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Thomas Elsaesser (ed.) Harun Farocki: Working on the Sight Lines (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2004) 398 pp.

About the Book

Anyone interested in how the technological, and now the electronic media have transformed civil society, could find no better chronicler of their histories, no more intelligent observer of their unexpected connections, no more incisive critic and yet interested party to the media’s epoch-making significance than the German filmmaker, installation artist and media theorist Harun Farocki. As a filmmaker, Farocki not only adds images to their stock in the world; he comments on the world made by these images, and he does so with and through images.

But documenting and commenting public life under the rule of the image is also a political act. So central are the technologies of picturing and vision to the twentieth century that there is little Farocki cares about which is not also a reflection on the cinema itself. In this perspective, its role as our culture's prime story-telling medium is almost secondary. Instead, what comes to the fore is a ‘machine of the visible’ that is itself largely invisible. This is why Farocki can talk about airports, schools or prisons as part of the post-history of cinema, just as a fork in the road leading to the foundation of cities, the Jacquard loom with its programmable sequence of coloured threads, and the Maxim machine gun at the battle of Omdurman are part of the pre-history of cinema.

Since the beginning of the 20th century, and probably since the invention of the camera obscura, the most pervasive - material and mental - model by which to picture ourselves in this world has been, in one form or another, the cinematic apparatus. It is present as an arrangement of parts, as a logic of visual processes and as a geometry of actions even when (especially when) camera and projector are absent. It existed as a philosopher's dream in Plato's parable of the cave, and it has a technical-prosthetic afterlife in surveillance videos and body-scans, so that its noble golden age as the art form of the second industrial age represents a relatively brief lease on its overall life. Or to put it differently: the cinema has many histories, only some of which belong to the movies. It takes an artist-archaeologist such as Farocki, rather than a mere historian, to detect, document and reconstruct them.

It is no exaggeration, then, to say that Farocki is the contemporary cinema's most important allegorist. Add to that Farocki the installation artist and archivist, and you can see that it is the very ubiquity of images forever failing to amount to a totality, but acting instead as fragments of cultural memory that have obliged Farocki to become also a media theorist. The different histories hidden in the images he picks preserve the fading traces of the human eye within the technologies of vision. They have made of him a special kind of witness, a close reader of images and an exegete-exorcist of their ghostly ‘afterimages’. Nearly forty years of making films, with a list of some eighty titles to his credit, confirm that he is also one of the great artist-survivors of his generation: of the bohemian-anarchist scene in Hamburg during the early 1960s, of the student protests in West-Berlin from 1968 to the mid-1970s, with their revolutionary dogmatism and activist aspirations. Building up such an oeuvre against the considerable odds of ‘independent’ film financing and contract work for television, he must also be considered a survivor of the New German Cinema of the 1980s.

The 1990s saw Farocki successfully make the transition to a new art-form and new venues, such as the museums, galleries and media arts festivals that now show his multi-screen installations. His work, including his earlier films, increasingly reach audiences all over the world: Europe (France, Austria, Italy, Belgium), Latin America, Australia and the United States. For these audiences, Harun Farocki- Working on the Sight-Lines can serve as an introduction. But hopefully, it can also turn a first encounter with his work into a pursuit lasting a lifetime - the lifetime of the cinema.