14:14, 13 October 2012 - Monoskop

Painting Pavements 47
The Trouble with Television
Farocki’s films can be read as an ongoing analysis of his distrust of the technological
image. He has always had a tendency to use visual material belonging to
others and to reinterpret it. Initially, he quoted other films, weaving them into
his own line of argument as evidence. What he had in mind was to teach the audience
to look and listen closely. He still had faith in the enlightening effect of his
own work. It was not until Etwas wird sichtbar that he reached the point
where he began to distrust even his own images (and thereby the potency of the
visual media altogether). At first he traced this distrust to the abuse made of images
by others, above all, by television journalists. The aim was to expose their
machinations. The WDR (West German Broadcasting) offered him a platform
for this. In 1973,fortheseriesTelekritik (tele-criticism), Farocki made Der Ärger
mit den Bildern (The Trouble with Images), a critical meta-film in which he
settled scores with the television news feature as a format, by pointing out the
systematic overuse of meaningless images. For the first time Farocki made do
entirely with material not shot by himself. (In Die Sprache der Revolution
[The Language of Revolution], a collage of film excerpts from various sources
made the year before, Farocki still managed to insert into his argument a couple
of brief, staged sequences that he directed himself.) The Trouble with Images
pursued a precise didactic concept, and for that reason it ended up very wordy.
But because there was more spoken text than visual material to clinch his argument
(and because the text was supposed to propel the analysis), Farocki faced a
problem. How could he visually illustrate a spoken text without practising precisely
what he was preaching against, the cancelling out of a critical commentary
by levelling it with arbitrary images? He decided on a principled refusal of
images. Spacing the paragraphs that constituted the line of his argument, he
spliced in black leader. This nod in the direction of experimental cinema shows
signs of the director’s own disorientation, an admission of his own impotence in
the face of the superior power of the images senselessly churned out day in day
out by the television machine.
In the 1970s, he produced other films for the WDR that criticised the media,
like Moderatoren im Fernsehen (TV Anchormen) orDie Arbeit mit den
Bildern (Working with Images), both made in 1974. But the easier it was for
Farocki to expose the mechanisms that led to the thoughtless use of images on
television, the harder it was for him to find the right approach to his own. In
Between Two Wars, completed in 1978, after he had worked on it for years as
his own producer and facing constant interruptions, the poverty of images is
carried to the limit of what is considered bearable. No doubt the sparseness of
the film was due to a lack of finances, but Farocki managed to raise reticence to