14:14, 13 October 2012 - Monoskop

160 Harun Farocki
a concept could be arrived at through visual perception (viewing), and that what is
understandable could be made visible. When film was finally discovered, science
was beyond the imaginable (the presentable). He who tries to imagine the theory of
relativity suffers from misconceptions.
Harun Farocki
What seems especially regrettable about the absence of Farocki’s two 35-millimeter
films – Before Your Eyes – Vietnam (1981) and Betrayed (1985) – from
the Chicago retrospective is that, judging from the eight Farocki films I have
seen, his recent work is much more interesting and complex than his early
shorts. While the early shorts aren’t devoid of interest, they bear heavy traces
of Godard’s and Straub-Huillet’s influence and show relatively few signs of either
the intellectual density of As You See and Images of the World and the
Inscription of War (1989) or the conceptual clarity of The Taste of Life
(1979), An Image (1983), and How to Live in the Federal Republic of Germany
(1990). (Apparently his first feature, Between Two Wars – Vietnam, an
essay film completed in 1977 , escapes some of these strictures.) The Words of
the Chairman (1967), Inextinguishable Fire (1969), and The Division of
All Days (1970) are all black-and-white shorts concerned with issues of representation
in relation to political subjects. The first, only two minutes long and
narrated by fellow German independent Helke Sander, is a rather jokey reflection
on the then-current state of Maoism, made the same year as Godard’s La
Chinoise and oriented around the notion that Chairman Mao’s words may
become weapons, but they exist only on paper.
Inextinguishable Fire offers a minimalist but precise 22 minutes on the
subject of the manufacture and effects of napalm – a salutary subject at the
present moment, especially when Francis Coppola’s and Oliver Stone’s morally
anguished beads of sweat in Apocalypse Now and Platoon are deemed
to be of far greater historical importance. A chilling moment occurs near the
beginning of the film: a man is monotonically reading the testimony of a Vietnamese
victim when he suddenly extinguishes a cigarette on the back of his
hand. He then calmly explains that the temperature of napalm is seven and a
half times greater than the temperature of that lit cigarette (see ill. 1). Most of
the remainder of the film is informative but anticlimactic.
The 40-minute The Division of All Days – a dry Marxist analysis of capitalist
exploitation with occasional sarcastic asides, co-written and co-directed
by Hartmut Bitomsky – is the least interesting Farocki film I’ve seen. Unless I
missed something, I’m afraid that adjectives such as ‘dour’ and ‘pedantic’ that
have been applied unjustly to his subsequent works are more to the point here.
In striking contrast, The Taste of Life, a half-hour colour documentary made
the same year, is the most lyrical and ‘open’ of all the Farocki films I’ve seen. A