Harun Farocki: Working on the Sight Lines

Thomas Elsaesser

2004
Amsterdam University Press, 379pp

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.

Contents

Introduction

Image In(ter)ventions

Painting Pavements

Volker Siebel 

Images and Thoughts, People and Things, Materials and Methods

Jörg Becker 

Incisive Divides and Revolving Images: On the Installation Schnittstelle

Christa Blümlinger 

Filming as Writing, Writing as Filming, Staking One's Life

Passage along the Shadow-Line: Feeling One’s Way Towards the Filmkritik-Style

Olaf Möller 

The Green of the Grass: Harun Farocki in Filmkritik

edited by Rainer Knepperges 

Staking One's Life: Images of Holger Meins

Harun Farocki 

Between Wars, Between Images

Working at the Margins: Film as a Form of Intelligence

Thomas Elsaesser 

Dog from the Freeway

Harun Farocki 

Political Filmmaking after Brecht: Farocki, for Example

Thomas Elsaesser 

Documenting the Life of Ideas? – Farocki and the 'Essay Film'

The Road Not Taken: Films by Harun Farocki

Jonathan Rosenbaum 

Slowly Forming a Thought While Working on Images

Christa Blümlinger 

Making the World Superfluous: An Interview with Harun Farocki

Thomas Elsaesser 

Images of the World and the Inscription of War

Reality Would Have to Begin

Harun Farocki 

Light Weapons

Tom Keenan 

The Political Im/perceptible: Images of the World

Nora Alter 

Film: Media: Work: Archive

Workers Leaving the Factory

Harun Farocki 

On Media and Democratic Politics: Videograms of a Revolution

Benjamin Young 

Towards an Archive for Visual Concepts

Wolfgang Ernst and Harun Farocki 

From the Surveillance Society to the Control Society

Controlling Observation

Harun Farocki 

Nine Minutes in the Yard: A Conversation with Harun Farocki

Rembert Hüser 

Harun Farocki: Critical Strategies

Christa Blümlinger