14:14, 13 October 2012 - Monoskop

282 Harun Farocki
A and B – it can easily be made to suddenly look like B is following A, a possibility
that slapstick comedy exploits. The subject-object construction is less
clear than it is in language; the question remains open: who did what to
whom? That the object can also be the subject simultaneously seems to me to
be more important than the possibility that the object may become the subject,
undergoing a transformation from victim to aggressor. Flusser wrote that, in
the future, it will no longer do to say that A is subject to B but instead that A is
in relation to B. Such a position would seem to show a debt to Nietzsche’s notion
that our sentence structure gives (and sustains) a false impression that
there is cause, that there is an act that brings about a subsequent state.
Serial Indexing and the Surveillance Paradigm
Finally, I would like to present a series of images from the collection of my
most recent work, Prison Images. These are images from surveillance cameras
in US prisons and the whole thing is about the two main themes in the cinema:
love and death, sex and violence. The interesting thing about the images
from the surveillance camera is that they are used in a purely indexical fashion,
that suspicions or hypotheses are never at issue, only facts. Was the car
present at 2:23 p.m. in the parking lot? Did the waiter wash his hands after urinating?
And so on. They go so far as to allow the images to speak for themselves,
when nothing in particular is happening, and often they are erased
right away to save on tape. Michael Klier made a film entitled The Giant,
which consists only of surveillance videos and thereby suggests a radical misreading.
He acts as if the images of the cars, which drive in the rain through the
underpass, are from a narrative film, and he accompanies them with music.
They are taken from a film from the 1950s: a gangster has rented a hotel room
with his girlfriend; what follows is a long shot of the city, meaning something
like, this city is full of the stories of regular people. Since there are few camera
movements or edits in the surveillance images, the most common means of
condensation are missing. For the same reason the events depicted are extremely
undramatic and it becomes clear to what degree the filmmaker is a
promoter of, or accomplice in, the events that take place. My images come
from the visiting room at the Calipatria prison in California, where men and
women are only permitted to embrace one another upon arrival and are
otherwise only allowed to touch each other’s hands.
I have here 24 minutes of tape from such a visiting hour. The camera can be
moved and the officer pans around in order to document transgressions,
which, of course, seems highly voyeuristic. He or she has overlooked one
thing: a black prisoner has turned the back of his chair toward the camera and
has placed the hands of the woman who is visiting him between his legs. I