14:14, 13 October 2012 - Monoskop

82 Harun Farocki
cannot know how the world works, but you can imagine it. The way these interesting
women teach you how it cannot work out with love but still instil in you the idea
of what it would be like if... (1983, pp. 51-52)
When one looks at a woman on the street in Paris she looks back for about three seconds,
then she lowers her eyes or else looks intently, conveying: ‘Enough of this approach’,
then if one keeps on looking across to her she again shifts her neutral expression.
Now the woman shows a second face, the face of conditional being, if one
had access to her, it would be her own... She opens a door to show you that you don’t
have the key. (1982, p. 435)
The book (Brackwasser [Brackish Water] by Heinrich Hauser) reminded me of James
M. Cain, the bit where a man wins a woman because he knows how to make fire and
prepare a meal at the right moment. In Serenade in Mexico the hero wins back his
masculinity when he transforms a loathsome iguana into a tasty meal for a woman.
With Cain, too, there is this hope: that the intensity one extracts from the world
when working on it might include women. (1981, p. 381)
Construction workers, when shifting cobblestones, throw one stone into the air and
catch it, each stone is different, and from its flight they gauge exactly where it will fit.
[...] Work at the editing table is like this: whether it is a question of where to cut,
which version of a take to include, or where to place the music, one needs to know
the material so well that it fits of its own accord. (1980, p. 2)
For me this music begins when I realize we are carrying out something that brings
together a dozen adults in the middle of the week, half of them coming by car via the
Berlin Autobahn. Of course, I’d prefer getting together for a communist commando
expedition, but a dozen people coming together without the promise of a salary or
reimbursement of expenses is already a big step; there has to be a spiritual power
present. (1983, p. 34)
[A meeting, a fresh encounter with films by Hitchcock, Hawks, Truffaut and Straub,
with which Filmkritik was ‘defined’; a retrospective; conversations about it, printed
in excerpts. One year later the journal appears for the last time. When I started devouring
the Filmkritik, it was already bound and on library shelves. Its format means
that it is difficult to photocopy. Reading it makes one proud. R. K.]
Reproduction forbidden, even excerpts, no photocopies. (1981, p. 140)
Translated by Roger Hillman and Timothy Mathieson