(Posted to FB by Jairus Banaji.)
Harun Farocki (1944–2014), who was born as Harun El Usman Faroqhi in
what is today Novy Jicin in the Czech Republic. His father, Abdul Qudus
Faroqui, had immigrated to Germany from India in the 1920s. His German
mother was evacuated from Berlin during the Allied bombing of Germany.
After the Second World War, Farocki grew up in India and Indonesia
before the family settled in Hamburg in 1958.
Here’s a fine obituary written by his friend, the British-Ghanaian
writer Kodwo Eshun:
“We regret to announce the passing of Harun Farocki on 30 July 2014. He
was 70 years of age. From 1967 onwards, Harun Farocki directed more than
120 films and installations that analysed the powers of the image with
an originality, a prescience and a gravitas that renewed itself, year
after year, project after project. In his teaching and his essays, in
journals and books and exhibitions conceived and produced with Antje
Ehmann, Farocki was a powerful critic, editor, theorist and curator in
his own right. Generations of artists, theorists and critics have taken
Farocki’s films such as Inextinguishable Fire (1969) and Images of the
World and the Inscription of War (1988) and installations such as Deep
Play (2007) as reference points. His impact and influence on culture,
within and beyond Germany, is undisputed. He was, and remains, a
commanding figure of contemporary culture. Despite his numerous
commitments, Farocki was always generous with his time, his ideas and
his attention. Unlike many artists from the 1960s, Farocki was neither
nostalgic nor bitter. He was forward-looking, youthful, humorous,
restless, unpretentious, enquiring, skeptical, stylish and handsome. He
loved football, a drink of beer and smoking his favourite cigarettes,
with his friends from his travels and with his life partner Antje
Ehmann. Harun Farocki, was and is, irreplaceable. We are proud to have
counted ourselves among his many, many friends. We admired him and we
loved him and we learnt from him, always. To say that we will miss him
is an understatement that he would have appreciated.”
Between Two Wars (1978) is Farocki’s most “Marxist” film. Inspired by an
essay which became Chapter 3 of Alfred Sohn-Rethel’s book Economy and
Class Structure of German Fascism, it took the Berlin filmmaker six
years to make. In that remarkable chapter Sohn-Rethel wrote (about
VESTAG, the giant German steel conglomerate): “Enterprises of this new
modern type which are run on the principle of the structural
socialization of labor but which continue along private capitalist lines
are under continual coercion to produce. So long as they are not totally
closed down…they must produce regardless of whether there is a demand
for their products or not”. This was Sohn-Rethel’s entry into the
alliance between German heavy industry, plagued by excess capacity, and
the Nazis. In Farocki’s film it re-emerges as the rational irrationality
of war (again taking his cue from Sohn-Rethel who had gone on to say,
“non-reproductive values must be created in order to keep the enterprise
in motion”, referring of course to armaments).
As the film critic Bruno Fischli (with whom I showed this and other
films about German fascism to audiences in India in the early 1980s)
wrote: “At the centre of the film stands the creation of a compound
integrated system in the coal, iron and steel industries in the 1920s,
the development of which…performs the role of the ‘hero’ who determines
the whole course of the action”.
Here is what Farocki told the film magazine Medium in 1978, when asked
what the film was about. He explained, in 1929 when the crisis broke,
given the extent of its ‘rationalization’ (the technical integration of
its production processes), VESTAG “could only afford to work at full
capacity. In other words, if it produced at less than full capacity the
whole complex would cease to function. It was this that drove the German
steel industry into the arms of Hitler. Only with the advent of the war
industry was it possible to manipulate the market to meet the needs of
production. Alfred Sohn-Rethel has examined this subject in two papers”,
adding “I was not interested in making a film in which I merely
demonstrated the workings of history, but one in which one sees people
who are studying the workings of history. I therefore invented characters”.
Here is part of the voice-over from the film: “In the past the furnace
gas was allowed to burn off the ovens. Later it was fed back into the
production, which sounded sensible enough. But there was no market for
the increased production. So one had to manufacture something that would
sell itself; something that would simply go up in smoke like furnace
gas; something that would clear the congested markets”.
(This extract goes with a deep sound of strings, as if from a cello, and
a dark wall on which is written in large white letters, ‘HITLER—THAT
MEANS WAR’.)
The best site listing Farocki’s substantial body of work is
http://www.harunfarocki.de/home.html
<https://l.facebook.com/l.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.harunfarocki.de%2Fhome.html%3Ffbclid%3DIwAR3Z6ugiUaL6PDtNUG6mE-mKVK0_QLdtjVDqdBh8es0-xonvO_YRZu39Olg&h=AT1LEmvoDUz1Ak4z9uUOo5jpJ4z4_8dw-_OYDr_KcqJCg5EeWAfbAJK-cme9F_El5o10g8MVgkhYbneuejaJGmJljzkWT6xWTVIRTK4lTn69xSeN4f6kClXKGZeTVvqD5K8Hnw&__tn__=-UK-R&c[0]=AT0pmYgo9lZp_T3svqWYBeAjLdt2I1tBBX3U2qA_hTG0quFlrg1woIFhAOEonClpTyBK6RkU0sKiyyLsJuBFAT5Asp4ff2EZ0Zd98Vvx0e6ckpAQhhUzy4jwTPreONJzF1ouUQH_qcuLebV1CTrxftDmONoIxuVJ5xlP67QLz79DOKoi0gTTM_c>
Margalit Fox’s obituary in the NYT:
https://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/04/arts/harun-farocki-filmmaker-of-modern-life-dies-at-70.html
makes no mention of Zwischen zwei Kriegen.
Image may contain: 1 person, night and closeup
<https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=10158872399870489&set=a.352264660488&__cft__[0]=AZV7Sp1XziZI2rv88lec6lpJjoGZwEK1ZVDCtt1AsgDSndAZbEC6HH8fYmr_3FuXW_CWmXwJdZhhGyX7QxpIOKmFqLav8Qt07-KZswtC8T2srj3SDn4gjqfHqlxS-cLQW_Y0lFT6aTcUN49PGgXTGQKwj_UNW_zMU8W9xrQSZ4ZhQQ&__tn__=EH-R>
53Sanjay G Reddy, Krishna Kumar Mandaland51 others
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