The film shows one day from waking up in the morning all the way to waking up again the next morning. The everyday situations that many commercials are made of, the little dramas that they create and solve through the product or service they sell, are stitched together into one day. This is a film...
Farocki’s intriguing and troubling film explores the processes of visual perception and how they affect our understanding of history and society. In a work reminiscent of the writings of Paul Virilio and Michel Foucault, Farocki examines a range of phenomena including aerial reconnaissance photos...
Knokke, Belgium. A small mundane coastal town, home to the beau-monde. To compete with Venice and Cannes, the posh casino hosts the second ‘World Festival of Film and the Arts’ in 1949, organised in part by the Royal Cinematheque of Belgium. To celebrate cinema’s 50 year existence, they put...
In 1991, when images of the Gulf War flooded the international media, it was virtually impossible to distinguish between real pictures and those generated on computer. This loss of bearings was to change forever our way of deciphering what we see. The image is no longer used only as testimony, but...
A West Berlin doctor, married with a two-year-old child, leaves her husband to go to Munich to work in the birth clinic of a hospital. Her husband doesn’t know that she’s pregnant with their second child. Will she have to choose between motherhood and her career?
In Comparison revisits issues explored in the director's 2007 two channel installation Comparison Via a Third. Spanning continents and cultures, the film focuses on the brick in its many contexts, from the collective efforts of a community building a clinic in Burkina Faso, through semi...
Images from the maximum-security prison in Corcoran, California. A surveillance camera shows a pie-shaped segment of the concrete yard where the prisoners, dressed in shorts and mostly shirtless, are allowed to spend half an hour a day. When one convict attacks another, those not involved lay flat...
An educational film about an aspect of political economy. The concepts of use value, barter value and labor as a commodity are the subjects; they are intended to introduce the process of understanding the theory of value of work and the law of values, alienation and fetish.
Henry Angst receives a farewell letter that promises an unspeakably cheerful death and calls his previous life into question. As a result, he leaves his wife and gives up his job. In a hotel room, he plays heads and tails and chooses the random path. The next day he meets Rita, a young woman whose...
A worker is sitting at a conveyor belt on which light bulbs are coming in at regular intervals. He takes the light bulbs from the conveyor belt and inserts them into a testing device. The light bulbs light up briefly and bathe the scene in glistening light. The worker puts the light bulb back on...
Ihre Zeitungen is a political film rooted in the 1968 student campaign against the Springer press group, which controlled popular dailies such as the Berliner Zeitung and the Bild Zeitung. Claiming the latter were manipulating public opinion, the students laid siege to the publisher's offices....
The third part of the Eye/Machine cycle structures the material around the concept of the operational image. These are images which do not portray a process but are themselves part of a process. As early as the Eighties, cruise missiles used a stored image of a real landscape then took an actual...
The revolution is as good as over, but the captain wants to send his crew into one last battle. Before this can happen, however, he is murdered. The crew is finally free. Meanwhile, the revolutionary Snow White has hidden on the ship, but she is discovered.
15-year-old Nike is torn between her wish of belonging to the cool clique around her friend Jess and individual autonomy, which to her is represented by her new friend Lea. When she takes Lea along to a party she does not know how to react to the competing friends - resulting in her not reacting at...
