14:14, 13 October 2012 - Monoskop

Passage along the Shadow-Line: Feeling One’s Way Towards the Filmkritik-Style 75
sion station in Hong Kong, delivering reports from around the globe. He was
repportly last seen in Yemen.
As such, Bitomsky and Bühler come across as more adventurous than
Farocki. Bühler, quite clearly, because he travels across faraway lands,
Bitomsky, because his journeys lead him through the vast territories of film
history.
André Malraux once observed that ‘The fatherland of a man who can
choose is there where the heaviest clouds gather’. Farocki’s clouds gather over
Germany. He seldom travels for his films – not to Marseilles, the United States,
or Vietnam; his travels are at best confined to cycling into some suburb or other
to get to a pre-natal class for expecting parents. While Bitomsky still finds
vague traces of a connection to the past in the everyday, Farocki discovers the
relentless dismemberment of the present. He lacks Bitomsky’s romantic
cinephilia, and his films-about-films are concerned with people like Peter
Weiss, Alexander Kluge, or, time and again, with Straub. The perspective of
his critical media works is deconstructive, whereas Bitomsky’s perspective,
while operating in a similar fashion, albeit with his own themes, is constructive.
Farocki always seemed to be the saddest of the lot. His texts, especially
those concerning contemporary themes, resemble the most corrosive of acids.
Underneath, despair certainly makes itself felt, but also astonishment at the
fact that things are represented the way they are. Once again the chalk shadow
on the cobblestones: rain causing the traces to blur to the strains of Mahler. To
continue without emotion, without a reason – beyond the simple, rational reason
– would make analysis a worthless undertaking.
Notes
1. Christian Petzold, quoted in Stefan Ertl and Rainer Knepperges, ‘Drei zu zwei
hitverdächtig. Ein Gespräch mit Christian Petzold’ (‘Three to two: a future Top of
the Pops. A conversation with Christian Petzold’), in filmwärts 34/35 (May 1995),
p. 75 and 76 (first appeared in Gdinetmao, no. 8, spring 1995).
2. Editor’s note: Filmkritik is a German film magazine, which was published in Munich
from 1957-1984, and served as a hub for innovative and impassioned German
filmmakers-writers.
3. Translator’s note: in the original German, the expression ‘über Leichen gehen‘ (to
walk over corpses) has an idiomatic usage in German similar to the English meaning
‘to stop at nothing’. This of course is lost in the translation.
4. M.R. James, A Pleasing Terror: The Complete Supernatural Writings (Ash-Tree Press,
2001).
5. Christian Petzold, in Ertl and Knepperges.
Translated by Roger Hillman.