An unpublished talk given by Harun Farocki in 1987 at the event "Films that Think in Images" at the Akademie der Künste, West Berlin. The typescript was found among Farocki's papers after his death.
"In 1970, the war in Vietnam had nearly been forgotten. The Palestinians were making themselves known. […] Perhaps Godard wanted to make a new base with his film […] when he began a film in 1970 that was supposed to be called Until Victory. The footage lay around for a few years." Oscillating between surprising associations and following a formal pattern reminiscent of a semantic game of dominos, Farocki speaks about
Jean-Luc Godard's and Anne-Marie Miéville's "Ici et ailleurs" (1974). How does politics interact with the logic of images and sounds, he asks, and what does technology contribute? "Godard wants to teach how to see; in industry and military labs, machines are currently learning to do so. Pattern recognition: out of a trillion satellite photos of the Soviet Union, a device reads any pattern that looks like a missile silo and shows these to the on-duty personnel."
Farocki's talk, translated by Ted Fendt, can be read as a complement to his and Kaja Silverman's book Speaking about Godard. It is dedicated to the memory of Elisabeth Büttner, who wrote about "Ici et ailleurs" early on and felt close to Harun Farocki's work.
Harun Farocki (1944-2014) was born in Neutitschein, in German-annexed Czechoslovakia. Since graduating from Berlin's
Deutsche Film-und Fernsehakademie in 1966, he has directed more that 90 films that include feature films, documentaries and television programs. He has also collaborated with numerous filmmakers as scriptwriter, actor and producer. His films have been the subject of retrospectives at the
Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona in 2004, and the Vienna Filmmuseum in 2006. He has participated in important international events such as the 2005 Carnegie International and Documenta XII (2007). He has held many teaching posts and between 1993 and 1999 taught at the University of California Berkeley. Since 2004 he has been Visiting professor at
Vienna's Akademie für Bildende Künste. Harun Farocki was a media theorist and writer and was the editor of the influential German film journal
Filmkritik from 1974 to 1984.
See also
E-flux journal – Navigation Beyond Vision.
