy Lee Crane, one of Harun Farocki's many collaborators.
The programmes will be accompanied by introductions and discussions for which we will be joined at the Goethe-Institut by Edward George, Phoebe von Held, and Beny Wagner.
Organised by the Birkbeck Institute of Moving Images and the Goethe-Institut London.
Please see the programme schedule below.
About Harun Farocki
Harun Farocki was 70 years old, when he died, and he left a large oeuvre of more than 100 films and video works as well as numerous texts about film, media, and culture. Since shooting his first agit-prop films as radical film student expelled from the German Television and Film Academy in Berlin (dffb) in the mid-1960s, Farocki produced a steady output of films for cinema and TV, moving between the essayistic, educational, observational and, at times, narrative. From the mid-1990s onwards, he also created single and multi-channel installations for the gallery space.
Throughout his varied output he pursued a number of key interests, an overarching one being his investigation into the production and perception of technological (moving) images. A tireless finder and masterful compiler of images, he critically examined their generation, function, re-purposing, and (mis-) readings in contexts as diverse as the military, advertising, sport, or cinema. Another of Farocki’s key concerns was the social conditioning of people through training and the rehearsal of behaviours often with the use of image technologies. Farocki also repeatedly returned to the subject of labour, filming people at work as well as analysing its representation in the history of cinema and its change under capitalism, the working of which he aimed to uncover throughout his work. This included its complicity with National Socialism, a subject Farocki also repeatedly returned to using close readings of historical images to reveal the previously unnoticed.
Farocki’s work has continued to be shown widely, and in Berlin, the Harun Farocki Institute was founded in 2015 to enable both research into Farocki’s oeuvre and new projects engaging in image cultures. A comprehensive exhibition Against What? Against Whom? at Raven Row (19 November to 7 February 2010) and a coinciding retrospective of his filmic work at Tate Modern made Farocki’s work more widely known to UK audiences. In a society obsessed with and divided over images, his clear-eyed works are more important than ever.
The programmes will be accompanied by introductions and discussions for which we will be joined at the Goethe-Institut by Edward George, Phoebe von Held, and Beny Wagner.
Organised by the Birkbeck Institute of Moving Images and the Goethe-Institut London.
Please see the programme schedule below.
About Harun Farocki
Harun Farocki was 70 years old, when he died, and he left a large oeuvre of more than 100 films and video works as well as numerous texts about film, media, and culture. Since shooting his first agit-prop films as radical film student expelled from the German Television and Film Academy in Berlin (dffb) in the mid-1960s, Farocki produced a steady output of films for cinema and TV, moving between the essayistic, educational, observational and, at times, narrative. From the mid-1990s onwards, he also created single and multi-channel installations for the gallery space.
Throughout his varied output he pursued a number of key interests, an overarching one being his investigation into the production and perception of technological (moving) images. A tireless finder and masterful compiler of images, he critically examined their generation, function, re-purposing, and (mis-) readings in contexts as diverse as the military, advertising, sport, or cinema. Another of Farocki’s key concerns was the social conditioning of people through training and the rehearsal of behaviours often with the use of image technologies. Farocki also repeatedly returned to the subject of labour, filming people at work as well as analysing its representation in the history of cinema and its change under capitalism, the working of which he aimed to uncover throughout his work. This included its complicity with National Socialism, a subject Farocki also repeatedly returned to using close readings of historical images to reveal the previously unnoticed.
Farocki’s work has continued to be shown widely, and in Berlin, the Harun Farocki Institute was founded in 2015 to enable both research into Farocki’s oeuvre and new projects engaging in image cultures. A comprehensive exhibition Against What? Against Whom? at Raven Row (19 November to 7 February 2010) and a coinciding retrospective of his filmic work at Tate Modern made Farocki’s work more widely known to UK audiences. In a society obsessed with and divided over images, his clear-eyed works are more important than ever.