14:14, 13 October 2012 - Monoskop

100 Harun Farocki
cal perspective). Secondly, the story’s relationship to the learning process (as
the acquisition of knowledge to generate further knowledge) is limited by the
problematic subject positions it gives to the protagonists, whom the outcome,
as an example of struggle, leaves no other option than to once more understand
themselves as victims of history, rather than as (its) revolutionary subjects.
The knowledge this story offers seems useless to the women in the film
and suicidal to their men, in a trajectory that is reminiscent of those detectives
in Jorge Luis Borges or Edgar Allan Poe’s stories, who at the end of their investigation
discover that they are themselves the murderer’s intended victim,
caught out by their own truth-seeking zeal.
In Between Two Wars, the protagonists have to cope with a double defeat:
they are defeated in their attempt to make their political aspirations converge
with their personal ones. But they are also defeated by the images they find,
and the narratives they construct, or rather: by the way these images place
them, in relation to history, as spectators of themselves. In this film, as in much
of his work, Farocki confronts the paradox that a film is always already a history
of its images, rather than merely providing the images that go with a particular
story. A film about history is a film trapped by the images of history.
How, then, to learn history lessons other than the melancholy ones of defeat,
circularity, and repetition (see ill. 17)?
The answer implies a life’s pursuit that is by no means assured of success,
because learning from history means working with images, and working with
images is the political task of progressive forces. But while for those on the left
this has often meant denouncing the ideological work of official pictures or
news photography, of the images used in advertising and the dominant political
discourse, the power of images must not remain in the hands of those in
power. Roland Barthes has tried to identify what it is that makes this kind of
image fantasmagorical, arguing that a photograph is both a record of a presence
and a substitute for that presence. Inscribing itself in two temporalities at
once, that of ‘having been there once’ referring to its indexicality, and the timeless
presence it preserves, thanks to the plenitude of its iconic referents, a photograph
is both a document-subject and a fetish-object. Its status of ‘notnow/not-here’
as well as its illusion of presence that seemingly protects the
viewer from loss, also implies that a photograph invariably structures a disavowal.