14:14, 13 October 2012 - Monoskop

62 Harun Farocki
temporal one, because the visitor has to enter another space), re-integrated
on a third monitor, which presents them for a rereading. Thus the viewer sees
a series of takes from various films by Farocki (i.e., images of the Romanian
Revolution, workers leaving the factory, a scene from Zwischen zwei
Kriegen, the indescribable violence of the Vietnam War, and photographic
constructions of the female body). Above all, the filmmaker is seen at work,
as he arranges and manipulates his images. That this arrangement takes
place in the context of a museum is crucial. 3 On the one hand, the expression
of a way of thinking is entrusted to an artistic form, and on the other, this
thinking is itself made into an object of reflection through filmic and electronic
means. (It is probably no coincidence that this kind of theoretical and
aesthetic effort comes from someone who has for most of his career also been
an incisive film and media critic.) The title Schnittstelle brings together
the twin paths of techné and poetics. At issue are the basic filmic processes of
the spatio-temporal arrangement of the image material – the question of the
interval,oftheintersticesofimages(andsounds)–aswellasthecombination
of analogue and (paradigmatically) digital representation, and finally,
the possibilities and dangers of bringing montage into the electronic and information
age. It is therefore less about the ancient quarrel of whether the
computer image must imitate the cinematic image, or can claim an independent
existence. Farocki is more generally concerned with the binary principles
of montage, with what happens to the powers of abstraction when analogue
images are processed automatically. Hence the pointedly pedagogical demonstration
of the production of an electronically ‘mixed’ image (as opposed
to the mechanically ‘edited’ one) portrayed as a research experiment. Even
the most recent developments in virtual (digital) montage thus resonate in
Farocki’s theoretical media interrogations, even when these are not explicitly
the object of his (re)presentation.
Schnittstelle invokes an apparatus that permits one to experience the simultaneity
of images which film usually orders as a succession: an almost perfect
model of the solitary place where the author writes and processes images:
‘Nowadays I can barely write a word unless an image is visible on the screen at
the same time. Or rather, on both screens.’ In this imaginary laboratory, at the
simulated workplace of the filmmaker, the spectator’s involvement with the
composition of the video differs from that of a (single) large screen in a dark
cinema. While in Farocki’s Arbeiter verlassen die Fabrik (Workers Leaving
the Factory, 1995) it is the successive presentation of Lumière’s primary
film of the same name, and excerpts from other (hi)stories of the cinema – such
as Marilyn Monroe at the factory gate in Fritz Lang’s Clash by Night (USA,
1952) (see ill. 73) and the proletarian masses in lock-step in Metropolis (Germany
1925-26) which forms the basis for comparison; the association of these