“De madre alemana y padre indio, Harun Farocki nació en la isla de Java en 1944. Estudió cine en Berlín. Entre 1973 y 1984 fue editor de Filmkritik, la revista de cine más influyente de Alemania. Dio a conocer la desconcertante potencia de su concepto del cine en 1969, con EL FUEGO INEXTINGUIBLE, un documental que en plena guerra de Vietnam examinaba con parsimonia y desapego el proceso de producción del napalm. Desde entonces no ha parado de filmar -lleva ya más de 60 películas-, de profundizar la pertinencia excéntrica de los temas que aborda y de perfeccionar una forma cinematográfica única, regida casi exclusivamente por el principio del montaje, donde la curiosidad periodística se entrelaza con la reflexión y engendra, en la huella de Godard, de Jean-Marie Straub o de Alexander Kluge, un “cine de ensayo”. Por su precisión, su escrupulosidad, su pasión por el detalle, los de Farocki son verdaderos documentales clínicos; exploran sus objetos con paciencia, con tenacidad, con una exhaustividad compulsiva que hace de su nitidez conceptual una forma nueva de la hipnosis o la alucinación”.
Un arquitecto nos mostró los planos de una nueva penitenciaría para "delincuentes sexuales" en Oregón, donde se había tachado un tercio de los edificios, justamente los planificados para rehabilitación y terapia. La Legislatura había denegado los fondos. En Campden, cerca de Filadelfia, un guardia me mostró la cárcel; detrás de los vidrios, como si estuvieran en la jaula de los leones, los hombres me miraban de reojo y con desdén. Vi mujeres peinándose unas a otras como en un film de Pasolini. El guardián me contó que en los techos de las salas de estar había respiradores por donde se podían lanzar gases lacrimógenos. Sin embargo, nunca los habían utilizado porque las sustancias químicas se descomponían con el tiempo.
Imágenes de la cárcel de máxima seguridad de Corcoran, California. La cámara de vigilancia muestra una parte del patio de cemento cuya forma se parece a una porción de torta; allí se les permite a los prisioneros, vestidos con pantalones cortos y casi siempre sin camisa, pasar media hora por día. Cuando un prisionero ataca a otro, quienes no están involucrados se arrojan al piso y se cubren la cabeza con las manos. Conocen de sobra lo que sigue a continuación: el guardia hará un llamado de advertencia y luego disparará con balas de goma. Si los que pelean no se detienen, usará balas de plomo.
Las imágenes son mudas; delante de la cámara, pasa la huella humeante del arma recién disparada. La cámara y el arma están exactamente una junto a la otra; el campo visual y el campo de tiro coinciden. Es obvio que el patio se construyó en forma de segmentos circulares para que nadie pudiera protegerse de las miradas o de las balas. Uno de los reclusos, generalmente el atacante, cae. En muchos casos está muerto o herido de muerte.
Dentro de la cárcel, los presos forman parte de bandas con nombres tales como "Fraternidad Aria" o "Mafia Mexicana". Cumplen largas condenas y fueron recluidos lejos del mundo, en una cárcel de máxima seguridad. No les quedan sino los cuerpos, cuyos músculos desarrollan permanentemente, y la pertenencia a una organización. Su honor es para ellos más importante que la vida; y luchan aun sabiendo que serán baleados. En Corcoran, se disparó más de dos mil veces contra los camorristas. Los guardias dijeron que a menudo sus colegas mandaban deliberadamente al patio a los miembros de grupos antagónicos y hacían apuestas con respecto al resultado de la pelea, como si se tratase de gladiadores.
Con el propósito de ahorrar material, las cintas de las cámaras de vigilancia corren a una velocidad reducida. En los registros a los que tuvimos acceso, los intervalos eran prolongados, de modo que los movimientos aparecen entrecortados y no fluidos. Las peleas en el patio se asemejan a un videojuego barato. Resulta difícil imaginar una representación menos dramática de la muerte.
| “Who is Farocki?” was the now famous heading that Cahiers du cinéma used in what was probably the very first essay about Farocki in 1975. That is a long while ago, and it confirms that 'Harun Farocki' has been around for a long while: already by 1975 he had been making films for a decade. The first time I wrote about Farocki was in 1983, the first time I introduced him to a live audience was in 1993, by which time I could with some justification call him “Germany's best-known unknown filmmaker”. A year later, Farocki had his first major retrospective in the United States, following several festival screenings of hisImages of the World and Inscription of War (1988). After becoming every student film-club's favourite meditation on the media and modern warfare in the age of smart bombs and Operation Desert Storm, Images of the World quickly advanced to something of a classic: the reference film, the anchoring point for seminars on Paul Virilio, on the essay-film as a hybrid documentary but politically subversive film genre, on the 'limits of representation' after Auschwitz andSchindler's List, as well as – this needs to be rediscovered after September 11th – the definitive film about terrorism. As happens so often with pioneers: they go unrecognised in their own country until someone else – often far away – 'discovers' them, and travellers bring back the news of what an exceptional talent has all these years been living right in their midst. It is therefore no exaggeration to say that, with a dozen feature-length films, and some 60 films altogether, along with a collection of essays in German, a bi-lingual collection of his own writings, and another book on Farocki about to be published in English, Harun Farocki has advanced to being one of Germany's best-known known filmmakers. Since the early 1990s, television and installation art has preoccupied Farocki at least as much as the cinema. What better place than the museum to confront the cinema once more with itself and its history? A curious set of parallels has evolved between the museum as a space of contemplation, and the electronic vision machines and their role as social instruments of surveillance; the museum as a site of aesthetic distance and reflection, and scientific instruments of calculation, of mathematics as means of measuring and monitoring. Both are now the expression of a control society which has replaced dialogue and democracy with sensoring and data-mining, just as it has muted – in our parts at least – the hard power of the coercive disciplinary society by the soft power of self-policing and self-fashioning. In installations such as Schnittstelle/Interface (1995) Farocki once more examines his own method of work ('work', 'place' and 'camera') and tries to locate the crossroads at which he finds himself. For video art and the digital media now challenge a filmmaker's craft; they intersect with the prime function which the (still) photographic image used to have for Farocki's view of history, and they interface with his analysis of the politics of the image. Now that he has completed another installation, Ich glaubte, Gefangene zu sehen/ I thought I saw Prisoners (2001) it seems that Farocki has completed yet another change in his long career. Not so much a change of medium or of the technological apparatus, but of the entire dispositif of the visible. What has shifted is his way of thinking about and of being in the world. Farocki captures in devastating mini-narratives the new social deployment of images, making one sense the unimaginable quantities of their recording and storage, alerting one to their replay and circulation in opaque and unaccountable sites of power. We are forced to share the point of view of blind eyes and of machine intelligence, scanning ever more of them for information – of what? And for whom? Installation art returns us to the spatial dimension of the image: but Farocki has also noticed for us how prisons and supermarkets, video-games and theatres of war have become 'work-places' – of subjects as much as of commodities. They are spaces that are converging, once one appreciates how they all fall under the new pragmatics of the time-space logic of optimising access, flow, control. These sites a filmmaker has to take cognisance of and recognise him/herself implicated in, but so has the spectator, whose role has changed so much. As one walks through Farocki's works, which have become our worlds, one realises that he may be one of the few filmmakers today capable of understanding the logic of this convergence, contesting its inevitability and yet feeling confident enough to continue to believe in the wit, wisdom and the poetry of images. This certainly makes Harun Farocki an important filmmaker: probably Germany's best-known important filmmaker. |
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