14:14, 13 October 2012 - Monoskop

Working at the Margins: Film as a Form of Intelligence 101
Before Your Eyes – Vietnam
This disavowal and temporal displacement experienced in front of images is
the starting point of Farocki’s second film, Before Your Eyes – Vietnam. Its
central scene shows the hero and the heroine, both political activists in Berlin’s
anti-Vietnam movement, in front of an exhibition of war photographs from the
conflict. They are deeply disturbed not only by what the images reveal. The
shock they experience in the face of the photographs’ immediacy and impact is
doubled – and further troubled – by the shock of a felt distance, brought on by
the sign character of the images, their legibility as a deliberate, constructed
rhetoric. Vietnam was palpably present, at the time, in Berlin, and not just
some faraway region on the other side of the globe. But the photographs were
also messages, addressed to someone, as densely coded as medieval emblems,
and as formal in their iconography as Renaissance paintings. How, then, do
these media images situate the activists looking at them?
[A] picture of us among the pictures of Vietnam... it looks obscene, because we are
unharmed. The victims in the photos are covered in blood, their assassins remain
unharmed... It’s like a war film...’
The German student movement wanted to demonstrate its involvement, its
sympathy, and solidarity with suffering and with the world’s victims of injustice.
It developed a cult of Betroffenheit (concern). But another motive was involved
as well: the students’ own sense of German responsibility for this suffering
and incredible injustice. Hence the desire to undo the isolation and selfsatisfaction
that a newly prosperous Germany had displayed during the reconstruction
period of the 1950s, which led to the next generation’s near obsession
with joining almost anything: the past with the present, the first world
with the third, student protest with direct military action. But instead of building
a united front with the ‘anti-imperialist struggle’ the students found themselves
in a maze of mirror images and echo effects. Yet because Before Your
Eyes – Vietnam is about the images of Vietnam, the books about Vietnam, the
recollections of militant demonstrations in Berlin’s streets, its activism becomes
double-edged: sincere and committed, remote and vicarious. The film
is as much a story about love and living as a couple during a time of war, as it is
about the protagonists’ struggle with ‘memory’ and ‘mourning work’. The
central emotional fact and key revolutionary discipline of their relationship
with each other, as well as with the world, are their daily acts of ‘joining’ and
‘separating’. Are they able to join disparate things through thinking, and to
keep separate what appears to be one and the same?