Films by Harun Farocki

Germany 2013, 37 min
by Harun Farocki

At first glance, A NEW PRODUCT doesn’t seem especially compelling: in a bland corporate boardroom, executives and consultants talk about optimizing employees’ workspace in order to improve productivity. Boring? Think again. Harun Farocki, the master essayist and editor, transforms a mundane situation into theatre of the absurd, blessed with acerbic wit and a sharp critical sense. By filming what appears to be the dullest possible thing, he has created a subtle report from a world whose violent machinery shines through from under a veneer of decorum. Above all, the film lets us appropriate images of an implacable system. Black comedy at its finest.

Germany 2009
by Harun Farocki

“I would like to propose a film that contributes to the concept of work. That compares the work of a traditional society, like in Africa, in an early industrial society such as India, and in a highly developed industrial society, in Europe or Japan. The object of comparison is to be the work in building houses. Houses to live in.” This was written in Harun Farocki’s exposé from 2003 for a documentary project. “After initial research - I had the idea of using the brick, its manufacture and its processing as the object of comparison. We were looking for a great variety of uses for bricks and we were looking for manufacturing processes that would possibly do away with bricks.” In India there was a brickworks whose threading machine was from the 1930s when Gandhi was organizing the anti-colonialist protest. The installation in northern France was operated by Moroccans who housed in barracks like POWs or forced labourers. In Mumbai apartment houses were built much like they are in Europe. No hand touched the products that came out of the highly mechanized factories in Germany. In Burkina Faso Farocki followed the communal work on a hospital ward and a school building with his camera: “I’ve never in my life been able to observed such a strange process so closely.” The film does without commentary; there are only indications of the places and a few explanations offered in subtitles.

Germany 1992, 107 min
by Harun Farocki

“Television is on our side! We have won!” This chronicle of the 1989 revolution in Romania is put together from live coverage by the state broadcaster TVR and video recorded by numerous amateurs. Harun Farocki and Romanian writer and director Andrei Ujica had access to 125 hours of material, from which they compiled a minute-by-minute account of the period from December 21st to the 25th. Seen from multiple perspectives, these videograms cover the rapid succession of events from Nicolae Ceaușescu’s last public speech in Bucharest to the execution of the dictator and his wife four days later. The digital images are condensed to shape a historical drama, and the audiovisual historiography takes on the form of a classic stage play: “The people revolt, power is overthrown, the rulers are executed.” In 1992, the directors said: “Our goal was to untangle the existing bundle of images and edit them into sequences so that the viewer has the impression that they are moving through the same film loop from one camera to the next for five days.” The work has been presented as an installation in museums, including in New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 2023. Source of Synopsis