Ingo Kratisch

Farocki’s intriguing and troubling film explores the processes of visual perception and how they affect our understanding of history and society. In a work reminiscent of the writings of Paul Virilio and Michel Foucault, Farocki examines a range of phenomena including aerial reconnaissance photos of the Auschwitz concentration camp.

An unconventional essay film that interrogates the visual and ideological legacy of the Vietnam War. Blending staged scenes, archival footage, photographs, and philosophical dialogue, the film follows various characters — including an American soldier captured by North Vietnamese villagers — as they reflect on violence, memory, and image-making. Set partly in West Berlin and partly in reconstructed spaces representing Vietnam, the film avoids traditional dramatic narrative in favor of a fragmented montage of voices, documents, and reenactments. Interweaving love stories, political debate, and historical commentary, Farocki creates a critical reflection on how war is represented, seen, and imagined, both in cinema and in public consciousness. The result is a complex meditation on images as weapons and instruments of perception.

In Comparison revisits issues explored in the director's 2007 two channel installation Comparison Via a Third. Spanning continents and cultures, the film focuses on the brick in its many contexts, from the collective efforts of a community building a clinic in Burkina Faso, through semi industrialized moldings in India, to industrial production lines in Germany, France, Austria and Switzerland. Through its notable structure and its captivating rhythms, In Comparison presents various methods of labor production, allowing for an assessment that changes with every layer and goes well beyond a simple binary divide.

An exploration of how the U.S. military employs video game technology to train troops for war. In A Sun With No Shadow, Farocki calls attention to the subtle differences between the simulations for combat training and PTSD. With the former, the sun can be programmed to cast shadows in the virtual combat zones, while the latter, less expensive technology does not offer this feature.

Harun Farocki was commissioned by the Lille Museum of Modern Art to produce a video 'about his work'. His creation was an installation for two screens that was presented within the scope for the 1995 exhibition The World of Photography. The work Schnittstelle developed out of that installation. Reflecting on Farocki's own documentary work, it examines the question of what it means to work with existing images rather than producing one's own, new images. The title plays on the double meaning of 'Schnitt', referring both to Farocki's workplace, the editing table, as well as the 'human-machine interface', where a person operates a computer using a keyboard and a mouse.

Peter Lorre achieved international fame for his performance in the myth-making role in M. This character has held a peculiar fascination for generations of cinephiles. However, at the time, whilst such success meant recognition, it also weighed on the Hungarian actor as a constrictive burden. Using photographs and film extracts, Das doppelte Gesicht reconstructs the ups and downs of Lorre's career, taking into consideration the economic imperatives and workings of the film industry at the time. (Arnold Hohmann, 1984)

This film is at once a self-portrait and an homage to Jean-Marie Straub, Farocki's role model and former teacher at the Film Academy.

A film about an amour fou between a young doctor and a former teacher. She, daughter of German Jews who emigrated to France, returns to Germany one day: she escapes from her bourgeois life in France into the memory of her childhood.

This Harun Farocki film shows the creation of a picture on which the artist worked for nine weeks. Sarah Schumann lives in Berlin and is a pioneer of the feminist scene. 1977 together with several other artists she organized the first large exhibition in which only work by women was shown. Sarah Schumann paints figuratively, that is to say she has developed a technique using layers of collage and painting worked on top of and into one another. Regarding a picture becomes an adventure. (harunfarocki.de)

Historically, the cinema close-up was initially employed to convey emotions through facial expressions. But soon filmmakers also began focusing their attention on hands. Using film extracts, Farocki explores this visual language, its symbolism, Freudian slips, automatisms and its music. Often, hands betray an emotion which the face tries to dissimulate. They can also function as a conduit (exchanging money) or witness to a form of competence (work).

A look at how mall producers design malls in order to maximise traffic and sales.

Mit Pyramiden is a film about Egypt. About Cairo, about the people there, the streets, the history of the country, the sounds, the light, about the colours, the religions, the sand, the pyramids. I see and I hear. Cars honking, cars standing around everywhere, people in long clothes, including men.

