Films 1983

1983

Ein Bild
An Image
Four days spent in a studio working on a centerfold photo for Playboy magazine provided the subject matter for my film. The magazine itself deals with culture, cars, a certain lifestyle. Maybe all those trappings are only there to cover up the naked woman. Maybe it's like with a paper-doll. The naked woman in the middle is a sun around which a system revolves: of culture, of business, of living! (It's impossible to either look or film into the sun.) One can well imagine that the people creating such a picture, the gravity of which is supposed to hold all that, perform their task with as much care, seriousness, a responsibility as if they were splitting uranium. This film, An Image, is part of a series I've been working on since 1979. The television station that commissioned it assumes in these cases that I'm making a film that is critical of its subject matter, and the owner or manager of the thing that's being filmed assumes that my film is an advertisement for them. I try to do neither. Nor do I want to do something in between, but beyond both. (Harun Farocki, Zelluloid, no. 27, Fall 1988)

1983

Jean-Marie Straub und Danièle Huillet bei der Arbeit
an einem Film nach Franz Kafkas Romanfragment
"Amerika"/ Jean-Marie Straub and Daniele Huillet
at Work on Franz Kafka's "Amerika"
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. Farocki's admiration for Straub was so great that he said of "Between Two Wars": "Perhaps I only made this film to earn Straub's recognition." In this observation-driven film Farocki documents the fulfillment of his wish.The film shows Farocki, under Straub's direction, rehearsing for his role as Delamarche in the film "Klassenverhältnisse" (1983). Anyone who has seen Farocki's documentary of the shoot will never forget these short scenes.The directing technique of Jean-Marie Straub and his wife Daniele Huillet is so repetitive and detail-obsessed that the performers are made to rehearse the scenes to the point of exhaustion. Straub manages his actors like a theater director.The very fact that it is unusual among filmmakers makes it well worth having captured Straub's working methods on film. Farocki filmed a work of resistance against traditional cinema, against which his own films rebel. (Tilman Baumgärtel)

1983

Interview: Heiner Müller
A conversation between Harun Farocki and Heiner Müller about theaters and other things, filmed for a French channel in 1983. (production statement)

1983

"L´Argent" von Bresson
Some of Filmkritik's authors comment on Bressons L'Argent. Script and commentary by Hartmut Bitomsky, Manfred Blank, Jürgen Ebert, Harun Farocki, Gaby Körner, Barbara Schlungbaum and Melanie Walz. (Harun Farocki)