Suspended Lives, Revenant Images. On Harun Farocki’s Film Respite by Sylvie Lindeperg

Note: Suspended Lives, Revenant Images. On Harun Farocki’s Film Respite was first published in Trafic, no. 70/2009 and is reprinted in Harun Farocki: Against What? Against Whom?, edited by Antje Ehmann and Kodwo Eshun. Harun Farocki’s Respite is something of a ghost film, revisiting his exposition on the intersection between productivity and violence (as captured […]

Harun Farocki: Working on the Sight-Lines, edited by Thomas Elsaesser

In the introductory chapter, Harun Farocki: Filmmaker, Artist, Media Theorist, Thomas Elsaesser underscores the idea that the singularity of Farocki’s cinema resides, not in the power (or juxtaposition) of images, but in the residual impact of the afterimages that is revealed through a careful editing design, noting that for the filmmaker, the power of cinema […]

Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet at Work on a Film Based on Franz Kafka’s Unfinished Novel ‘America’

The French word répétition – rather than the English word rehearsal – more closely captures the implicit connotation behind Straub and Huillet’s rigorous and exacting method of preparation for the shooting of Class Relations. A seated Straub asks the actor Christian Heinisch (who plays Rossmann) to deliver his lines over and over, each time, subtly […]

Images of the World and the Inscription of War, 1989

In 1944, an Allied aircraft took topographic photographs of Auschwitz during a routine surveillance operation for power plants, munitions factories, chemical plants, and any other industrial complexes that could potentially serve as bombing targets that, in the military’s myopic search for these high collateral targets that would cripple the German war machine, failed to recognize […]