Images of the World and the Inscription of War (Bilder der Welt und Inschrift des Krieges)

80 years have passed since World War II ended with the total and unconditional surrender of Nazi Germany in Europe on 8 May 1945, and worldwide on 2 September 1945. This time span of 80 years also marks the period of a shift in our collective memory; putting us on the brink of the moment where the communicative memory, kept alive through the narratives of contemporary witnesses, gives way to the cultural memory, according to German cultural theorists Jan und Aleida Assmann. 
At this pivotal moment in time, we are inviting audiences to revisit history and reflect how memory is being shaped and reshaped through imagery and narratives; how the recent past is impacting our future, and how memory culture is instrumentalised by populist movements even today.

We are starting this exploration with the screening of Harun Farocki's Documentary "Bilder der Welt und Inschrift des Krieges" (1988). In this film essay, Farocki concentrates on photography and the use of pictures as well as the question of how the impact of war appears in reality. In April 1944 American pilots had made aerial photographs of the Buna works, without even suspecting that in doing so they had also photographed the concentration camp Auschwitz. It was not before 1977 that the photographs were properly evaluated.

Farocki uses this material to challenge our perceptions on how we see what we see: 
“ 'Aufklärung', meaning 'Enlightenment' -  that's a word in the history of ideas,” says Farocki. He reports on the development of the measuring image process in 1858: a method of determining the dimensions of buildings using photographs. The Prussian Ministry of War was interested - the new technology soon became established. “Seeing better”, it is said, “is the opposite of mortal danger”. We see pictures from a photo book from 1960, portraits of Algerian women who were photographed for the first time in their lives to produce identity cards - without veils.

“'Aufklärung', meaning 'Reconnaissance', that's a word in military language,” it continues. In April 1944, US pilots had taken aerial photographs of the Buna works without realizing that they had also taken photographs of the Auschwitz concentration camp. The pictures were not analyzed again until 1977. During the Second World War, cameras began to be installed in bombers to monitor the effectiveness of attacks. But they first had to learn to “read” the images from a bird's eye view and develop techniques for automatic evaluation. Because, according to Farocki, “more images of the world were created than the eyes of the soldiers could evaluate.”

“'Aufklärung', meaning 'Reconnaissance', that's [also] a word from the police language.” Stored images are recorded as data. Farocki refers to attempts during the two world wars to deceive the enemy's reconnaissance. He tells of two prisoners who managed to escape from Auschwitz; they tried in vain to make the truth about the concentration camp public.

At the center of this cinematic essay is a single photograph. "A woman has arrived in Auschwitz; the camera captures her in motion. The woman knows how to catch this photographic gaze with the position of her face and to look past the camera with her eyes. On a boulevard, she looks past a gentleman who gives her a glance, just past a shop window. By looking past, she tries to transport herself into a world of boulevards, gentlemen and shop windows, away from here. The camp, run by the SS, is supposed to destroy her, and the photographer who captures her beauty is from the same SS. How this interacts, preserving and destroying. The Nazis actually took photographs in Auschwitz. Two SS men had the task of documenting the camp. They captured the moment when this woman was brought into the camp. How to deal with such pictures? The SS took this picture, the camera was part of the camp equipment. How to show this picture and put it in quotation marks?" (Harun Farocki)
 
The director traces the connections between civilian inventions and their military use: the measuring image process, or the method of “metal spinning”, with which vases and searchlights could be reproduced, or the “thermal images” of the infrared camera. The examples confirm Farocki's thesis of the connections between technology, industry and armaments. A connection that, according to the filmmaker, also has significant cultural consequences: War production, he says, is mass production and therefore means the death of small craft businesses.

In a time where the concept of truth is being questioned around tahe world and images are both more powerful and more untrustworthy than ever before due to Social Media and the rise of AI, this calm, in-depth reflection  is as relevant as ever. 

Germany 1988 | Director: Harun Farocki | 75 mins | Documentary | German with English subtitles.

Reprinted with kind permission of: Filmportal.de / Deutsches Filminstitut.