Harun Farocki Against What Against Whom

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.

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.

A Companion to Contemporary Documentary Film presents a collection of original essays that explore major issues surrounding the state of current documentary films and their capacity to inspire and effect change. Presents a comprehensive collection of essays relating to all aspects of contemporary documentary films Includes nearly 30 original essays by top documentary film scholars and makers, with each thematic grouping of essays sub-edited by major figures in the field Explores a variety of themes central to contemporary documentary filmmakers and the study of documentary film – the planet, migration, work, sex, virus, religion, war, torture, and surveillance Considers a wide diversity of documentary films that fall outside typical canons, including international and avant-garde documentaries presented in a variety of media

The Financial Image: Finance, Philosophy, and Contemporary Film draws on a broad range of narrative feature films, documentaries, and moving image installations in the US, Europe, and Asia. Using frameworks from contemporary philosophy and critical finance studies, the book explores how contemporary cinema has registered recent financial and economic issues. The book focuses on how filmmakers have found formal means to explore, celebrate, and critique the increasingly important role that the financial sector plays in shaping global economic, political, ethical, and social life.

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.

Cinema and Surveillance: The Asymmetric Gaze shows how key modern filmmakers challenge and disturb the relation between film and surveillance, medium and message. Assembling readings of films by Harun Farocki, Michael Haneke, and Fritz Lang, the book considers surveillance in such different domains as urban life, religious doctrine, and law enforcement. With surveillance present in the modern world as both a technological phenomenon and a social practice, the author shows how cinema, as a visual medium, presents highly sophisticated analyses of surveillance. He suggests that “surveillance” is less an issue to be tackled from a secure spectatorial position than an experience to be rendered, an event to be dealt with. Far from offering a general model of spectatorship, the book explores how narrative moments of surveillance are complicated by specific spectatorial responses. In its intersection of well-known figures and a highly topical issue, this book will have broad appeal, especially, but not exclusively, among students and scholars in film studies, media studies, German studies, European studies, art history, and political theory.

With its increasing presence in a continuously evolving media environment, the essay film as a visual form raises new questions about the construction of the subject, its relationship to the world, and the aesthetic possibilities of cinema. In this volume, authors specializing in various national cinemas (Cuban, French, German, Israeli, Italian, Lebanese, Polish, Russian, American) and critical approaches (historical, aesthetic, postcolonial, feminist, philosophical) explore the essay film and its consequences for the theory of cinema while building on and challenging existing theories. Taking as a guiding principle the essay form's dialogic, fluid nature, the volume examines the potential of the essayistic to question, investigate, and reflect on all forms of cinema—fiction film, popular cinema, and documentary, video installation, and digital essay. A wide range of filmmakers are covered, from Dziga Vertov (Man with a Movie Camera, 1928), Chris Marker (Description of a Struggle, 1960), Nicolás Guillén Landrián (Coffea Arábiga, 1968), Pier Paolo Pasolini (Notes for an African Oresteia, 1969), Chantal Akerman (News from Home, 1976) and Jean-Luc Godard (Notre musique, 2004) to Nanni Moretti (Palombella Rossa, 1989), Mohammed Soueid (Civil War, 2002), Claire Denis (L'Intrus, 2004) and Terrence Malick (The Tree of Life, 2011), among others. The volume argues that the essayistic in film—as process, as experience, as experiment—opens the road to key issues faced by the individual in relation to the collective, but can also lead to its own subversion, as a form of dialectical thought that gravitates towards crisis.

Godard and the Essay Film offers a history and analysis of the essay film, one of the most significant forms of intellectual filmmaking since the end of World War II. Warner incisively reconsiders the defining traits and legacies of this still-evolving genre through a groundbreaking examination of the vast and formidable oeuvre of Jean-Luc Godard. The essay film has often been understood by scholars as an eccentric development within documentary, but Warner shows how an essayistic process of thinking can materialize just as potently within narrative fiction films, through self-critical investigations into the aesthetic, political, and philosophical resources of the medium. Studying examples by Godard and other directors, such as Orson Welles, Chris Marker, Agnès Varda, and Harun Farocki, Warner elaborates a fresh account of essayistic reflection that turns on the imaginative, constructive role of the viewer. Through fine-grained analyses, this book contributes the most nuanced description yet of the relational interface between viewer and screen in the context of the essay film. Shedding new light on Godard’s work, from the 1960s to the 2010s, in film, television, video, and digital stereoscopy, Warner distills an understanding of essayistic cinema as a shared exercise of critical rumination and perceptual discovery.