14:14, 13 October 2012 - Monoskop

Slowly Forming a Thought While Working on Images 169
soundtrack are dance-like: there is no linear progression within the film but
rather a rhythmic ‘two steps forward, one step back’.
From Text to Film
Farocki often chooses to work, on a visual level, with found footage, in order to
read those images anew; similarly, he often chooses to make use of texts by
other authors, quoting these (in a fashion similar to Godard), or – in earlier
films – (similar to Straub, in a Brechtian manner) reciting them: Hannah
Arendt, Alfred Sohn-Rethel, Heiner Müller, Günther Anders or Carl Schmitt
have provided Farocki with material and starting points for reflection.
Farocki’s films are allegorical in that they incorporate fragments and remains.
They double or re-read such texts, also making use of second-hand material
on the soundtrack, they shoot new images and combine all of these elements
afresh, in order to create a ‘new analytical capacity of the image’ in the
sense intended by Deleuze.
The beginning of Images of the World speaks of the sea, free thinking,
and a gaze liberated from all bounds, while a scientific station researches water
quality, followed by images of the simulation of a ship’s passage through a
canal in which the effect of waves are measured: visual counterpoints to unfettered
thought. Near the end of the film the image of the wave-canal reappears
in the midst of a sequence in which Farocki examines American reconnaissance
photography from the Second World War. The spoken commentary
points out particular features of those images, as do visual markers, stating
that the CIA years later discovered details the Allies did not want to see in
1944: that the concentration camp, Auschwitz, was visible right next to the industrial
target, the I.G. Farben plant. The image of the wave-canal is suddenly
and momentarily re-introduced, at this point in the middle of this investigation,
suggesting quite clearly the manner in which the gaze is trained. For neither
the gaze nor thought is unfettered when machines in conjunction with science
and the military determine what is worth investigating. The texture of the
film does not only offer the linkage of images but rather selects corresponding
sets of images, in order to create a space between those images, transporting
thought itself to the interior of the image.
The fact that both found footage and found texts make up the basis of
Farocki’s films is already anticipated in his writings for Filmkritik that accompanied
his work in film. On Between Two Wars (1978) he wrote: ‘Eight years
ago I read an analytical piece in the journal Kursbuch Nr. 21. It was one and a
half pages long and I nearly had a stroke. It was as if I had found the missing