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 […]
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 […]
The convergence of Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet’s A Trip to the Louvre and experimental filmmaker Mark LaPore’s transfixing ethnography Kolkata at this year’s View from the Avant-Garde provided the proper frame of mind to revisit Harun Farocki’s meditation on the art of consumerism, Still Life, a film that on the surface seemed to be […]
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 […]
The projection of the 1895 Auguste and Louis Lumière short film, Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory is accompanied by a third person narrator who observes the unfolding, animated images of a group of men, women, and even dogs making their way out of the entrance gates and comments on their apparent haste in exiting the […]
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 […]