14:14, 13 October 2012 - Monoskop

86 Harun Farocki
managed to maintain the force of his arguments despite the grimaces and contortions.
He naturally expressed a power to demand.
The prime example for stylized youthful uncertainty remains James Dean,
who never seemed not to be acting, but rather to be presenting his actions as
something he had discovered and regarded as being worth reproducing.
When he plays a student he reveals that he has already been an adult for a long
time or that he is pursuing something beyond the mere contrast between
youth and adulthood. This seemed to be true of Holger Meins as well, in
whom I could see no distinctive characteristics of a family background, not
even in the form of its rejection. It seemed as if he had effortlessly shed his
background and, when in a playful mood, was able to delve into his childhood
with equal ease, but without ever immersing himself in its social history. Everything
about him seemed to have happened to him. Over the next few years I
saw him again and again with his shoulders hunched, with his arms dangling
or folded behind his neck. In seminars and later at political gatherings, he
liked to sit on the floor or on the table; one time he might sit with his knees
drawn up, clutching his ankles, the next with his back pressed against the wall,
arms folded across his chest, and his hands clutching his shoulders. He expressed
a sense of not being quite where he wanted to be or belonged. He had
little use for social propriety and was not ashamed that his deep sense of unrest
was so obvious. At the entrance examination I must have eyeballed all my
fellow applicants like a debutante examining the other dancers: every other
girl seems as perfectly rounded as a character out of a novel and only she is
merely piece-work.
I first noticed Holger Meins because he knew how to make so much more
out of his restlessness than I did of mine. I began listening to what he said and
found myself adopting the attitude of a listener even when we were speaking
to each other. It already seemed that he had reached the place where one must
seek the secrets of film. He said that you should use colour material in the
same way you use black and white film, by which he denounced the meaningless
expression ‘dramatic use of colour’. On another occasion, when the film
academy was considering buying a viewfinder, he said that if someone could
not recognise a shot with his own eyes, then a viewfinder wouldn’t help either.
Once, when the conversation turned to Francesco Rosi, I heard Holger Meins
say that Rosi only made films for television. He said that he was not going to
work for television, but only for cinema.
By that he meant real cinematography, which is something almost never accomplished
in the actual film business. All this talk of colour or black and
white film, of how superfluous viewfinders were, of how large a face can appear
in close-up, whether long focal lengths should be allowed, whether
zooms are a crime, whether we ought to subordinate ourselves to shot-