FILMS BY HARUN FAROCKI
No film which only translates into film what is known already (from the newspaper, a book, TV) is worth anything. A film has to find an expression in its own language. –Harun Farocki
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
What this question seems to overlook is that European Marxism encompasses a lot more than what Americans understand as “politics.” The aesthetics of most American Marxists and communists, at least within my lifetime, tend toward socialist realism and–more recently–multiculturalism. Turn to leftist American film magazines like Jump Cut and Cineaste, and you’ll find articles about third-world filmmakers, American independent documentarists, and old-style Hollywood lefties like Dalton Trumbo and Budd Schulberg. You’re less likely to find articles about more formally oriented filmmakers such as Farocki, Robert Bresson, Carl Dreyer, Jean-Luc Godard, Alexander Kluge, Jacques Rivette, Jacques Tati, and Jean-Marie Straub and Daniele Huillet, but these are the filmmakers that the European Marxists and communists I know care passionately about.
All these concerns, and many others that follow in the film, might be said to be political by virtue of being formal, and vice versa. Even the discussion of the machine gun might be said to follow this principle as it critiques the form of the weapon: “The military had 50 years to study what a machine gun is and they still sent soldiers out into machine-gun fire over and over again. They didn’t understand that one machine is more than a match for 1,000 men. Their way of breaking the machines was to send soldiers out into the line of fire.”
What seems especially regrettable about the absence of Farocki’s two 35- millimeter films–Before Your Eyes–Vietnam (1981) and Betrayed (1985)–from the Chicago retrospective is that, judging from the eight Farocki films I have seen, his recent work is much more interesting and complex than his early shorts. While the early shorts aren’t devoid of interest, they bear heavy traces of Godard’s and Straub- Huillet’s influence and show relatively few signs of either the intellectual density of As You See and Images of the World and the Inscription of War (1989) or the conceptual clarity of The Taste of Life (1979), An Image (1983), and How to Live in the Federal Republic of Germany (1990). (Apparently his first feature, Between Two Wars–an essay film completed in 1977–which concludes the local retrospective Saturday night, escapes some of these strictures.)
An Image, another half-hour color documentary, is devoted to the construction of one centerfold photo, shot over a single day in Playboy’s Munich studio. I mean “construction” literally: the film begins with the building of the set and the placement of props, then proceeds through the diverse poses and rearrangements of the model, complete with the photographer’s instructions (“Give us your usual saucy look”), followed by various critiques and conferences about the test photos and various reshoots before the lights are extinguished and the set is dismantled.
