Wie man sieht (As You See) – In memory of filmmaker Harun Farocki

Bilder der Welt und Inschrift des Krieges (Images of the world and the Inscription War)

The Goethe-Institut Los Angeles and Los Angeles Filmforum present

Wie man sieht (As You See) –

In memory of filmmaker Harun Farocki

Wednesday February 18, 2015, 7:00 pm

Screening 6: Bilder der Welt und Inschrift des Krieges (Images of the world and the Inscription War)

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.

Bilder der Welt und Inschrift des Krieges (Images of the world and the Inscription War)

1988, 75 min., color and b/w, German with English subtitles. Digital.

The vanishing point of Images of the World is the conceptual image of the 'blind spot' of the evaluators of aerial footage of the IG Farben industrial plant taken by the Americans in 1944. Commentaries and notes on the photographs show that it was only decades later that the CIA noticed what the Allies hadn't wanted to see: that the Auschwitz concentration camp is depicted next to the industrial bombing target. (At one point during this later investigation, the image of an experimental wave pool - already visible at the beginning of the film - flashes across the screen, recognizably referring to the biding of the gaze: for one's gaze and thoughts are not free when machines, in league with science and the military, dictate what is to be investigated. Farocki thereby puts his finger on the essence of media violence, a "terrorist aesthetic" (Paul Virilio) of optic stimulation, which today appears on control panels as well as on television, with its admitted goal of making the observer into either an accomplice or a potential victim, as in times of war. (Christa Bl�mlinger)

One must be just as wary of pictures as of words. There is no literature without linguistic criticism, without the author being critical of the existing language. It's just the same with film. One need not look for new, as yet unseen images, but one must work with existing ones in such a way that they become new. (J�rg Becker, TAZ, 30.01.1989) -- http://farocki-film.de/flash/index.html