14:14, 13 October 2012 - Monoskop

Making the World Superfluous: An Interview with Harun Farocki 179
TE: You have written on Robert Bresson. How does this come together? A filmmaker
like Bresson on the one hand, Godard on the other. Are these compatible
ways of thinking about the cinema, and if so, what idea of cinema do you
see them pursuing?
HF: But Bert Brecht and Thomas Mann were also antagonists, and nonetheless
one can be an admirer of both, as happens to be the case with me. Bresson, to
put it briefly, makes his images rhyme, of which I’m a great admirer, even
though this is not at all my own project. Whether it is Bresson, Godard or the
Straubs, watching their films or writing about them is like learning to read. In
order to read a philosophical text, you have to have a certain amount of training;
the text requires a different mode of reading than a newspaper or a novel.
The same goes for these films. I study them in order to attune myself to their
way of thinking and production.
TE: One thinks of the kind of spare clarity that the mise-en-scène has in Bresson,
the tremendous effort to keep a certain distance. With Godard, one rather gets
the sense that he always comes in with his own voice or pencil or paintbrush,
and that, graffiti-like, he crowds the frame with all kinds of – admittedly far
from irrelevant – interferences and interjections. But I also remember something
you said when we met nearly twenty years ago, and we got to talking
about Filmkritik, the Munich-based film journal, of which you were at the time
a contributor, and you said, jokingly: ‘Terrible magazine if you want to know
what movies to see, but the best literary magazine in Germany.’ As a long-time
subscriber to Filmkritik, I found this an illuminating comment, also about your
own work. Not only because writing for you is obviously very important. Indeed,
some of your films exist as a written text and as a film, without the one
cancelling out the other, but also because it seems to me that your writing is already
a form of filming, of spacing, editing, of transposing ideas into images
and actions. On the other hand, there is also a sense in which for you the cinema
is not a substitute for writing. On the contrary, writing has, since the advent
of cinema, achieved a new definition, a new purity and outline that is paradoxically
due to the existence of cinema. Where does this stance of cinema as
writing come from – for it seems different from the French caméra stylo idea of
Astruc. Or is it quite simply an economic relation: you have to make some of
your money with journalism, getting your work published, in order to keep
circulating as an author, for only as an author can you continue making films.
HF: Yes, of course, by writing one produces oneself as author. In the mid-1970s
I stopped working for radio, because those texts took too much time compared
to what they paid. Since then I only write when I feel like I have something to