Wie man sieht (As You See) – In memory of filmmaker Harun Farocki
Videogramme einer Revolution (Videograms of a Revolution)
The Goethe-Institut Los Angeles and Los Angeles Filmforum present
Wie man sieht (As You See) –
In memory of filmmaker Harun Farocki
Wednesday January 28, 2015, 7:00 pm
Screening 3: Videogramme einer Revolution (Videograms of a Revolution)
Film Series
Wednesdays, January 14th through March 4th 2015
Goethe-Institut Los Angeles, 5750 Wilshire Blvd. Suite 100, Los Angeles, CA 90036
German with English subtitles
Free admission, but RSVP needed, by email to rsvp@losangeles.goethe.org or the 323.525.3388
Harun Farocki – the director whose perspicacious cinematic essays analyzed the new media world – died in July 2014. With his radical way of looking at things Farocki strove to endow images with their own form of self-will, to expose their political and cultural coding.
Farocki lived and worked in Berlin as a filmmaker, artist and writer. His essay and observational films question the production and perception of images, decoding film as a medium and examining how audiovisual culture is related to history, politics, technology and war.
His projects have been shown in festivals and solo, group and retrospective exhibitions worldwide at important events and international institutions, including the 2010 São Paulo Biennial, Documenta X and XXII in Kassel, Tate Modern in London, MACBA in Barcelona, Museum Ludwig in Cologne and the Jeu de Paume in Paris.
All films in this series are in German with English Subtitles, unless otherwise noted.
For more event information: info@losangeles.goethe.org, or +1 323 5253388
Tickets: Free, but please RSVP due to limited seating, by email to rsvp@losangeles.goethe.org or the 323.525.3388
$1 validated parking (for events only) on weekdays after 6:00 pm and all day on weekends in the Wilshire Courtyard West underground garage-P1.
Special Thanks to Daniel Chaffey of the Goethe-Institut Los Angeles and Lucas Quigley for organizing this series.
Videogramme einer Revolution (Videograms of a Revolution)
Videogramme einer Revolution (Videograms of a Revolution)
Dir. Harun Farocki & Andrei Ujica, 1992, 106 min. color and b/w.Romanian, English and German with English subtitles, Digital.
In Europe in the fall of 1989, history took place before our very eyes. Farocki and Ujica's "Videograms" shows the Rumanian revolution of December 1989 in Bucharest in a new media-based form of historiography. Demonstrators occupied the television station [in Bucharest] and broadcast continuously for 120 hours, thereby establishing the television studio as a new historical site. Between December 21, 1989 (the day of Ceaucescu's last speech) and December 26, 1989 (the first televised summary of his trial), the cameras recorded events at the most important locations in Bucharest, almost without exception. The determining medium of an era has always marked history, quite unambiguously so in that of modern Europe. It was influenced by theater, from Shakespeare to Schiller, and later on by literature, until Tolstoy. As we know, the 20th century is filmic. But only the videocamera, with its heightened possibilities in terms of recording time and mobility, can bring the process of filming history to completion. Provided, of course, that there is history. (Andrei Ujica) Harun Farocki conceived of and assembled Videograms of a Revolution together with Andrei Ujica. Ujica, who was born in Timisoara in 1951, is a Rumanian writer who has been living in Germany since 1981, where he is a lecturer in literature and media theory. He has good connections to Rumanian friends and colleagues who not only opened up the television archives to the authors but also enabled them to get in contact with cameramen from state film studios and with numerous amateur videographers who had documented the events on the streets of Bucharest, often from the roofs of highrise buildings. "If at the outbreak of the uprising only one camera dared to record," said Farocki, "hundreds were in operation on the following day." (Dietrich Leder, Film-Dienst 24/92) - http://farocki-film.de/flash/index.html