14:14, 13 October 2012 - Monoskop

218 Harun Farocki
enabling and encouraging him to feed his (essay) films with previously
produced advertising material.
The resulting personal editing technique creates a new global image with
fragmented old images, with both ideological and aesthetic results. Most obviously,
this new image echoes Farocki’s concern with the way that a constructed
technological vision relates to a direct natural vision. Do the two compliment
or negate one another, or both? 25 Farocki is aware that the camera lens often
provides information that viewers normally do not see, in spite and/or because
of its visibility – recalling Adorno’s conceptualization of the Vexierbild.
One of the most striking examples in Images of the World involves a 1944 Allied
photograph of I.G. Farben in Auschwitz: the Auschwitz death camp was
shown in the photo yet had was not seen by the CIA until 1977 26 (see ill. 53). To
clarify the other meaning of this image, Farocki takes viewers rhythmically
through a complex montage of seemingly unrelated sequences: the work of
Alfred Meydenbauer (the inventor of scale measurement by the use of photography);
photographs taken by SS officers in Auschwitz; pictures of unveiled
Algerian women taken in 1960 by French soldiers; drawings of the Auschwitz
camp made by an inmate, Alfred Kantor; a Dior model being made up in Paris;
an art school class; and relatively high-tech computer-generated images,
robotized industrial production lines, and flight simulators – all in addition to
the aforementioned water-research laboratory in Hannover and the aerial
photograph of I.G. Farben/Auschwitz (see ill. 58-59). Images of the World’s
image track thus implies that the historical purpose of photography – whether
scientific, military, forensic, or aesthetic – has been not only to record and preserve
but also to mislead, deceive, and even destroy: that is, to aid yet obfuscate
vision. In other words, to show the in/visible. Of course, this thematic aspect
of the film is itself problematic (intentionally or not), since film in general
– and, in particular, this film – is subject to the same visual regime as photography
and hence must deceive and obfuscate, not only at the level of sight but
also at the level of sound.
This dual function of Images of the World is notably carried out through
the interplay of images and Farocki’s verbal narrative that in both the German
and English version is spoken (ventriloquized) by a tonally objective and neutral
female voice-over. Farocki clearly seeks thematic contrasts by superimposing
an intentionally fictional and subjective narrative on the documentary and
objective photographic facts. But this strategy, while consistent with the theory
and practice of the essay film, raises certain questions in its concrete application
to Images of the World. Why is only a woman’s voice heard? And why is
it accompanied by the minimalist tinkling of a piano? In fact, these are questions
related to a much more basic interrogation about the instances of