“Labor and War and Their Interconnectedness”: Film Historian Nora M. Alter Discusses Her New Harun Farocki Monograph

Ten years ago, on July 30th, 2014, the celebrated German filmmaker, writer, and artist Harun Farocki passed away. Farocki’s output spans short political films with an agitational edge, sharp essay films critiquing the ideologies behind image production in television from the inside, observational documentaries that extended this critique to the broader economic sphere, critical texts that both accompanied his own work and investigated that of others, editing the journal Filmkritik for a decade, teaching at Berkeley, and collaborating with Christian Petzold. Producing a study that properly deals with this oeuvre, which spans over six decades and numerous mediums and formats, is a daunting undertaking. The recent publication of Harun Farocki: Forms of Intelligence (Columbia University Press, 2024), the first book-length English language study of its kind, marks a landmark occasion in the study of the erudite German filmmaker. 

Nora M. Alter is a professor at Temple University’s School of Theater, Film, and Media Arts and one of the foremost experts on the essay film. She has published several books on the topic, including The Essay Film After Fact and Fiction (2018), Essays on the Essay Film (2017), and a monograph on another of cinema’s preeminent essay film practitioners, Chris Marker (2006). Nora’s latest book, Harun Farocki, continues her exploration of the essay film format in combination with another specialty of hers, German film and culture (Projecting History: Non-Fiction German Film (2002), Sound Matters: Essays on the Acoustics of Modern German Culture (2004)). The result is the most comprehensive English language study of one of the essay film’s most prominent practitioners. 

DOCUMENTARY: How did you first meet Farocki?

NORA ALTER: I initially met him after writing an article on Images of the World and the Inscription of War (1989). I was in Berkeley, where he was teaching at the time. We met, and I gave him a copy of the essay, which I think he was happy with. Several years later, in the spring of 2002, I invited him to co-teach a class with me at the University of Florida. This was made possible through a 10-week-long fellowship, the length of which made it difficult for him to find housing. So, Farocki and his partner, Antje Ehmann, lived with us. We team-taught a course together, and he provided both readings and films for the course, including works by Artavazd Peleshyan, Jean-Luc Godard (Numero Deux, 1975), Alexander Kluge (In Danger and Deep Distress, the Middle Way Spells Certain Death, 1974) and Mike Figgis (Timecode, 2000). In effect, he was emphasizing the idea of montage without necessarily calling it that. However, it was a different kind of montage from the traditional Eisensteinian or American classical montage.

D: What were the students’ reactions to his pedagogical approach?

NA: They responded really well; some even stayed in touch with him. 

D: Lucky students! In the book, you write that Farocki always considered himself a writer, even after making it as a filmmaker. Where did this self-perception of being a writer come from?

NA: When he was 16 or 17, he ran away to Berlin from home in the suburbs of Bonn. And when he was there, he did any number of jobs. For example, he worked as a beer deliverer, which allowed him to get to know the city. But it also motivated him to go back and finish his Abitur [high school exam] since he realized manual work wasn’t for him. Around this time, he started writing newspaper reviews, initially literary ones. The first proper critical text he reviewed, in 1965, was Roland Barthes’ Mythologies. Then, he entered film school in 1966.

D: What was his family environment like?

NA: He came from a family where intellectual thought was highly valued. Though his father was a doctor, he wrote and published a Ph.D. about the India-Pakistan relationship. However, his father became a fervent supporter of Hitler because he was against the Brits. He was a very authoritarian and extremely rigid man. Growing up in this post-war landscape as a dark, decidedly non-Aryan individual left a mark on Farocki and his self-perception as an outsider who could never quite fit in, even though he was completely German.

D: He began his filmmaking career with agitational shorts that reflected the radical political mood of the mid-late 1960s. 

NA: At the time, the U.S. was pouring Marshall money into the arts and culture in Berlin as a low-cost, low-risk soft power against Soviet influence. The film school that Farocki went to, the German Film and Television Academy Berlin (DFFB), was founded in this context. He was part of the inaugural class, including important future filmmakers like Helke Sanders, Helma Sanders-Brahms, Wolfgang Petersen, Holger Meins, Skip Norman, and Hartmut Bitomsky.

This was when the famous demonstration against the visit of the Shah of Iran to Berlin took place; it was the beginning of the RAF, the Vietnam War protests, etc. Farocki made a series of agitprop films like How to Make a Molotov Cocktail (1968) and Their Newspapers (1968), often in collaboration with classmates. When his partner gave birth to their twins, who were born prematurely and required a lot of care, he started to look for a more stable source of livelihood. The Inextinguishable Fire (1969) is his last overtly agitational film. 

D: You make the important point that Farocki’s career was tied to the funding and distribution avenues he could find at each stage. What was the next stage? 

NA: He started to work for West German television. Werner Dütsch, his commissioning editor (and a filmmaker himself), was letting many things slide into TV that probably shouldn’t have been allowed to get into it. Farocki was trying to analyze TV from the inside out. His first two TV programs (The Trouble with Images, 1973, and The Struggle with Images, 1974) were analyses of TV documentaries, in which he would meticulously pull these programs apart. They weren’t even particularly reprehensible programs but ones with supposedly progressive social messages. 

Farocki wanted to make the TV crews, say the cameramen, really think about what the images they filmed were for. Unlike film production contextualized by a script, the cameramen working for TV stations would often simply be told, “We need images of a certain monument in Hamburg.” So, they would capture that monument from 50 angles without knowing how their recorded shots would cohere into the greater whole. This was also the case with the editors. Farocki was very much against that kind of fragmentation of work and alienation of media workers from how their contributions fed into the overarching argument. He also wrote several accompanying essays for each of these TV programs, extending his critique in a more theoretical language. 

