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Wie man sieht (As You See) – In memory of filmmaker Harun Farocki

Wie man sieht (As You See) – In memory of filmmaker Harun Farocki

In Comparison

The Goethe-Institut Los Angeles and Los Angeles Filmforum present

Wie man sieht (As You See) ­–

In memory of filmmaker Harun Farocki

Wednesday March 4, 2015, 7:00 pm

Screening 8: Schnittstelle (Section/Interface) and Zum Vergleich (In Comparison)

 

Film Series
Wednesdays, January 14th through March 4th 2015
Goethe-Institut Los Angeles, 5750 Wilshire Blvd. Suite 100, Los Angeles, CA 90036
German with English subtitles
Free admission, but RSVP needed, by email to rsvp@losangeles.goethe.org or the 323.525.3388

Harun Farocki – the director whose perspicacious cinematic essays analyzed the new media world – died in July 2014.  With his radical way of looking at things Farocki strove to endow images with their own form of self-will, to expose their political and cultural coding.

Farocki lived and worked in Berlin as a filmmaker, artist and writer. His essay and observational films question the production and perception of images, decoding film as a medium and examining how audiovisual culture is related to history, politics, technology and war.
His projects have been shown in festivals and solo, group and retrospective exhibitions worldwide at important events and international institutions, including the 2010 São Paulo Biennial, Documenta X and XXII in Kassel, Tate Modern in London, MACBA in Barcelona, Museum Ludwig in Cologne and the Jeu de Paume in Paris.

All films in this series are in German with English Subtitles, unless otherwise noted.

For more event information: info@losangeles.goethe.org, or +1 323 5253388

Tickets: Free, but please RSVP due to limited seating, by email to rsvp@losangeles.goethe.org or the 323.525.3388

$1 validated parking (for events only) on weekdays after 6:00 pm and all day on weekends in the Wilshire Courtyard West underground garage-P1.

Special Thanks to Daniel Chaffey of the Goethe-Institut Los Angeles and Lucas Quigley for organizing this series.

schnittstelle FAROCKI FILMPRODUKTION 400x260 92dpi

Schnittstelle (Section/Interface)

Schnittstelle (Section/Interface)

Schnittstelle (Section/Interface)

1995, 23 min., color and b/w, German with English subtitles. Digital.

"Harun Farocki was commissioned by the Lille Museum of Modern Art to produce a video about his work. His creation was an installation for two screens that was presented within the scope of the 1995 exhibition The World of Photography. The film Interface (Schnittstelle) developed out of that installation. Reflecting on Farocki's own documentary work, it examines the question of what it means to work with existing images rather than producing one's own, new images. The German title plays on the double meaning of "Schnitt", referring both to Farocki's workplace, the editing table, as well as the "human-machine interface", where a person operates a computer using a keyboard and a mouse."

--3sat television guide, September, 1995

In Comparison

Zum Vergleich (In Comparison)

Zum Vergleich (In Comparison)

Zum Vergleich (In Comparison)

2009, 61 min., color, no dialogue with English intertitles. Digital.

Bricks are the resonating fundamentals of society. Bricks are layers of clay that sound, like records just simply too thick. Like records they appear in series, but every brick is slightly different – not just another brick in the wall. Bricks create spaces, organize social relations and store knowledge on social structures. They resonate in a way that tells us if they are good enough or not. Bricks form the fundamental sound of our societies, but we haven’t learned to listen to them. Through different traditions of brick production Farocki’s film has our eyes and ears consider them in comparison – and not in competition, not as clash of cultures. Farocki shows us various brick production sites in their colours, movements and sounds. Brick burning, brick carrying, brick laying, bricks on bricks, no off-commentary. 20 inter-titles in 60 minutes tell us something about the temporality of working processes. The film shows us that certain production modes require their own duration and that cultures differentiate around the time of the brick. (Ute Holl)