14:14, 13 October 2012 - Monoskop

172 Harun Farocki
In the laboratory of society, novices have the choice of being bad actors or
viewers. In How to Live in the FRG ’real’ life in Germany is absent. It turns –
as one sees – into a chimera. This is demonstrated in a particularly remarkable
scene that shows a group of people gathered at a gigantic parking lot to practice
the proper behaviour after a car accident. The car is turned on its side; after
detailed instructions are given, two women emerge: the accident victims in
training. During these instructions one hears the ‘instructor’ off-screen explain
what one should do in case of an emergency. The camera, framing the car on its
side, does not initially reveal the interior of the car, where the bad imitations of
accident victims are giving it their all. What we see are distorted images of the
observers, who are receiving ‘instruction’ reflected in the windshield of that
car (see ill. 58).
The complex impression slowly takes shape here – as it does in the film as a
whole – through displacement: we repeatedly hear about something that is not
visible in the image but is announced off-screen (such as the imitation accident
victims), or we happen to see something ‘by chance’ that is present in the image
(such as the reflection of the participants in the windshield) but actually is
thought to be absent, since it lies ostensibly beyond the edges of the frame.
Farocki is able to demonstrate social and media rituals through the structure
of the filmic composition. In the compilation film, A Day in the Life of
the End-User, we encounter the fictionalised world of consumption in the
form of a symphony. An imaginary day-in-the-life emerges from the narrative
modules of the heterogeneous but (as one may observe) deeply conventionalised
footage from German advertising gleaned from various decades: from the
ritual of rising in the morning to various mealtimes and the semicircle formed
by the family of consumers as they watch television, finally to an evening at
the opera and the goodnight kiss. An iconography of advertising is revealed
that develops from the montage of the material guided by motifs or other
formal criteria.
Farocki demonstrates a certain faithfulness to the rules of ‘documentary’
behaviour: the quotations are only decontextualised to the point that they are
grouped differently than they would be in normal advertising segments, but
not by means of a dissociation of image and sound. This type of filmic montage
functions entirely without commentary. It is enough that a particular ad is allowed
to speak for itself in order to make the associative link between the heterogeneous
clips. (Television advertising functions, on the basis of meaning
displacement and a divergence between image and sound, which is the reason
why in A Day in the Life of the End-User humorous moments develop on
the basis of the repetition or proximate placement of similar material on either
the image or soundtrack.) The cleverness of the film lies in the logic of its composition
(see ill. 68).