14:14, 13 October 2012 - Monoskop

Painting Pavements 53
again with a lesson on how to see. Reading between the lines, however,
Farocki here states his failure. His biggest problem is that the medium in
which, despite decades of filmic work, he has his roots – writing – has reached
its historical endpoint. He recognised this early on, and along with many of his
colleagues who had emerged from the ’68 movement as filmmakers, he believed
that the visual media could take over the political function of writing,
because the scope for distribution seemed broader and comprehensibility
greater. At some stage he noticed that illiteracy was far greater amongst the
viewing than the reading public. Although all the consciousness-raising projects
of the auteur-filmmakers came to nought, he never abandoned hope. In a
society dominated by images, Farocki believed political engagement could
only arise out of the making of images. His programme was and still is (and
Schnittstelle renders this explicit): making images against images. Wrenching
images from the speeding up process. Slowing images down. Bringing images
to a halt. Blowing up images. Reframing images. Taking images and turning
them into real images. And finally: making images about images.
Repeating images, re-capturing images. Schnittstelle, at the very least, is
testimony to a productive failure. It is just possible that the key to truth lies in
tautology and redundancy. With their motto of ‘copying the way the ancients
used to’, Bouvard and Pécuchet were also ultimately redeemed. That was over
a hundred years ago, when it was time to invent the cinema so as to liberate the
traditional arts from the ballast of redundancy (see ill. 33).
Notes
1. Farocki is an heir to German enlightenment philosophy, but the term ‘Aufklärung’
(enlightenment) is used here in a more Brechtian sense. In the same way as, throughout
the centuries, the painted picture transformed from giving information to representing
deformation, the film image turned from informing the viewer to
deforming the viewer (mentally, of course). That was not done by a change of quality
(e.g., the introduction of colour and sound) but by a gigantic increase of quantity,
since the technological/filmic image (including television) is still meant to present
an image of a pro-filmic reality. The ‘critique of the enlightened eye’ maintains that
the initial goal of enlightenment (to circulate information in order to make the receiver
gain a deeper knowledge) is no longer possible with the technological image.
2. The Deutsche Film und Fernsehakademie Berlin (DFFB) is the first film school in
West Germany, founded in 1967. Farocki had been a student in its first year.
3. Duisburger Filmwoche (Annual Festival of German Documentary Film) Catalogue
1991, Duisburg, accompanying text to Farocki’s film Was Ist Los? p. 14.
4. Farocki, ibid. p. 13.