14:14, 13 October 2012 - Monoskop

166 Harun Farocki
why were there so many images of this war? One possible answer is that, ‘in
Vietnam the American soldier is in such close proximity to the Vietnamese
partisan that both fit into a single image’.
The question ‘What is an Image?’ is posed in Before Your Eyes – Vietnam
by an American soldier, who explains what the military reads into photos that
are gathered by reconnaissance planes: the material condition of the enemy’s
weaponry, for example. One examines the images – in a continuation of this
train of thought – to gather information, which can be expressed in words or
numbers.
The series of images that went around the world, of the South Vietnamese
chief of police holding a pistol to the head of a Vietnamese fighter, do not need
to be shown again by Farocki for us to grasp their essence. Instead, the dispositif
generating such images is set out, re-staged, in order to integrate that which
lies beyond the frame in the photograph. For instance, the one of two children
playing dead in Vietnam; a third looks on and presses the button of the camera,
taking the photograph (see ill. 27).
Similarly, the dispositifs of measurement and photography are central to
Farocki in Images of the World and the Inscription of War (1988), in order
to reveal the disjunction between the camera and the eye, 3 between the subject
and the apparatus. This analysis focuses primarily on stills, historical (surveillance)
images, insisting on their double temporal codification: they recall, indeed
they state, as Barthes has suggested, ‘Cela a été (this has been)’, but they
also suggest a death that is yet to come.
In Images of the World images of military, industrial and scientific apparatuses
of calibration are combined with photographs that were created by
those means: identity papers belonging to Algerian women, who were registered
and photographed for the first time by French officials without their
veils; the image of a Jewish woman on the loading ramp in Auschwitz, taken
by an SS photographer. This image appears repeatedly and finally is examined
more closely at one point in the film, as a representation of the interplay between
preservation and destruction. 4 Farocki’s voice-over adds something to
that image of the woman, in that he considers her gaze directed past the camera.
The dispositif defined by sexual difference (a man gazes at a woman) is also
at play here, a fact that is employed to evoke the significance of everyday life
beyond the borders of Auschwitz, pointing out the distinction between here
and elsewhere, between seeing and being seen, the life that unfolded prior to
the moment that this photograph was taken and the fatal regulations, which
led to the Nazi’s and thus also the photographer’s subjugation of this woman.
In Videograms of a Revolution (1992), a film that Farocki, together with
Andrei Ujica, compiled completely from found footage, it is television and amateur
documentation of the mass protests leading to the fall of Ceauçescu that