The work centers on the images of the Gulf War which caused worldwide sensation in 1991. In the shots taken from projectiles homing in on their targets, bomb and reporter were identical, according to a theory put forward by the philosopher Klaus Theweleit. At the same time it was impossible to...
A film composed of images from prisons. Quotes from fiction films and documentaries as well as footage from surveillance cameras. A look at the new control technologies, at personal identification devices, electronic ankle bracelets, electronic tracking devices.
Examines monuments scattered all over the world that have become goals for pilgrims and tourists and now serve to meet a whole range of different needs, from personal memory to spiritual enlightenment and religious sentiment. Farocki starts from the Vietnam Memorial in Washington ... thousands of...
Advertising posters for the Berliner Kindl brewery in the stands of Berlin’s sports arena show beer drinkers through the ages, from an organ-grinder at the turn of the 20th century to a fashionable "Beatle wannabe". A critical analysis of the images leads to the parody motto "Berliner Kindl is a...
What venture capital or VC for short actually means is explained in the film itself. Banks only lend money against collateral. Those who have none have to turn to VC companies and pay interest of 40%.
On Easter 1968 an assassination attempt on Rudi Dutschke was carried out. Shortly afterwards street battles resulted throughout West Germany. Farocki's short film Drei Schüsse auf Rudi is presumably lost.
Harun Farocki: Serious Games I–IV (2009–10) explores the use of virtual reality and gaming technology in U.S. military recruitment, training and after-action therapy, revealing fundamental links between technology and violence in a time of war. Young recruits engage in simulated combat...
This film is about a five-day seminar designed to teach executives how to "sell themselves" better. This course, designed for managers, teaches the basic rules of dialectics and rhetoric and provides training in body language, gesture and facial expression. The aim of selling something has always...
Farocki frequently chooses a single news photo as his pretext. In his film he explains convincingly that 'learning from images' is not so much a question of having power over the image or a consistent subject-position towards the image, which would allow the filmmaker access to complete knowledge....
"As if pictures could think! Einschlafgeschichten doesn't really speak of bridges or railroads but rather of two girls filling the space between daytime and dreamtime with a poetic game, an endless game, a game with no end. A game which can fade out without becoming fragmentary. "Are you asleep?",...
In the summer of 1996, Farocki filmed application training courses in which one learns how to apply for a job. School drop-outs, university graduates, people who have been re-trained, the long-term unemployed, recovered drug addicts, and mid-level managers - all of them are supposed to learn how to...
A New Product is a corporate documentary, or, that is, a document of corporate qualities; specifically about what seems to be a small company whose purpose is to consult and design working spaces for larger corporations, exemplified by Vodafone and Unilever.
How a look can be turned toward its goal by grasping and measuring its covetousness is shown in an exemplary fashion in What's Up? in a motif depicting a postcard of a painting by Titian in an eye-mark recorder.
This Harun Farocki film shows the creation of a picture on which the artist worked for nine weeks. Sarah Schumann lives in Berlin and is a pioneer of the feminist scene. 1977 together with several other artists she organized the first large exhibition in which only work by women was shown. Sarah...
Refreshingly, Farocki lays his cards on the table at the very beginning of the film, “I want to demonstrate that most feature films are of the sort that make people lose their interest and appetite for the real world”.
