14:14, 13 October 2012 - Monoskop

Making the World Superfluous: An Interview with Harun Farocki 187
Audience member: My question relates to the previous question. You use images
that speak very eloquently, but you give them a very insistent commentary,
too. Unless I’m wrong, the commentary tended to overlap and double the
images, sometimes to undermine them. At times this made me angry, it
seemed quite didactic. I wonder whether it was meant to make me angry.
Could you imagine making a film, perhaps even this film with these images
but without the commentary, imagine that the images are on their own,
without the insistent commentary?
HF: Yes, you’re right, in principle, I could. I think if I was really using up the
images with my commentary, then I would have to agree with what you say.
But I think that often I make such playful use of the commentary, I propose this
meaning and then another meaning, and then exchange them, as one does
when playing cards in a game. They are never the so-called representative illustrations
for these ideas. They are never that. There is always a reading of the
images, sometimes a provocative reading, where the audience will wonder,
‘surely, this can’t be the right commentary to these images?’ Between the images
and the commentary there is a parallel, but it’s a parallel that will meet in
infinity.
TE: This may actually be a point that an English audience would be more
struck by than a German audience, where commentary, when it is used in a
documentary, often seems to be killing the images. In Alexander Kluge, for instance,
one has that sense that he knows it all and whatever is in the images is
in a sense just dangling from his words. In your film – partly because of the
rather flat delivery by Cynthia Beatt – one is very conscious of her delivering
the words in a kind of even monotone, against the melody of meaning and
sense. Was this precisely in order to create that interplay that the last questioner
was alluding to, that there is the possibility not only of reflecting on the
sense, but of inserting oneself and disagreeing with the words, disagreeing
with the commentary?
HF: Yes, the dramaturgical line is not in the commentary, it is somewhere else.
It’s somewhere in your mind or in these connections and solutions. And the
connection is made through all these combinations, the structure of these
loops, and therefore the music and the commentary should also loop in this
way.
TE: I am thinking of ‘the solution that begets the solution’ that Chris Marker
found in Sans Soleil where he actually has a female voice speak what is effectively
a male text because these are letters written to her by a man. So there is a