Farocki/Godard : film as theory

Abstract

The German version of this book was published in early 2006, after several years of intensive study of the work of the directors who are its subject. I had come to know Harun Farocki’s work while an undergraduate in 1994, when Rembert Hüser showed some of Farocki’s films in the classes he taught at the German Department of Bonn University. I vividly recall the surprise and excitement that Images of the World and the Inscription of War (1988) and As you see (1986) elicited in me. These were films unlike any others I had seen, both in their intellectual curiosity and in the intimate dialogue with film history and media theory that they enacted and contributed to. Farocki’s work struck me as a mode of critical discourse that I had not known existed: elegant, complex, clearly informed by film history, not only well-grounded in cultural and visual theories but producing a genuine mode of theory in itself. In the following years, I had the opportunity to watch more of Farocki’s films. A small retrospective at the Kunsthochschule für Medien (Academy of Media Arts) in Cologne in 1995 comprised Workers leaving the Factory, which had just been completed, A Day in the Life of the Consumer (1993), and some of the observational films Farocki had made since 1983. We, a handful of students from Bonn, had been looking forward to this event and were quite surprised to see that, except for one KHM student, we were the only attendees. The screenings gave an impression of the range of approaches that Farocki had pursued since 1966, when he started studying film as one of the first students at the Deutsche Film und Fernsehakademie Berlin (DFFB). It would be misleading to claim that Farocki’s work was unknown at the time, but it had certainly not yet received the attention it was to attract some years later, especially from the world of contemporary art. In 1998, when two important books on Farocki appeared in German, Thomas Elsaesser could still refer to him as “Germany’s best known unknown filmmaker.”