Movies: Harun Farocki

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. Th...

“Six young people move through a city in order to establish the starting point of their joint action. But they can’t agree on the topic. In the end everybody goes their own way and leaves the city.” - Hartmut Bitomsky...

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A few years ago, German artists Antje Ehmann and Harun Farocki conducted workshops on the subject of work in 15 cities around the world. The result was the creation of 400 short films depicting various faces of work in the modern world. Now Antje Ehm...

The film shows one day from waking up in the morning all the way to waking up again the next morning. The everyday situations that many commercials are made of, the little dramas that they create and solve through the product or service they sell, ar...

On Easter 1968 an assassination attempt on Rudi Dutschke was carried out. Shortly afterwards street battles resulted throughout West Germany. Farocki's short film Drei Schüsse auf Rudi is presumably lost....

How a look can be turned toward its goal by grasping and measuring its covetousness is shown in an exemplary fashion in What's Up? in a motif depicting a postcard of a painting by Titian in an eye-mark recorder....

A review of film books old and new....

A worker is sitting at a conveyor belt on which light bulbs are coming in at regular intervals. He takes the light bulbs from the conveyor belt and inserts them into a testing device. The light bulbs light up briefly and bathe the scene in glistening...

The work centers on the images of the Gulf War which caused worldwide sensation in 1991. In the shots taken from projectiles homing in on their targets, bomb and reporter were identical, according to a theory put forward by the philosopher Klaus Thew...

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Harun Farocki: Serious Games I–IV (2009–10) explores the use of virtual reality and gaming technology in U.S. military recruitment, training and after-action therapy, revealing fundamental links between technology and violence in a time of war. Young...

I was on a ship – this sounds like a novel: I had just embarked for Venezuela on June 2, 1967 as the Shah of Iran was arriving in West Berlin. There were protests, a student was shot, and a new form of opposition movement came into existence. The ide...

This Harun Farocki film shows the creation of a picture on which the artist worked for nine weeks. Sarah Schumann lives in Berlin and is a pioneer of the feminist scene. 1977 together with several other artists she organized the first large exhibitio...

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In Eye/Machine II, Farocki has brought together visual material from both military and civilian sectors, showing machines operating intelligently and what it is they see when working on the basis of image processing programs. The traditional man-mach...

This short piece for the television station Sender Freies Berlin (SFB) is highly relevant to Farocki's later work. Zwei Wege is a cheeky description of a picture; Farocki shows us an image, a religious allegory showing the 'right' and the 'wrong' pat...

Harun Farocki Interviews Andreas von Rauch, lead actor in Straub-Huillet's "The Death of Empedocles....

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 dy...