14:14, 13 October 2012 - Monoskop

Making the World Superfluous: An
Interview with Harun Farocki
Thomas Elsaesser
This interview was conducted after a screening of Images of the World and
the Inscription of War at the National Film Theatre-MOMI London, 6 February
1993.
TE: You have been making films since 1966. I think your filmography numbers
some fifty titles. Where have you been all these years? The New German Cinema
has come and gone, Fassbinder, Wenders, Herzog – been and gone. How
did you manage to survive? How have you been able to create such a body of
work, unnoticed by the world?
HF: Not entirely unnoticed. I’m probably the best known unknown filmmaker
in Germany. Hartmut Bitomsky is another filmmaker in the same position, a
well-known, unknown filmmaker in Germany. He and I started making films
together, after leaving the Berlin Film Academy in 1969. During those years a
lot of things were possible, or so it seemed to us. Kluge was successful in the
cinema, and Hellmuth Costard’s work was shown on prime-time television.
There was a short boom for political films in West Germany, and for a brief
summer we had the possibility of producing this kind of films, and before we
knew it the fashion was over. I think we didn’t take advantage of our opportunity
all that wisely, and with the start of the 1970s, it was all over. Take Wim
Wenders, he gave up his long takes, began to work with shot-countershots and
made himself socially acceptable. But we didn’t manage the crossover, and it
seems that anyone who failed to adapt at that point, stayed out in the cold for a
long time. I tried to get by, by getting my work into arts programmes or on children’s
television, but it was by no means always a done deal. And in any case,
there is not much public attention to be gained from those kinds of assignments.
Working for television, a documentarist like Peter Nestler attracted
precious little attention, and today, not even the Straubs can provoke a
reaction, always assuming that their films are being shown at all.
TE: Was it a deliberate move on your part to more or less bypass the subsidy
system as it existed in Germany during the 1970s? I noticed that Images of the
World did actually get subsidised by the Land of North Rhine-Westphalia, a