14:14, 13 October 2012 - Monoskop

Making the World Superfluous: An Interview with Harun Farocki 185
ity? In some sense, for both, the human interface has dropped out of the
equation as a cumbersome and costly irrelevance?
HF: Yes, that’s correct. A process of human self-abolition is underway. The extermination
camps were directed against ‘the Jews’ – I put it in scare quotes,
because so many of the victims were not even aware that this was their identity,
being a ‘Jew’. Already in this case, the identity and image of the other was
not clearly drawn. With euthanasia and eugenics the border is even less clear
because every family can have a handicapped or terminally ill family member.
In his table talk, Hitler was thinking out loud about the possibility of exterminating
all those with hereditary lung or heart disease. Meanwhile, nuclear
weapons are even more indiscriminate: they’re directed against everyone. The
German philosopher Ernst Tugendhat once wrote that if there was ever a nuclear
war, the survivors of the first wave would most likely queue up outside
the gas chambers, if they existed. It is a terrible thought. I had it in the script,
but maybe I did not dare keep it in.
When in 1989, the regimes in Eastern Europe began to collapse into nothingness,
it would have been a good opportunity to also address the question of
the threat of nuclear weapons. The existence of nuclear installations is to my
mind no less a scandal than political dictatorship or the five-year plan. Incidentally,
this aspect of my film has largely passed unnoticed. It’s a little like the
story with the title; to me, the film has come back from its journey with another
name and a somewhat different identity. Of course, one has to be careful if one
establishes relations between Auschwitz and other events, it can easily lead to
purely dramatic or rhetorical effects. I hope my filmic method allows for certain
reflections to enter into relations with each other, without suggesting
equivalence.
Audience member: I found your film very graphic and I would like to know
about your use of still photographs.
HF: I saw a film recently, where Robert Frank was asked what the difference
was between still photography and the moving image. And he said something
like, ‘in a photograph you see a man standing somewhere, and in a film, he
stands there for only a moment and then he walks out of the frame’. Then he
walked out of the frame, but unfortunately, the camera panned after him.
There is just too much movement in the world. When I make a film, I have to
compete with all this movement. So, I try to reduce the level of expectation a
little, slow things down a bit. I use still images, in the hope that afterwards, the
moving image will acquire a different value. When I show sequences where