With his complex, often collage-based multichannel films, German filmmaker Harun Farocki reflects upon the political implications of the use of images in contemporary society and upon the social and historical conditions of the visual technologies his own works employ. Farocki’s work does not in any clear sense belong to the tradition of “video art” but is rather inscribed into the long (and heterogeneous) history of the documentary and the essay film: Dziga Vertov and Chris Marker are touchstones, rather than Nam June Paik and Tony Oursler. This retrospective is anchored by Videogramme einer Revolution (Videograms of a Revolution), 1992, a collage film that consists of home video footage taken during the revolution in Romania in 1989 and demonstrates Farocki’s interest in the intersections between politics and visual technologies. A video library has also been created for the show, with twelve of Farocki’s most important works available for on-demand viewing. Among these films are Bilder der Welt und Inschrift des Krieges (Images of the World and the Inscription of War), 1988, a single-channel essay film reflecting upon the concurrent development of military surveillance technologies and the visual technologies of modern, automated industry, tracing their origins to the Renaissance birth of central perspective and to Enlightenment ideology; Schnittstelle (Interface), 1995, a two-channel film (here shown in a single-channel version) in which Farocki demonstrates his own method by criticizing it and reflecting upon his artistic process, at times producing a veritable mise-en-abyme of layers and repetitions; and the seminal Arbeiter verlassen die Fabrik (Workers Leaving the Factory), 1995, a collage film drawn from the origin of the medium—the Lumière brothers’ short sequence from 1895 showing workers leaving the factory at the end of day—that goes on to assemble diverse examples of the same motif from the history of the moving image, from Metropolis to contemporary high-tech surveillance imagery.
