Harun Farocki

Filmmaker, film essayist, installation artist, writer: the Berlin artist Harun Farocki has devoted his life to the power of images. Over the thirty-plus years of his career, Farocki has explored not the images of life but rather the life of images that surrounds us in newspapers, cinema, books, television, and advertising. Harun Farocki examines, from different critical perspectives, his vast oeuvre, which includes three feature films, critical media pieces, children’s television features, “learning films” in the tradition of Brecht, and installation pieces. Interviews, a selection of Farocki’s own writings, and an annotated filmography complete a valuable biography of this pioneering artist and his legendary career.

Against What? Against Whom? is a monograph about the author, film maker and video artist Harun Farocki. Its the first book about Farocki that is neither a purely academic publication nor an exhibition catalogue. it brings together the most diverse of themes, tonalities and approaches: alongside a complete filmography and list of installations, there are 21 contributions that take a discursive (or use drawings to) look at Farocki's complex oeuvre. Additionally there are two key Farocki texts, previous reflections on his film and video work, and a new text he has written especially for this book, which begins quite biographically and underhandedly becomes a short history of the making of films and art in (West) Germany over the past 40 years. The themes discussed are as varied as the authors involved, with much focus on individual Farocki films, beginning with the early political, Marxist, educational films, via his cinema direct films and his essay films, that have become classics in the meantime, up To The films and installations, which For The most make use of found footage of the most varied types of image, such as amateur recordings, archive pictures, surveillance images, technical images and computer animations. English text.

Probably the most prominent living filmmaker, and one of the foremost directors of the postwar era, Jean Luc-Godard has received astonishingly little critical attention in the United States. With Speaking about Godard, leading film theorist Kaja Silverman and filmmaker Harun Farocki have made one of the most significant contributions to film studies in recent memory: a lively set of conversations about Godard and his major films, from Contempt to Passion. Combining the insights of a feminist film theorist with those of an avant-garde filmmaker, these eight dialogues–each representing a different period of Godard's film production, and together spanning his entire career–get at the very heart of his formal and theoretical innovations, teasing out, with probity and grace, the ways in which image and text inform one another throughout Godard's oeuvre. Indeed, the dialogic format here serves as the perfect means of capturing the rhythm of Godard's ongoing conversation with his own medium, in addition to shedding light on how a critic and a director of films respectively interpret his work. As it takes us through Godard's films in real time, Speaking about Godard conveys the sense that we are at the movies with Silverman and Farocki, and that we, as both student and participant, are the ultimate beneficiaries of the performance of this critique. Accessible, informative, witty, and, most of all, entertaining, the conversations assembled here form a testament to the continuing power of Godard's work to spark intense debate, and reinvigorate the study of one of the great artists of our time.

Harun Farocki was one of the world’s most celebrated experimental filmmakers at the time of his death in 2014. In a career spanning over fifty years, the German artist produced more than one hundred works, including political cinema, nonfiction film and video, and art installations, which have been exhibited globally. After his early politically engaged films in Super 8 and 16 mm, Farocki spent many years making independent films and commissions for German public television. In the last phase of his career, he transitioned to creating digital and multichannel installations. He also collaborated with the director Christian Petzold on a dozen films. In addition to his prolific media-making career, Farocki was an incisive critic and editor. This groundbreaking book is an incisive and comprehensive analysis of Farocki’s oeuvre, shedding new light on his media experimentation and writings across platforms and venues. Nora M. Alter examines how Farocki’s work investigates film and media images: their history, nature, manipulation, changing function, and strategic use. Focusing on interconnected ideas surrounding labor, critique, and war, she shows how his politically committed art is informed by pedagogical strategies that drive viewers to perceive how the media world they inhabit functions. Alter also argues that Farocki’s career provides a lens on the history of avant-garde and experimental filmmaking amid shifts in materials and exhibition platforms. Tracing the transformations of Farocki’s artistic practice and thought, this book offers new insight into the body of work of one of the most significant media makers of the late twentieth century.

This book brings together two major filmmakers-French New Wave master Jean-Luc Godard and German avant-gardist Harun Farocki-to explore the fundamental tension between theoretical abstraction and the capacities of film itself, a medium where everything seen onscreen is necessarily concrete. Volker Pantenburg shows how these two filmmakers explored the potential of combined shots and montage to create "film as theory."

This publication maps a visual approach to one of the world's foremost documentary and essay filmmakers, Harun Farocki. Unlike the many other, more theoretical publications about his work, this book operates with still images beyond an illustrative or documentary purpose. By means of repetition, interruption and displacement, the configurations pursue specific movements within each film, taking into account mechanisms of order and open-endedness that are characteristic for Farocki's work in general. This book traces the dynamics in ten of Farocki's films and presents them along with each film's complete commentaries, dialogues and intertitles, celebrating their major critical gesture: the exposition of mediality.

The book both extends and reflects upon a large-scale, international art project that has taken the form of an online database and numerous exhibitions (including the Venice Biennale and other important venues). The essays explore the social, political, and ethical ramifications of documenting global labour with a roving camera that often operates in close proximity to its human subjects. The inclusion of Antje Ehmann's journal entries, translated for the first time into English, will offer a real-time account of the workshops that will complement the scholarly essays' accounts of the videos.