D: Farocki’s oeuvre is almost exclusively composed of nonfiction works, which you divide into documentaries and essay films. 

NA: Works like Inextinguishable Fire (1969), The Division of All Days (1970), and The Television Critique (1973–4) are all essay films in which he offers arguments. These films always have a heavy voiceover. Sometimes, text comes in; in some, even fictional scenes are acted out. 

The essay films center his voice as an auteur, whereas his documentaries are observational. One of the first of these documentaries is Sarah Schumann Paints an Image (1977), in which Farocki simply watches the painter create without intervening. He also had a series of interview films like On Display: Peter Weiss (1979). His most famous observational documentary is How to Live in the German Federal Republic (1990). He looks at all these self-training videos and workshops designed to help salesmen become better at their jobs. Then, he visits the same workshop leader after unification, who now has to train former East Germans to become successful salespeople. Farocki presents long takes with no voice-over. You have to make meaning and perceive the critique by how the film is put together. It’s very subtle, whereas the essay films are more didactic.

D: Would you say his critical framework stays the same between the essay films and the documentaries, but his cinematic tools and approach differ? 

NA: His observational documentaries are interrogating the social class systems of capitalism. The penultimate one, Nothing Ventured (2004), is about venture capitalism, takeovers and mergers. His last documentary, Sauerbruch Hutton Architects (2013), was about an architectural firm, specifically about investments. The focus of these projects is a critique of capitalism, whereas his essay films interrogate the nature of the image, representation, language, and text. They investigate how we’re moving more and more towards a mediatized image production society. 

D: A concept that ties both investigations of capitalism and the production of images together is labor. Farocki was deeply concerned with cinema’s historic failure to represent labor onscreen, as demonstrated in Workers Leaving the Factory (1995). 

NA: I would say labor and war and their interconnectedness. War gets integrated into all systems of capital, but so does work. And sometimes, they overlap. His interest in image production was that it’s simultaneously a process of production and representation. It’s the production of labor and the representation of labor. It’s how work enters all systems, but nobody wants to discuss it.

Similarly, the war industry enters various systems, but that’s rarely acknowledged. It’s often invisible yet present. He tried to show the complex entanglement of all these threats and how they seep into the entertainment industry, coalescing in video games and computer technologies. 

D: Speaking of technology, the last period of Farocki’s work sees him entering the art world, where he works with multichannel installations. How does this shift build upon what he’s done up to that point?

NA: Farocki was toying with this idea of “soft montage” from early on in works like Something Self Explanatory (15x) (1971) when he used a split screen of a laborer who’s working but imagining leisure. This also relates to his interest in Godard, especially in films like Here and Elsewhere (1976) and Numéro deux (1975), precisely because that’s where Godard introduces the idea of multiple simultaneous screens. 

Moving to the gallery space, where you can have multiple physical screens side by side, was a logical step. You can walk through and around the screens. You can think about the positioning of the spectator and the screens. You can have different sizes of screens and different placements. All of that is what allowed him to actualize soft montage. Additionally, the art world could provide substantial production budgets, much larger than anything he had worked with. For instance, Deep Play (2007), which was made for Documenta and coincided with the 2006 World Cup, gave him unprecedented funds and access.

D: I was fascinated to learn about the “cinematographic thesaurus” project that Farocki was working on, which I believe was never finished. It was related to his interest in the repetition of conventions and gestures throughout the history of cinema.

NA: We can trace that interest back to his early days in television when he realized certain tropes kept reappearing. This is connected to our previous discussion about TV camera operators and editors. For example, the representation of leisure would be a hand serving a plate of dessert, people at an amusement park, or people skiing. So, you end up having the same footage repeated in all these TV documentaries. We also see this repetition in how people take selfies or with spots and compositions considered suitable for taking photographs. Images become repeated cliches. They form a stockpile that you can take from with ease. 

Farocki explores an action that is filmed over and over again in the same exact way in Workers Leaving the Factory. It’s all connected and replays the same images repeatedly. What are the counter images? And how are the counter images being pushed to the margins? Today, when AI creates images, it’s just looking for the dominant algorithm, thus eliminating whatever is on the margins and not conforming to the endlessly repeated images.

D: My last question concerns two of Farocki’s most important collaborators: Christian Petzold and Antje Ehmann. What was their creative relationship with Farocki?

NA: Ehmann was his life partner and creative collaborator. Their most important project together, which Ehmann is continuing to this day, was Labor in a Single Shot, in which they trained students worldwide in workshops on how to make a film about work.  

As for Petzold, they met when Christian was a student of Harun’s in the 80s. This coincided with the failure of Farocki’s sole narrative feature film, Betrayed (1985). But then he immediately started to work with Petzold on his first projects, which continued until the end of Harun’s life. Farocki underplayed his extent of influence in their collaboration, but Petzold always acknowledged his enormous impact on the films through the lengthy conversations they would have about the script, how to shoot the scenes, overcoming various difficulties, etc. In a way, Farocki had his alternative life as a successful feature filmmaker through Petzold.

D: He certainly had a very wide-ranging career of thinking in images. Is that how you would sum up his creative practice?

NA: Yes—how to think with and through images. 

Arta Barzanji is a London-based Iranian filmmaker, critic, and lecturer. His current film project is the documentary Unfinished: Kamran Shirdel. Arta is an alumnus of the critic programmes at the Locarno and Ghent film festivals and has written for outlets including MUBI Notebook, Sabzian, and photogėnie.