According to Harun Farocki, today's photographers working in advertising are, in a way, continuing the tradition of 17th century Flemish painters in that they depict objects from everyday life - the "still life". The filmmaker illustrates this intriguing hypothesis with three documentary sequences which show the photographers at work creating a contemporary "still life": a cheese-board, beer glasses and an expensive watch.

An exploration of how the U.S. military employs video game technology to train troops for war. Filmed at the United States Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center, Watson is Down pairs footage of soldiers at computers engaging in combat-simulation training with scenes from the video games.

What venture capital or VC for short actually means is explained in the film itself. Banks only lend money against collateral. Those who have none have to turn to VC companies and pay interest of 40%.

An exploration of how the U.S. military employs video game technology to train troops for war. Three Dead depicts a military exercise within a mock Iraqi town built on the outskirts of Twentynine Palms, California, blurring the line between computer simulation and reality.

The film documents the work of an anti-authoritarian and self-organized school store in Witzlebenstraße in Berlin-Charlottenburg, which emerged as a critique of the development of children's stores. The film shows how the teachers discuss the conversion of open spaces into playgrounds with the children and how the children jointly prepare the publication of their newspaper "Radau". The concept of the children's stores was developed by the Action Council for the Liberation of Women, which emerged from the Socialist German Student Union (SDS), at the Free University of Berlin (FU) and was organized as self-help from January 1968. Helke Sander was one of the co-founders of the Action Council.

A film based on the poem of the same name by Georg Heym (1911).

A New Product is a corporate documentary, or, that is, a document of corporate qualities; specifically about what seems to be a small company whose purpose is to consult and design working spaces for larger corporations, exemplified by Vodafone and Unilever.

Horst Wolland is a welder in Berlin who tries to move up the career ladder to better provide for his family. He is on the verge of being promoted when the working conditions worsen, triggering a strike. Wolland stays out of it, but he also refuses to tell his manager who the strike leader is, so he is not promoted. Wolland understands what solidarity means and tries to organize another strike.

Harun Farocki: Serious Games I–IV (2009–10) explores the use of virtual reality and gaming technology in U.S. military recruitment, training and after-action therapy, revealing fundamental links between technology and violence in a time of war. Young recruits engage in simulated combat training, which barely differs from video games produced as entertainment. Footage is included from a workshop demonstrating the use of computer re-enactments in the psychological care of veterans suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. As a large-scale installation, Serious Games critically focuses on the role of audiovisual culture in the spectacle of war.

Manfred, a lathe operator, and Manuela, a seamstress, marry and try to find happiness together. They have two children in quick succession and realize that their simultaneous material advancement is beyond their strength. Marianne stops working and Manfred's position in the company deteriorates. The atmosphere between the two becomes more irritable, even more so when Marianne finds a new job. She becomes increasingly distant from Manfred, who is suspicious of her emancipation, and ends up sleeping with another man. But the two move towards each other and, after five years of marriage, find their way back together.

HARUN FAROCKI – TAKE TWO combines two perspectives on filmmaker Harun Farocki. For his TV documentary “Die Sache mit der Realität. Eine Collage über Dokumentarfilm” (1996), Lothar Schuster had a long conversation with Farocki, whom he had known since the late 1960s. Farocki discusses the idea of the Enlightenment, the compositional patterns of his films, the relationship between image and text. Ingo Kratisch, responsible for the camera in many of Farocki’s films between 1977 and his death, used his photo and film camera to record casual observations during the shooting of “The Creators of Shopping Worlds”(2001), “In Comparison”(2009), “Serious Games”(2009/10) and other films. In HARUN FAROCKI – TAKE TWO, Schuster’s and Kratisch’s footage alternates; discourse and observation comment and complement each other. On the one hand the gradual construction of thoughts during speech, on the other the act of patiently waiting, making pauses and preparing to shoot.