14:14, 13 October 2012 - Monoskop

The Political Im/perceptible: Farocki’s Images of the World and the Inscription of War 223
Without these women, neither terrorism nor resistance would have been
possible. They, at least, attempted actively to do what the combined might of
Allied bombers could not – or would not – accomplish: stop the horror. 43
Thus, women are allowed access – into history and into Farocki’s film – precisely
because they are in/visible. But does the female voice-over problematise
or reinforce this point? Kaja Silverman’s The Acoustic Mirror contains a helpful
analysis of the role of the female voice in feature films. She deconstructs ‘the
classic cinema’s rigorous ‘marriage’ of voice to image’ and explores the ‘ironic
distance between the female voice and her filmic “stand-in”’. 44
On these
grounds, the voice-over in the essay film Images of the World would also be
‘a voice “apart”, in both senses of that word – a voice which asserts its independence
from the classic system, and which is somehow a part of what it narrates’.
45 As critics have pointed out, German male directors have often used a
male voice-over to undermine female characters and women’s issues – a voice
that ‘takes on the guise of a meta-character, offered up unproblematically for
audience identification, smoothing over the real contradictions of the film’s
form in order to displace attention upon false contradictions taken to represent
impossible obstacles to political consciousness or action’. 46 However, switching
the gender of the voice-over from male to female does not necessarily solve
the problem of biased presentation. 47 Part of the problem in Images of the
World is that Farocki’s audible woman is never made visible: she is literally
disembodied, ventriloquising for a Farocki whose hands, at least, are visible in
the film. It may be that the problematic of the political tension between the
in/visible and the in/audible is not wholly under Farocki’s conscious control
but rather is part of his own political unconscious. Furthermore, the accompanying
soft piano music acts in tandem with the female voice as a parallel suture:
another way of seaming the movie together in terms of its seeming
gendered content, or semés. Here again, a direct link can be made back to the
written essay, for as Adorno observes, ‘the essay approaches the logic of music,
that stringent and yet aconceptual art of transition’. 48 As in a Hollywood
feature film, that nondiegetic music signals moments of special significance,
producing an ‘acoustic mirror’: in this case, a replication of the audio-visual,
acutely en/gendered montage. But, of course, not all of the montage serves
gender issues, and its contribution to the film’s intelligence has more general
political effects. In that sense the question now becomes, what exactly are its
in/visible and in/audible countercultural politics?