Recognize and Pursue. Harun Farocki Series (3)

July 30, 2017, is the third anniversary of Harun Farocki’s passing. To keep his work as a filmmaker and artist, and as an author and teacher, alive and also to make it available (anew) as a resource to a younger generation, Sabeth Buchmann and Constanze Ruhm, in cooperation with Jens Kastner, have devised a comprehensive series of lectures and events. As teachers, whose approach is close to Farocki’s own thinking and practice, Buchmann, Ruhm, and Kastner wish to readdress his work in film and as an author by focusing on his teaching activities. This relates to his highly influential role as a professor for film and art from 2004 to 2011 at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. Farocki’s students profited greatly from his film analysis, with its accomplished use of film and media theory and political reflection; as did the interested general public that came to his screenings of his own films and of the films of others. In this sense, this program of events entitled Recognize and Pursue (relating to Farocki’s Erkennen und Verfolgen from 2003) which will take place within the auspices of a lecture series of the same name at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, will focus on Farocki’s profound interest in the relationships between image and politics and between practice and theory. It was not least Farocki’s own approach to teaching that made him a key influence on a young generation of artists and authors in particular in the field of documentary film.

Guests include Michael Baute (March, 29), Christine Lang (May 31), Thomas Elsaesser (June 14), and Sezgin Boynik (June 21). They will each compile and present a film program with a focus on a specific question connected with the work of Harun Farocki.

Lectures series at The Academy of Fine Arts Vienna: Jens Kastner (March 7), Volker Pantenburg (March 21), Michael Baute (March 28), Tom Holert (April 4), Filipa César (May 2), Christa Blümlinger (May 9), Thomas Heise (May 16), Maren Grimm (May 23), Christine Lang (May 30), Antje Ehmann, Sabeth Buchmann, and Constanze Ruhm (June 8), Diedrich Diederichsen (June 13), Sezgin Boynik (June 20).

Conceived by Sabeth Buchmann and Constanze Ruhm, in cooperation with Jens Kastner and the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna
 

This event looks at two of Farocki‘s works – Vergleich über ein Drittes (Comparison via a Third, 2007) and Das Silber und das Kreuz (The Silver and the Cross, 2010), asking as to the differences between moving image as film and as installation. For Das Silber und das Kreuz, we also ask to what extent Farocki‘s installation diverges from the didactic concept of the exhibition Das Potosí-Prinzip (The Potosí Principle, 2010) for which the work was devised. Looking at Vergleich über ein Drittes, the aim is to address Farocki‘s basic cinematographic principle, montage, and also the associated steps for connecting and dividing material, and Farocki’s use of analogy, intermediate spaces, over overlaps.

Program

Harun Farocki,
Vergleich über ein Drittes (Comparison via a Third), 2007, 24 min
Das Silber und das Kreuz (The Silver and the Cross), 2010, 17 min

Presented by Thomas Elsaesser

Thomas Elsaesser is professor emeritus at the faculty of media and culture at the University of Amsterdam and has been a guest professor at Columbia University, New York, since 2013. Books in German include Hollywood Heute (Hollywood Today) (2009), Terror und Trauma. Zur Gewalt des Vergangenen in der BRD (Terror and Trauma. On the Violence of the Past in West Germany (2007), Filmtheorie zur Einführung (An Introduction to Film Theory) (with Malte Hagener, 2007, 5th edition, 2013). In 2004 Elsaesser edited Harun Farocki. Working on the Sightlines, the first book on Farocki in English.