HltO Steyerl HITO STEYERL, FACTORY OF THE SUN, 2015, HD video, 21 min. / SONNENFABRIK, HD-Video. (ALL IMAGES COURTESY OF THE ARTISTAND ANDREWKREPS GALLERY, NEW YORK) Hito Steyerl Hito Steyerl HITO STEYERL, LIQUIDITY INC., 2014, HD video, 30 min. / particularly in NOVEMBER (2004), LOVELY ANDREA t 2 m+àJt~Z TFfÉ CUOC-V LIQUIDITÄT INC., HD-Video. (2007), and JOURNAL NO. 1 (2007), in which the f ^ r rft Æ Ï contemplation of a martyred friend, the search for a dimly remembered photo of the artist herself, and interviews about an old Yugoslavian newsreel lost in v*ü that country’s dissolution, respectively, supply the SOFTWARE through-lines to each piece. Lastly, Farocki and Stey­ erl’s films are frequently compared to those of three erl share an interest in exploring the political dimen­ exemplary elder filmmakers: Harun Farocki, Jean- sion of the production and distribution of images, Luc Godard, and Chris Marker. This heroic male trio with Farocki stressing the former half of this process, has been invoked innumerable times by harried jour­ and Steyerl, increasingly, the latter. nalists and pedigree-obsessed academics alike when a Focusing on the Farocki-Steyerl relationship and quick gloss is required. enhancing its details is instructive, illuminating not Even if this tripartite genealogy largely functions only the similarities between the two, but, more im­ On exposed hills, the as a form of praise, implying that a torch has been portantly, Steyerl’s divergence from older models passed from one generation to the next, significant Weather Underground lines can be traced from Steyerl’s work back to these will host corporate three figures. Through Godard, we might see a model clouds using orgone of the socially engaged filmmaker who uses the for­ c a n n o n s . mal expression of an intellectual restlessness to dis­ rupt dominant ways of thinking. Like Marker, Steyerl HITO STEYERL, LIQUIDITY INC., 2014, HD video, 30 min. / has often pondered the nature of personal memory, LIQUIDITÄT INC., HD-Video. AFTER EFFECTS £Z) HALTER Hito Steyerl’s moving-image work is often placed Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s feature Mysterious Ob­ in the category of the “essay film,” a protean quasi­ ject at Noon (2000), which blends documentary with genre that is notoriously difficult to pin down. One of scripted drama. “Maybe in the end we should recon­ the most ambitious attempts to do so in recent years cile ourselves to the fact that the film essay is not a was “The Way of the Termite: The Essay in Cinema, territory and that it is, like fiction and documentary, 1909-2004,” an expansive retrospective organized by one of the polarities between which films operate,” Jean-Pierre Gorin for the Austrian Filmmuseum in Gorin states in his notes for the series: “an energy 2007, which included all manner of titles from D. W. more than a genre.” If pressed for a more direct defi­ Griffith’s narrative fiction A Corner in Wheat (1909) nition, one might say that the essay film puts the trac­ to Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin’s canonical work ing of a conceptual line at its center, and will, toward of cinéma vérité, Chronicle of a Summer (1961), to this end, poach liberally from various other practices. But as with other problematic terms—such as experi­ ED H ALTER is a director of Light Industry, Brooklyn, and m ental and avant-garde—perhaps the most efficient Critic in Residence in the Department of Film and Electronic Art way to explain this deeply impure form is to point to at Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York. the achievements of its best practitioners. Thus, Stey- PARKETT 97 2015 152 1 5 3 Hito Steyerl Hito Steyerl iti Safari Ille tdU View History Bookmarks Window Help 9 4 S3 O * <p < > Ig A <3* in g the Factory (1995), which compiles shots depicting eoo hnkutal on Tumblr * workers exiting factories, from the Lumières’ origi­ Ì ^ ► 1 L+ Q v/ww.tumblr.com fyi iiii Aj>filp Yahont C,ooijlr M.>[>> Ynututip Mnkiprdm Npws ■' Kpltebt ▼ nary 1895 actuality through an international range hukuvrfi c»n Tumblr ___________ ]_______________________________________ _ of twentieth-century footage culled from cinema and Sign Up Login television, in order to analyze how very similar im­ tu m b lr. Rnd and follow posts tagged #hokusai ages can be deployed to various ends. The image of workers leaving a factory, Farocki’s narrator says, is “an image like an expression, so often used that it can be understood blindly and does not have to be Hiro STEYERL, NOVEMBER, 2004, HD video, 25 min. / HD-Video. seen.” Here Farocki proposes a distinction between seeing an image and interpreting its meaning. The phenomenological, optical experience of the world through cinema is placed against the semiotic read­ ing of an image as instrumentalized information; the former is part