14:14, 13 October 2012 - Monoskop

174 Harun Farocki
This is, of course, dependent on the tangibility of the manner in which
thoughts come into being and the process by which the film itself was created.
Farocki points explicitly to the moments of rupture in the films with a disarming
openness, as in, for example, As You See (1986), which is dedicated to male
fantasies and the dispositifs of war: after an image which displays the apparatus
of a duel with pistols and a quotation from Hannah Arendt about the figure
of the unknown soldier (to the effect that ‘an act without a name does not
exist’), followed by images from porn magazines which are labelled with
women’s names. ‘Even the girls in these magazines are given names’, the film
states, and shortly afterwards: ‘I bring death and sex together as did the American
bomber pilots in the Second World War’.
If the signature of the author is made tangible at this point in the voice-over,
it is also often transmitted through gestures: Farocki’s hands organise the documents
into a montage, point out photographs, obscuring certain parts of the
image. In Images of the World, for instance, the hands of the filmmaker conduct
an examination of the French identity card of the Algerian woman: first
the face is obscured by the hands, replacing the veil, then finally the eyes become
blind in the face of the gaze directed at them by the official registrars.
This kind of manual reframing offers a visible and even pleading depiction of
the manner in which historical photographs may be read.
Although Farocki is not afraid of including his own image, he operates beyond
narcissistic self-revelation. If he reveals his own body in these non-fictional
films, then it is always in the context of the work conducted by the artisan,
who happens to be a collector and editor of images, the author making
notes or the researcher posing questions. In Between Two Wars, for instance,
the director points out the following from (what would seem to be) beyond the
frame: ‘a story cannot tell of two worlds’, while one observes the figure of the
film’s author, only vaguely visible mirrored in the shiny surface of the table on
which his notes have been spread, as he speaks those words.
Two worlds: thus we locate one pivotal source for the writer and imagemaker,
son of an Indian father and a German mother, himself an impassioned
father of twin girls, who are themselves now adults. Whenever Farocki works
in a less essayistic and more documentary fashion, he reveals his dedication to
a similarly dualist artistic personality: alongside the essay films, Farocki has
made portraits of like-minded individuals such as the author and cineaste, Peter
Weiss, or the author of German-language fiction, Georg K. Glaser, who
lived for years as an ‘artist and smithy’ in Paris and refused to the very end to
divide the work of the mind from that of the hand.
It is difficult to describe something, which I, from my Viennese perspective,
would describe as Harun Farocki’s ‘vital’ humour, ‘vital’ particularly at a time
when German artists and intellectuals tend to be emotional about the new-