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The Political Im/perceptible: Farocki’s Images of the World and the Inscription of War 233
example, the analysis of Alexander Kluge’s mis/use of male voice-over in Miriam
Hansen, ‘Cooperative Auteur Cinema and Oppositional Public Sphere: Alexander
Kluge’s Contribution to Germany in Autumn’, New German Critique 24-25 (fallwinter
1981-82), pp. 36-56, where Hansen argues that the status of Kluge’s male
narrator is never radically questioned. Building on this argument, see further
Rich, ‘She Says, He Says’, pp. 143-61.
47. Various male directors other than Farocki use – wittingly or not – a female voiceover
to deflect possible criticism expressing feminist perspectives. Indeed, this has
become something of a trend in recent documentaries, exemplified by the English
version of Ray Müller’s The Wonderful Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl (1993).
48. Adorno, ‘Essay as Form’, p. 22.
49. See, for example, Leo Strauss, Persecution and the Art of Writing (1952; Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1988).
50. See Elsaesser, New German Cinema, p. 82.
51. Farocki, ‘Commentary’, p. 87.
52. When Farocki intercuts Images of the World and the Inscription of War with
the long sequence of this woman being made up (in all senses) and, in effect, being
disguised, his female voice-over comments, ‘Women paint themselves to be beautiful’,
even though a man is clearly doing the work (see also Farocki, ‘Commentary’,
p. 88). To be sure, there are other possible interpretations of this scene. For
example, I would prefer to read it (also) as an allusion to the aforementioned scene
in Pontecorvo’s Battle of Algiers, when Algerian militants make themselves up
as Europeans to conceal their identity and then plant bombs.
53. The dictum of Dziga Vertov is illustrative in this regard: ‘Kino-eye is the documentary
cinematic decoding of both the visible world and that which is invisible to the
naked eye’ (‘From Kino-Eye to Radio-Eye’ [1929], in Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga
Vertov, ed. and intro. Annette Michelson, trans. Kevin O’Brien [Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1984], p. 87).
54. Jameson, Geopolitical Aesthetic, p. 5.
55. See Michael Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses (New
York: Routledge, 1993), esp. pp. 83-86. Taussig argues that ‘the “origins” of mimesis
lie in art and politics and not in survival’ and that mimesis in effect is the ‘nature’
that cultures use to produce second nature to maintain various types of social
control, including the means of public secrets and various forms of aesthetic semblance.
For Adorno, ‘under the essay’s gaze second nature recognises itself as first
nature’, in part because ‘the essay has something like an aesthetic autonomy that is
easily accused of being simply derived from art, although it is distinguished from
art by its medium, concepts, and by its claim to be a truth devoid of aesthetic semblance’
(Adorno, ‘Essay as Form’, pp. 5, 20). I argue that the essay film as practised
by Farocki attempts to continue this proper Enlightenment tradition by bringing it
up to techno-cultural speed, whatever the limitations may be.
56. Harun Farocki, ‘The Industrialization of Thought’, Discourse 15 (spring 1993),
p. 77.
57. Farocki, ‘Commentary’, p. 92.
58. See Harun Farocki, ‘Reality Would Have to Begin’, trans. Marek Wieczorek, Tom
Keenan, and Thomas Y. Levin, Documents 1-2 (fall-winter 1992), pp. 136-46; originally
published as ‘Die Wirklichkeit hätte zu beginnen’, in Fotovision: Projekt