of the essential nature of the image SEHÎT RONAHÎ while the latter is a contingent effect of culture. (ANDREA WOLF) - In 2003, Steyerl published “Documentarism as Politics of Truth,” an essay that likewise wrestles with the paradoxical nature of the photographic image, its simultaneous existence as truth and fiction. “On the one hand,” she writes, the articulation, production and reception of a document is profoundly marked by power relations and based on social conventions. On the other hand, though, the power of the of filmmaking. From his earliest titles in the 1960s HITO STEYERL, LIQUIDITY INC., 2014, HD video, 30 min. / document is based on the fact that it is also intended to be through some of his most recent, Farocki, who died LIQUIDITÄT INC., HD-Video. able to prove what is unpredictable within these power rela­ last year, shot the bulk of his work on 16-mm film. tions— it should be able to express what is unimaginable, IV* Umili In. Fie made a number of forays into electronic media, unspoken, unknown, redeeming or even monstrous— and m N1KARIN ROM W: TARlBIKtlH! for instance, Videograms of a Revolution (1992), a com­ thus create a possibility for changed pilation of television and amateur clips made with seen through phantom cameras and emulated via al­ The “unpredictable” here can be thought of as Andrei Ujica, and SERIOUS GAMES I-IV (2009-10) gorithmic means. the recalcitrant nature of photographic evidence, as and PARALLEL I-IV (2012-14), two installations deal­ This is not to say that Farocki propounds any a recorded image may contain visual facts that elude ing with computer animation and the US military’s simple reverence for the image as pellucid mirror of and even contradict the intentions of its use. It is this use of gaming that helped gain him belated atten­ reality. Quite the contrary: Farocki questions the il­ slippery but inherent link to prior reality that seems tion in the art world. As with many auteurs of his lusory depth of his images through minimal and stra­ to give documentary forms their power, and Steyerl era, the zone defined by the camera’s lens serves as tegic use of narration and montage that provides a likens this to Walter Benjamin’s notion of the “dia­ his primary space of interest. Farocki’s space is, at skeptical view of the power of these same images. As lectical image” whose redemptive truth, as she puts heart, Bazinian space, often defined by deep focus the title of his landmark feature Images of the World it, “is not relative and contingent.” Citing art histo­ and long takes, framed and edited so that we may and the Inscription of War (1988) implies, Farocki pro­ rian Georges Didi-Huberman, she gives the example perceive figures as they move through the world of poses that the technology of film provides not only a of photos taken in concentration camps and smug­ their existence.11 Farocki’s space is also akin to that recording of the world but also a set of signs that can gled out, which were able to negate the National So­ of cinéma vérité, each shot bearing evidence of life be analyzed, decoded, and countered. The force of cialist narrative by providing glimpses of a reality the as it might normally be lived, captured in real time his work lies in how he draws out these two qualities regime had denied. However, by the early twenty-first by the mechanisms of cinema. Even in the all-digital of the photographic image, at times arguing that they century, we come to see how images of real human SERIOUS GAMES and PARALLEL, Bazinian space re­ work in opposition to one another. Take, for exam­ suffering can be used to justify war on a humanitar­ tains a presence through its own negation, in a world ple, a line of narration from his video Workers Leav- ian basis. While documentary images still could be 154 1 5 5 Mito Steyerl Hilo Steyerl useful in liberation struggles, “the misery-voyeuristic Subsequently, Steyerl’s recent films have concerned HOW NOT TO BE SEEN: A FUCKING DIDACTIC EDU­ picture forms developed by this ‘redemption’ idea themselves ever more with the digital spaces where CATIONAL .MOV FILE (2014), IN FREE FALL (2010), are among the most potent documentalities3> of the such circulationism now occurs, stressing the two- GUARDS (2012), and numerous other videos. It both present and legitimize both military and economic dimensional surface of the computer screen, where disrupts the simulation of three-dimensional space invasions.” She thus concludes that “there is hardly everything is the result of reconfiguring data, and by providing two or more conflicting topologies (and a visibility that is not steeped in power relations—so the artist may arrange elements with little regard for temporalities) within the same frame and serves as that we can almost say that what we see has always the ontological necessities of the physical world.