APPENDIKS 3

Beginning Saturday, the 25th of October, Appendiks presents 10 films by

filmmaker Harun Farocki.

Harun Farocki has been producing film for the past thirty years. He works

within the field of documentary, but is best known for his unique

contribution to the essay film.

Most of Farockis films problematize technologies of visual representation

and reproduction. He uses material produced for the mass media in

conjunction with alternative media coverage of the same events. He has

produced almost all of his films independently, and his choice of production

is formally incorporated into his films. He explains it this way: When one

doesnt have money for car, shooting, nice clothes; when one doesnt have

money to make images in which film time and film life flow uninterruptedly,

then one has to put ones effort into intelligently putting together

separate elements: a montage of ideas.

It is possible for Harun Farocki to operate as an independent filmmaker due

to a system he has created. Working independently for German industry and

television, Farocki finances his essay films by making traditional

industrial documentaries and then recycling this commercial material in his

own work. This mode of production is directly linked to one of the questions

Farocki raises with his films: how is history produced through media? Using

montage and editing to produce meaning, through the juxtaposition of

recycled material it becomes possible for a potential viewer to make a

critical reading of that information. Farockis films encourage the viewer

to do her or his part of the work. Farocki puts it this way: One has to

encounter an image or thought at least twice to see what happened to it, how

it has been transformed by a new context. Farocki stresses that a film

first finds its political potential in its encounter with the viewer, and

also due to the fact that it can by viewed repeatedly.

It is now possible to consult Harun Farockis films at Appendiks.

Some of the films available:

The Creators of Shopping Worlds, 2001, 73 min.

I Thought I Was Seeing Convicts, 2000, 25 min.

Videograms of A Revolution, directed with Andrei Ujica, 1992, 106 min.

Images of the World and the Inscription of War, 1988, 75 min.

Harun Farocki lives and works in Berlin.

Appendiks also presents the new issue of The Journal of Aesthetics and

Protest. The journal sits at a discursive juncture between art and (often

anarchist) activism with the knowledge that a knowledge and discourse are

one tool in changing the world. Edited by Marc Herbst and Robert Herbst.

Graphic design by Kimberly Varella.