A look back at the collaboration and intellectual exchanges between Harun Farocki, Hanns Zischler and Heiner Müller.
In 1976, Harun Farocki and Hanns Zischler directed Heiner Müller's plays The Battle and Tractor for Theater Basel. For Farocki, this production remained his only directorial work for theater. With Heiner Müller, however, he remained in intellectual exchange. The two collaborated on the adaptation of Müller's text The Hamletmachine for radio in 1978; for the May 1981 issue of the magazine Filmkritik, they conducted a conversation.
This booklet gathers together material about the Basel performance. Klaus Völker, then dramaturge at Theater Basel, recalls the background of the performance and compiles some of his notes from the time. A letter written by Heiner Müller to Martin Linzer, a theater critic and dramaturge in the GDR, and Farocki's text from the program note of the play, as well as photographs of the production, evoke the political and intellectual climate. In the late 1990s, Hanns Zischler wrote a memoir text about their collaboration, which has been translated into English for this issue. Finally, Anja Quickert, a theater scholar, dramaturge, and freelance writer animating the International Heiner Müller Society, contextualizes the documents and reflects on some of the staging ideas of the time.
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.
Hanns Zischler (born 1947 in Nuremberg) is a director, actor (with Wim Wenders, Chantal Akerman,
Jean-Luc Godard and Olivier Assayas), photographer, publisher and writer.
