80 WASHINGTON SQUARE EAST Harun Farocki was born in 1944 in what was Sudetengau, now the Czech Republic. He lived in India and Indonesia before moving with his family to Germany at age 10. In his early twenties, he left for West Berlin to further his studies in cinema, and spent most of his working life there. By the time of his death in 2014, he had directed over 120 films and installations. Laboring under the burden of Europe’s history in which the Holocaust loomed large, Farocki was a naturalist of loss. His work, often graceful in its observations, was never far from the injury of our world. “He was endlessly patient,” Antje Ehmann wrote, “with the strangeness, the beauty, the stupidity, and even the unbearable cruelness of our world.” He consistently chronicled that which has been intentionally repressed – genocide, the laborer, the American prison system, the trauma of war. Often his films register the effects that free markets, war, and their attendant technologies have on the individual, intimating that these forces are constant company. Coincident with major and incremental shifts in technology, the films in this program serve as an index of technological development from the beginning of the twentieth century to the first decade of the twenty-first. Organized by Lucas Quigley and Robert Snowden. The project would not be possible without the support of Antje Ehmann, The Estate of Harun Farocki, Nicola Lees, Carol Greene, Jed Rapfogel, and Greene Naftali Gallery. We also wish to thank Jesse Bransford, Tammy Brown, Marina Molarsky–Beck, Leslie Dick, Matthias Rajmann, Chloe Truong– Jones, Andrew Weiner, and Audrey Wollen. Design by Lucas Quigley. 80 Washington Square East is a part of NYU, Steinhardt School, Department of Art and Art Professions Education Block 80 Washington Square E, New York, NY 10003 PROGRAM today. […] The plasticity of life and work positively using cynicism; that means, processes decreases everywhere. At the using phrases whose emptiness one not same time, more and more games are only perceives, but even takes into April 8 played which are intended to expose account. One could speak of a second what lies hidden within human beings. order cynicism, which entails being Videograms of a Revolution The rules by which we are supposed to cynical about one’s own cynicism and 1992, 106 min live are increasingly uncertain, and there gaining a language that communicates Farocki and Andrei Ujica’s film shows the are more and more games where life is that one only trusts it because one Romanian revolution of December 1989 trained, like a sport. Instruction manuals doesn’t trust it, and knows oneself in this in Bucharest in a new media-based form for life: in the commodity society, the mistrust to be of one mind with all one’s of historiography. Demonstrators occu- instruction manual is the only record of counterparts. One could be tempted to pied the television station and broadcast theory. extol this as a further case of the social, continuously for 120 hours, thereby (Harun Farocki) not entirely conscious refinement of establishing the television studio as a communication, if it were not clear how new historical site. Between December April 29 much it compels the participants into an 21, 1989 (the day of President Ceausescu’s infantilization, from which they see no last speech) and December 26, 1989 (the Bedtime Stories: Railways escape. first televised summary of his trial), the 1977, 3 min. (Dirk Baecker) cameras recorded events at the most important locations in Bucharest, almost Images of the World and the Inscription May 13 without exception. of War (Dietrich Leder) 1988, 75 min. Still Life The vanishing point of Images of the 1997, 56 min. April 15 World is the conceptual image of the According to Farocki, today’s photo- ‘blind spot’ of the evaluators of aerial graphers working in advertising are, Bedtime Stories: Ships footage of the IG Farben industrial plant in a way, continuing the tradition of 17th 1977, 3 min. taken by the Americans in 1944. Com- century Flemish painters in that they mentaries and notes on the photographs depict objects from everyday life – the As You See show that it was only decades later that “still life.” Farocki illustrates this intrigu- 1986, 72 min. the CIA noticed what the Allies hadn’t ing hypothesis with three documentary As You See is an action-filled feature film. wanted to see: that the Auschwitz sequences that show the photographers It reflects upon girls in porn magazines concentration camp is depicted next to at work creating a contemporary “still to whom names are ascribed and about the industrial bombing target. At one life”: a cheese-board, beer glasses, and the nameless dead in mass graves, upon point during this later