Harun Farocki
Directing
Biography
Harun Farocki was a German filmmaker, author, and lecturer in film. He made over 90 films, the vast majority of them short experimental documentaries.
Born: January 9, 1944
Place of Birth: Neutitschein, Sudetenland
Known For
A German Youth
At the end of the 1960s the post-war generation began to revolt against their parents. This was a generation disillusioned by anti-communist capitalism and a state apparatus in which they believed they saw fascist tendencies. This generation included journalist Ulrike Meinhof, lawyer Horst Mahler, filmmaker Holger Meins as well as students Gudrun Ensslin and Andreas Baader.
Class Relations
A young man, recently arrived in New York from Europe, becomes swept up in a series of events that are beyond his knowledge or control.
Images of the World and the Inscription of War
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.
The Inextinguishable Fire
An austere treatise on the military-industrial complex that produces napalm.
Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet at Work on a Film Based 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.
Their Newspapers
Ihre Zeitungen is a political film rooted in the 1968 student campaign against the Springer press group, which controlled popular dailies such as the Berliner Zeitung and the Bild Zeitung. Claiming the latter were manipulating public opinion, the students laid siege to the publisher's offices. These events made a strong impression on the German collective conscience, and it's in this context that Farocki made this "agit-prop" film.
Between Two Wars
A film about the time of the blast furnaces – 1917–1933 – about the development of an industry, about perfect machinery which had to run itself to the point of its own destruction.
Kulturplatz
Workers Leaving the Factory
Using one of the Lumière Brothers' first films of workers leaving the Factory as his starting point, Farocki provides an insight to changes in industrial production, workers' strikes and motion pictures-- via images of workers leaving factories throughout the years.
Georg K. Glaser – Writer and Smith
Portrait of Georg Glaser, who is a writer in the mornings and a blacksmith in the afternoons.
Filmography
as Himself
as Self (archive footage)
as Harun Farocki
as Self
as Self
as Narrador
as Self (uncredited)
as Delamarche
as N°1068
as Self / Interviewer
as (voice)