Videograms of a Revolution is a 1992 documentary film compiled by Harun Farocki and Andrei Ujică from over 125 hours of amateur footage, news footage, and excerpts from the Bucharest TV studio overtaken by demonstrators as part of the December 1989 Romanian counter-revolution.
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...
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...
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...
A film about the time of the blast furnaces – 1917–1933 – about the development of an industry, about perfect machinery which had to run itself to the point of its own destruction.
"If there is a relationship between production and destruction, between the development of productive and destructive forces, then the atom bomb is the ultimate weapon of the post-industrial age. Greatest tonnage, highest mortality, maximum devastation. But what comes next, what are the weapons of...
Single is not a theoretical treatise; it just uses clips to show how a single is produced. The song is Time to Love, the singers call themselves Witchcraft. Also involved are the composer, arranger, producer, the studio musicians and later on the strings. At the beginning the off camera narrator...
Harun Farocki was commissioned by the Lille Museum of Modern Art to produce a video 'about his work'. His creation was an installation for two screens that was presented within the scope for the 1995 exhibition The World of Photography. The work Schnittstelle developed out of that installation....
Historically, the cinema close-up was initially employed to convey emotions through facial expressions. But soon filmmakers also began focusing their attention on hands. Using film extracts, Farocki explores this visual language, its symbolism, Freudian slips, automatisms and its music. Often,...
An advertising agency has to pitch a marketing concept to an optician's consortium, represented by the manager who is the first to see the campaign. The logo submitted is examined from every angle: it must simultaneously express both the company's dynamism and its reliability. A fascinating,...
The diagrams used to help represent consumer shopping baskets, the pensions deficit or migration are anachronistic, Farocki posits; Whether pictographs or simple bar or pie charts, their abstractions all display an impotence of information. "Examples of diagrams gleaned from newspapers, school text...
An exploration of how the U.S. military employs video game technology to train troops for war. Three Dead depicts a military exercise within a mock Iraqi town built on the outskirts of Twentynine Palms, California, blurring the line between computer simulation and reality.
Respite consists of silent black-and-white film shot at Westerbork, a Dutch refugee camp established in 1939 for Jews fleeing Germany. In 1942, after the occupation of Holland, its function was reversed by the Nazis and it became a 'transit camp.' In 1944, the camp commander commissioned a film,...
An exploration of how the U.S. military employs video game technology to train troops for war. In Immersion, Farocki presents footage of a role-playing exercise in which military psychologists demonstrate how to use the PTSD program on their colleagues, who describe traumatic wartime experiences....
Using one of the Lumière Brothers' first films of workers leaving the Factory as his starting point, Farocki provides an insight to changes in industrial production, workers' strikes and motion pictures-- via images of workers leaving factories throughout the years.
Farocki revisits the executive trainer from his earlier "Die Schulung" (Indoctrination, 1987), this time holding a seminar with ex-GDR employees of a West German construction company.
