14:14, 13 October 2012 - Monoskop

Slowly Forming a Thought While Working on Images 167
are examined. On one side is the official television dispositif that does not
change substantially after the fall of the despot. On the other are the images
shot – at least initially – spontaneously and surreptitiously by amateurs, showing
people on the street, revealing the revolution beyond the television images,
which increasingly take on the conventions of television, as the event is
increasingly reported on by the official station.
In the decisive gesture in the film an amateur filmmaker’s camera records
the official live television broadcast of a public speech made by Ceauçescu
from the television set in the living room. It pans over to the window and the
turbulence outside, which cannot be precisely located on the street, ‘to see if
the incident had any consequences’, as the commentary suggests.
The archival footage from the television underscores this distinction between
the tele-visual dispositif and public space as the location for historical
events. (It has been said of this revolution that it took place on television.)
Farocki/Ujica offer a comparison between the normal cueing of official television
images and an image notable for its deviation: the red screen, used by
Romanian television as the sign of a loss of signal and the interruption of the
broadcast, is placed in opposition to the still running but shaky camera belonging
to the state television team, which finally is pointed towards the sky,
as per instructions under such circumstances.
Image Loops
When Farocki in his films examines images of heterogeneous origin, he
weaves them together into a spiral-like form, into a movement-image, in
which the meaning of the individual parts is multiplied. Such multiplication is
supported by a type of filmic linkage termed montage lateral by André Bazin, or
montage from ear to eye. 5 An example from Images of the World: the images
made by the SS of the Jewish woman at Auschwitz and the registration of the
Algerian women by the French colonial authorities are paired at one point in
the film with a kind of permutation of the motif of automation – images of robots
used in the production of automobiles. A direct link is made between the
machines of observation used by the oppressors (as a single cog in the bureaucratic-military
machinery) and the machinery of industrial production, which
is without subjectivity in that it eliminates the part played by vision within
that machinery. The point is not only made here; it is itself a variation of the notion
of the blind eye turned by the analysts of the American reconnaissance
images from 1944, who were interested in the industrial complex belonging to
I.G. Farben but not in the adjacent concentration camp, Auschwitz. Farocki