Customer Reviews

Films of Harun Farocki: An Image

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An Image is a deconstructed walk through of a German Playboy centerfold shoot which succeeds in presenting the pornography industry as a labor job like any other. Similar to Farocki's We Live In The German Federal Republic, the film is shot in a minimalist cinéma vérité style that helps demystify the glamorization of the pornography industry and reappropriates it as a structural process. The director treats the subject of the centerfold shoot as simply a subject and nothing else, completely disregarding her sexuality and forcing her and the crew into a mechanical state. Farocki chooses to focus on the physical objects that make the centerfold shoot possible; distancing itself from the ideal effect the pictures of the shoot have on our realities. Large pieces of film equipment and lights are often the primary focus of the shot, allowing the nude subject to barely be seen or simply be reconstructed as an afterthought to the real labor of the situation.

Farocki's documentaries are telling of the mechanical nature of Germany in the 1980s, though the shift in the political nature of the world has not stopped him from becoming one of the most underappreciated documentarians in the world. Farocki's latest venture, Serious Games I-IV, currently on display at MoMA features a 4 screen installation commenting on the effect of video-game technology used to train soldiers in warfare where again we question the processes that form our realities.