14:14, 13 October 2012 - Monoskop

222 Harun Farocki
back again to the two photographs of women in Auschwitz. Whether ‘Jew’,
‘Algerian’, or ‘German’, it is suggested that they are all someone’s enemies.
They are also all females, it is true, but they primarily evoke facing an in/visible
enemy in a world of violence and terror – in/visible because that world has
been historically and culturally en/gendered as a male sphere. At once female
and hostile, the ‘inappropriate/d other’ appears here to be particularly dangerous
because it surfaces not where one expects it but where one does not. 37
We also begin to grasp why the German police photograph of a wanted
woman is computer enhanced into a male face (see ill. 53). It is almost as if the
suspected female ‘terrorist’ was changed into a male to better identify her as
the enemy other – traditionally a military, male other. As Susan Sontag and
Paul Virilio proclaim, to photograph is – potentially – to kill. 38
Still, women are the carriers of bombs in Farocki’s film – as in the actual battle
of Algiers and in Battle of Algiers. And women had done so earlier in
Auschwitz, as Farocki will presently show. It is also worth noting that the ‘revolutionary’
Algerian women are shown unveiled, perhaps as a symbolic allusion,
Farocki’s as well as the women’s, to their rejection of the pre- and post-colonial
and/or Islamic oppression of women in Algeria. But the absence of the
veil also suggests the women’s refusal of public invisibility and of the resulting
sexual mystery and appeal. 39 In that sense, Farocki might have wanted to
link the veil motif with another group of women terrorists – Gudrun Ensslin
and Ulrike Meinhof – and so to protest against the relentless mass media
branding of these women as whores, lesbians, PLO trainees, and so on. 40 (Indeed,
As You See directly refers to Meinhof with the inclusion of a popular
magazine’s cover story on her.) This linkage is not surprising because, as demonstrated
earlier, the overdetermined layering of the enemy body with ‘female’
and ‘oriental’ sexuality seems to cut across many cultures and times. 41
Then there is the story of the Auschwitz women. Three rhythmically inserted
sequences show a series of handwritten numbers on a slip of paper. On
the first two occasions, viewers are offered what turn out to be false leads,
seeming to link the numbers with military reconnaissance or with electronic
image manipulation. The numbers flash on the screen without voice-over
commentary, but the visual context suggests some semantics even though we
do not see yet their precise historical meaning (see ill. 54). Only near the end of
the film is this series of numbers explained retroactively (that is, after the audience
has begun to assimilate them in/visibly): the female voice-over explains
that they were ‘coded messages from Auschwitz prisoners who belonged to a
resistance group. They set the date for an uprising [...] With explosive devices
made from powder that women had smuggled out from the Union Munitions
factory, they set fire to the crematorium’. 42