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War at a Distance

Harun Farocki

2003 00:54:00 GermanyGermanB&W and ColorStereo4:3Video
Tags:
Consumer culture, Future, History, Middle East, Politics, War

Description

Since the Gulf War in 1991, warfare and reporting it have become hyper-technological affairs, in which real and computer-generated images cannot be distinguished any more. With the aid of new and also unique archive material, Farocki sketches a picture of the relationship between military strategy and industrial production and shows how war technology finds its way into everyday use.

-- International Film Festival catalogue, Rotterdam (2004)

"Farocki's War at a Distance brilliantly navigates and explores the connections between machine-vision, violence, and capitalist production practices in the context of the Gulf War and the global economy. Farocki demonstrates that our naive anthropocentric notions of vision and the visible are obsolete in today's world."

-- San Francisco Cinematheque (2004)

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.