investigation, the an expensive watch. machines that are so ugly that coverings image of an experimental wave pool – (Production note) have to be used to protect the workers’ already visible at the beginning of the eyes, upon engines that are too beautiful film – flashes across the screen, May 20 to be hidden under the hoods of cars, recognizably referring to the biding of upon labor techniques that either cling the gaze: for one’s gaze and thoughts are I Thought I Was Seeing Convicts to the notion of the hand and the brain not free when machines, in league with 2000, 23 min. working together or want to do away with science and the military, dictate what is Images from the maximum-security it. My film As You See is an essay film. to be investigated. prison in Corcoran, California. The The contemporary opinion industry is (Christa Blümlinger) surveillance camera shows a pie-shaped like a huge mouth, or maybe a paper segment: a concrete-paved yard where shredder. May 6 the prisoners, dressed in shorts and I compose a new text out of these mostly shirtless, are allowed to spend scraps and thus stage a paper-chase. Bedtime Stories 1–3: Cat Stories a half an hour a day. A convict attacks My film is made up of many details and 1977, 9 min. another, upon which those uninvolved creates a lot of image-image and lay themselves flat on the ground, their word-image and word-word relationships An Image arms over their heads. They know what among them. So there’s a lot to chew 1983, 25 min. comes now: the guard will call out a on. I searched for and found a form in Four days spent in a studio working on warning and the fire rubber bullets. If the which one can make a little money go a centerfold photo for Playboy magazine convicts do not stop fighting now, the a long way. provided the subject matter for my film. guard will shoot for real. The pictures (Harun Farocki) The magazine itself deals with culture, are silent, the trail of gun smoke drifts cars, a certain lifestyle. Maybe all those across the picture. The camera and the April 22 trappings are only there to cover up gun are right next to each other. The the naked woman. Maybe it’s like with field of vision and the gun viewfinder fall How to Live in the FRG a paper-doll. The naked woman in the together... 1990, 79 min. middle is a sun around which a system (Harun Farocki) In 1989, the production year, we filmed revolves: of culture, of business, of acted scenes in 46 locations. Scenes living! (It’s impossible to either look or The Silver and the Cross from psycho-dramas, socio-dramas, and film into the sun.) One can well imagine 2010, 17 min. other hypenated-science dramas. We that the people creating such a picture, This video, a diptych of two side-by-side filmed in schools, public administration the gravity of which is supposed to hold images, analyzes the towns, workers, offices, higher education institutions and all that, perform their task with as much and silver mines of Potosí, Perú, during clinics, when fragments of life were care, seriousness, and responsibility as the period of Spanish colonization. acted out. When life was acted to if they were splitting uranium. With a landscape painting by Gaspar demonstrate something, to instruct, to (Harun Farocki) Miguel de Berrío, Farocki discusses practice, to cope with something. [...] I the brutal process by which Spain filmed games, because games have rules A New Product colonized the Incan empire by enslaving and establish rules. There are all too few 2012, 37 min. its people, extracting its resources, and rules determining the speech and A New Product shows that organizations monopolizing its silver industry. As actions of people in documentary films have found ways and means to speak Farocki exclaims, “On the mountain the cross; in the mountain the silver ore. The Parallel I–IV a canvas, primed for painting. Flesh is Spanish colonists brought the cross and 2012–2014, 43 min. turned into something different, looking took away the silver.” Parallel opens up a history of styles in like marble. It seems as though life has computer graphics. The first games of to be frozen in order to achieve beauty; I Interface the 1980s consisted of only horizontal and reused some of this footage 15 years later 1995, 24 min. vertical lines. This abstraction was seen in Images of the World and the Inscription Throughout most of Interface Farocki sits as a failing, and today representations of War which deals with the relationship at a desk, watching two video monitors are oriented towards photo-realism. between preservation and destruction. while explaining his editing process in For over one hundred years photo- (Harun Farocki) a monotonous fashion: how to edit with graphy and film were the leading media.