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The Creators of Shopping Worlds

Harun Farocki

2001 01:12:00 Germany, United StatesEnglishColorStereo
Tags:
Architecture, Consumer culture, Humor

Description

Brave new shopping worlds are being created. What have mall owners, architects, surveillance technicians, and supermarket workers done to turn human subjects into pure streams of consumers, into the perfect inhabitants of shopping mall paradise?

"…Going to the supermarket is an exercise in predestination: research has proven, as we learn in The Creators of Shopping Worlds, that, "Customers orient themselves horizontally... and vertically they look for a specific item." The mall planners and bread-display architects seen at work in Harun Farocki's doc take on the sinister air of a worldwide conspiracy."

--Jessica Winter, Village Voice, October 31st, 2001

About Harun Farocki

Harun Farocki (1944-2014) was born in German-annexed Czechoslovakia. From 1966 to 1968 he attended the Deutsche Film- und Fernsehakademie Berlin (DFFB). In addition to teaching posts in Berlin, Düsseldorf, Hamburg, Manila, Munich and Stuttgart, he was a visiting professor at the University of California, Berkeley.

Farocki made close to 120 films, including feature films, essay films and documentaries. He worked in collaboration with other filmmakers as a scriptwriter, actor and producer. In 1976 he staged Heiner Müller's plays The Battle and Tractor together with Hanns Zischler in Basel, Switzerland.

He wrote for numerous publications, and from 1974 to 1984 he was editor and author of the magazine Filmkritik (München). His work has shown in many national and international exhibitions and installations in galleries and museums.