How to Live in the FRG (Documentary by Harun Farocki)

Director: Harun Farocki
West Germany / 1990 / Colour / 83 mins In German with English subtitles

A police officer barges into a flat to subdue a drunken boor. An insurance salesman lures a customer by telling him how easy he could just drop dead. A woman strips and seduces a man. Anorexics attend a dinner party. It’s all real, yet not yet completely so – these are just snapshots of “training sessions” for people to cope with situations at work and at home. Filmed in 46 different locations, German documentarian Harun Farocki reveals the rules dictating everyday life and also the documentary as a genre, a pioneering work charting modern human experience as performance.

Talk:
In a career spanning six decades, Harun Farocki (1944-2014) questioned relentlessly the state of the world and the way it was represented in film. The screening of How To Live in the FRG will be followed by a talk via Skype by Doreen Mende, co-founder of the Harun Farocki Institut, about the late director’s approach towards filmmaking.

Online Registration