Videograms of a Revolution is a 1992 documentary film compiled by Harun Farocki and Andrei Ujică from over 125 hours of amateur footage, news footage, and excerpts from the Bucharest TV studio overtaken by demonstrators as part of the December 1989 Romanian counter-revolution.
Harun Farocki was commissioned by the Lille Museum of Modern Art to produce a video 'about his work'. His creation was an installation for two screens that was presented within the scope for the 1995 exhibition The World of Photography. The work Schnittstelle developed out of that installation. Reflecting on Farocki's own documentary work, it examines the question of what it means to work with existing images rather than producing one's own, new images. The title plays on the double meaning of 'Schnitt', referring both to Farocki's workplace, the editing table, as well as the 'human-machine interface', where a person operates a computer using a keyboard and a mouse.
Farocki’s intriguing and troubling film explores the processes of visual perception and how they affect our understanding of history and society. In a work reminiscent of the writings of Paul Virilio and Michel Foucault, Farocki examines a range of phenomena including aerial reconnaissance photos of the Auschwitz concentration camp.
This film is at once a self-portrait and an homage to Jean-Marie Straub, Farocki's role model and former teacher at the Film Academy.
A film about the time of the blast furnaces – 1917–1933 – about the development of an industry, about perfect machinery which had to run itself to the point of its own destruction.
In Comparison revisits issues explored in the director's 2007 two channel installation Comparison Via a Third. Spanning continents and cultures, the film focuses on the brick in its many contexts, from the collective efforts of a community building a clinic in Burkina Faso, through semi industrialized moldings in India, to industrial production lines in Germany, France, Austria and Switzerland. Through its notable structure and its captivating rhythms, In Comparison presents various methods of labor production, allowing for an assessment that changes with every layer and goes well beyond a simple binary divide.
Using one of the Lumière Brothers' first films of workers leaving the Factory as his starting point, Farocki provides an insight to changes in industrial production, workers' strikes and motion pictures-- via images of workers leaving factories throughout the years.
An exploration of how the U.S. military employs video game technology to train troops for war. Filmed at the United States Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center, Watson is Down pairs footage of soldiers at computers engaging in combat-simulation training with scenes from the video games.
An ad agency creates a new campaign for a shoe company.
Historically, the cinema close-up was initially employed to convey emotions through facial expressions. But soon filmmakers also began focusing their attention on hands. Using film extracts, Farocki explores this visual language, its symbolism, Freudian slips, automatisms and its music. Often, hands betray an emotion which the face tries to dissimulate. They can also function as a conduit (exchanging money) or witness to a form of competence (work).
In 1991, when images of the Gulf War flooded the international media, it was virtually impossible to distinguish between real pictures and those generated on computer. This loss of bearings was to change forever our way of deciphering what we see. The image is no longer used only as testimony, but also as an indispensable link in a process of production and destruction. This is the central premise of "War at a Distance", which continues the deconstruction of claims to visual objectivity Harun Farocki developed in his earlier work. With the help of archival and original material, Farocki sets out in effect to define the relationship between military strategy and industrial production and sheds light on how the technology of war finds applications in everyday life.
Peter Lorre achieved international fame for his performance in the myth-making role in M. This character has held a peculiar fascination for generations of cinephiles. However, at the time, whilst such success meant recognition, it also weighed on the Hungarian actor as a constrictive burden. Using photographs and film extracts, Das doppelte Gesicht reconstructs the ups and downs of Lorre's career, taking into consideration the economic imperatives and workings of the film industry at the time. (Arnold Hohmann, 1984)
An exploration of how the U.S. military employs video game technology to train troops for war. In A Sun With No Shadow, Farocki calls attention to the subtle differences between the simulations for combat training and PTSD. With the former, the sun can be programmed to cast shadows in the virtual combat zones, while the latter, less expensive technology does not offer this feature.
Respite consists of silent black-and-white film shot at Westerbork, a Dutch refugee camp established in 1939 for Jews fleeing Germany. In 1942, after the occupation of Holland, its function was reversed by the Nazis and it became a 'transit camp.' In 1944, the camp commander commissioned a film, shot by a photographer, Rudolph Breslauer. “By exhuming the scattered fragments and traces of the phantom film (intertitle cards, ideas for the scenario, graphic elements), Harun Farocki inscribes the Dutch footage within the genre of the corporate film.
What venture capital or VC for short actually means is explained in the film itself. Banks only lend money against collateral. Those who have none have to turn to VC companies and pay interest of 40%.
"If there is a relationship between production and destruction, between the development of productive and destructive forces, then the atom bomb is the ultimate weapon of the post-industrial age. Greatest tonnage, highest mortality, maximum devastation. But what comes next, what are the weapons of the post-industrial age?" - Harun Farocki
An exploration of how the U.S. military employs video game technology to train troops for war. Three Dead depicts a military exercise within a mock Iraqi town built on the outskirts of Twentynine Palms, California, blurring the line between computer simulation and reality.
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.
"Four days spent in a studio working on a centerfold photo for Playboy magazine provided the subject matter for my film. The magazine itself deals with culture, cars, a certain lifestyle. Maybe all those trappings are only there to cover up the naked woman. Maybe it’s like with a paper-doll. The naked woman in the middle is a sun around which a system revolves: of culture, of business, of living!" (Harun Farocki, Zelluloid, no. 27, Fall 1988)
An advertising agency has to pitch a marketing concept to an optician's consortium, represented by the manager who is the first to see the campaign. The logo submitted is examined from every angle: it must simultaneously express both the company's dynamism and its reliability. A fascinating, dispassionate glimpse behind closed doors, where every detail is dramatized to win that lucrative contract.
