14:14, 13 October 2012 - Monoskop

The Political Im/perceptible: Farocki’s Images of the World and the Inscription of War 231
cause from a neo-Heideggerian point of view, the cut stands for ‘the darkness
against which an image, a photograph or a film, finds its possibility’ – a possibility
that is here ‘brought into the event of the film itself’ (‘Light Weapons’, p. 151).
28. Vicki Goldberg, Margaret Bourke-White, A Biography (Reading, Mass.: Addison-
Wesley, 1987), p. 290. Farocki’s SS photo must be contextualised further, however,
with regard to another problem of photographing (in) the camps. Thus, the Picture
Post in 1943, when prison camps in Italy were liberated, captioned a picture of an
emaciated female inmate, ‘Women Want to Be Photographed’. In 1945, aPicture
Post caption of an image of a horrifically thin man claimed that he had demanded
to be photographed because ‘the free peoples of the world should know what a
German prison-camp does to a man’. See ‘The Eighth Army Breaks Open a Concentration
Camp’, Picture Post, October 23, 1943, p. 8; ‘The Problem That Makes All
Europe Wonder’, Picture Post, May 5, 1945, p. 11. For these references, I am indebted
to an unpublished essay by Barbie Zelizer of Temple University: ‘The Image,
the Word, and the Holocaust: Photojournalism and the Shape of Memory’.
29. Slavoj Žižek , Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991), p. 91.
30. Ibid., p. 91.
31. Adorno, Minima Moralia; Žižek, Looking Awry.
32. Keenan, ‘Light Weapons’, p. 151. This certainly is not a particularly original observation
by either Keenan or Farocki. See, for example, the extensive treatment of
this articulation of war and cinema in Virilio’s War and Cinema, which Keenan cites
only in passing and Silverman not at all. There is also the infamous case of Life
photographer Ron Haeberle, who asked GIs to hold their fire for an instant at My
Lai so that he could snap his picture of the victims before they were murdered. (He
was rewarded with a Pulitzer Prize.) For this and similar incidents, see Susan D.
Moeller, Shooting War: Photography and the American Experience of Combat (New
York: Basic Books, 1989). A similar problematic has been recently addressed from a
very different angle in Remy Belvaux’s pseudo-documentary Man Bites Dog
(France, 1992), in which the film crew assigned to ‘document’ the everyday life of a
serial killer eventually ‘participates’ in stealing money to finance the film and in
raping a victim.
33. Farocki, ‘Commentary’, p. 81.
34. This more or less un/decidable and im/perceptible effect is further enhanced by
an ever-so-slight tinkling of classical European piano music in the background.
Viewing Farocki’s treatment of the Algerian women, this musical soundtrack
weaves its way in and out here, too, as if to recall not only the history of the cinema
(that is, silent films without audible verbal interpretation and/or misinterpretation)
but also the subliminal hegemony of the (here aural) West over the (here visible)
Orient. This would be an ironic reversal of Trinh T. Minh-ha’s remark,
following Foucault, that in the West the power/knowledge effect resides primarily
in the visual (‘The World as a Foreign Land’ [1989], in Trinh, When the Moon
Waxes Red: Representation, Gender, and Cultural Politics [New York: Routledge,
1991], p. 189).
35. Battle of Algiers, dir. Gillo Pontecorvo (screenplay Franco Solinas), 35 mm, 120
min., Igor Films, Algeria, France, and Italy, 1965. This film had a huge impact
when it first appeared and was censored in many countries.