14:14, 13 October 2012 - Monoskop

178 Harun Farocki
regional funding authority. Considering the way your projects are set up, it
could not have been easy to submit scripts or otherwise comply with the regulations,
which were required by this public machinery surrounding the subsidy
system? Or maybe it was a political decision to not even try?
HF: No policy decision on my part. Simply, in the case of Between Two Wars,
I tried twenty-five times or so to get the finances together, but in the end, I had
to produce it without public money, and instead used some 30,000 German
Marks that I had earned with other film work.
TE: I gather that Between Two Wars, when it was submitted for a Prädikat,
that is, when it was submitted for evaluation to the Ratings Board was actually
refused a certificate on the grounds that it was biased, unimaginative, a filmed
lecture. Does this sort of discriminatory judgement hurt you when you hear
someone referring to your films as didactic?
HF: Yes, unfortunately, yes. If you look at the film that Henri-Georges Clouzot
made about Picasso [The Mystery of Picasso, 1956] you can see that Picasso
wanted to prove something, namely what a virtuoso painter he was. Apparently
all that talk about his work being something ‘a five-year old boy could
do’ got to him. So it may be true that I, too, am trying to prove that my films are
not unfilmic or uncinematic, that with my framing and editing I want to prove
them wrong. There is already a burden of proof in Between Two Wars.
TE: You have actually made feature films, fiction films, but I think on average
you prefer either to make fictional documentaries or to document fictions.
With your films, which sometimes go by the name of ‘essay films’, you have
actually contributed to film history a sort of genre, or at least you gave the idea
some currency in Germany. One tends to think of Jean Luc Godard in this context,
but your films do not strike me as Godardian, to use a term that has gone a
little out of fashion. But I know that you have worked with Jean-Marie Straub
and Danièle Huillet, for instance. Do you see yourself as a filmmaker belonging
to the European cinema in either of these senses?
HF: For me, Godard has been way out in front for the past thirty years, he always
encouraged me to do things, and I always found out that I do what he
did fifteen years earlier. Luckily for me, not quite in the same way. At the moment
I am working with video, sometimes I think I see myself remaking
Numéro Deux, the same staging in my apartment, but there are also major differences.
So many ideas are hidden in his work that although you are a different
director, you can nonetheless always refer back to him.