About Narration
Interdisciplinary studies put into practice is a plane on which HaF's interests and mine coincide. Ideas of fictional research projects in films emerge very early on, or of film as research device, allowing people from different disciplines to come together and discover something, to pursue a line of thought, or just be adventurous. These ideas correspond to a tendency we both have of accumulating knowledge from different sciences, for example so as to bring exact sciences like medicine together with subjects which aren't directly aimed at application, such as religious studies or anthropology.
Harun Farocki
Ingemo Engström
Also Directed by Harun Farocki
Harun Farocki: Serious Games I–IV (2009–10) explores the use of virtual reality and gaming technology in U.S. military recruitment, training and after-action therapy, revealing fundamental links between technology and violence in a time of war. Young recruits engage in simulated combat training, which barely differs from video games produced as entertainment. Footage is included from a workshop demonstrating the use of computer re-enactments in the psychological care of veterans suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. As a large-scale installation, Serious Games critically focuses on the role of audiovisual culture in the spectacle of war.
The third part of the Eye/Machine cycle structures the material around the concept of the operational image. These are images which do not portray a process but are themselves part of a process. As early as the Eighties, cruise missiles used a stored image of a real landscape then took an actual image during flight, the software compared the two images. A comparison between idea and reality, a confrontation between pure war and the impurity of the actual. This confrontation is also a montage and montage is always about similarity and difference. Many operational images show coloured guidance lines, intended to portray the work of recognition. The lines tell us emphatically what is all important in these images, and just as emphatically what is of no importance at all. Superfluous reality is denied – a constant denial provoking opposition.
The work centers on the images of the Gulf War which caused worldwide sensation in 1991. In the shots taken from projectiles homing in on their targets, bomb and reporter were identical, according to a theory put forward by the philosopher Klaus Theweleit. At the same time it was impossible to distinguish between the photographed and the (computer) simulated images. The loss of the 'genuine picture' means the eye no longer has a role as historical witness. It has been said that what was brought into play in the Gulf War was not new weaponry but rather a new policy on images. In this way the basis for electronic warfare was created...
Previously focused on Asian directors, “Jeonju Digital Project 2007” takes a look at Europe. The Portuguese filmmaker Pedro Costa, the German filmmaker Harun Farocki, and the French filmmaker Eugène Green participated in this project.
An austere treatise on the military-industrial complex that produces napalm.
A series of 32 short scenes, uniformly set in West German instructional and training classes, that show various tasks among the citizenry being done solely as the result of exhaustive preparation - everything from women preparing to give birth, to strippers stripping, to policemen making arrests. Farocki uses the material to savagely dissect the West German mode of life. ~ Nathan Southern, Rovi
A film about the time of the blast furnances - 1917 - 1933 - about the development of an industry, about a perfect machinery which had to run itself to the point of its own destruction.
"As if pictures could think! Einschlafgeschichten doesn't really speak of bridges or railroads but rather of two girls filling the space between daytime and dreamtime with a poetic game, an endless game, a game with no end. A game which can fade out without becoming fragmentary. "Are you asleep?", one of them asks at the end of a clip – and the final shot is of the two, asleep; the game is over. The girls are played by Lara and Anna, Farocki's daughters." - Hans J. Wulff
Also Directed by Ingemo Engström
A West Berlin doctor, married with a two-year-old child, leaves her husband to go to Munich to work in the birth clinic of a hospital. Her husband doesn’t know that she’s pregnant with their second child. Will she have to choose between motherhood and her career?
About Austrian-British psychoanalyst Melanie Klein, whose pioneering achievements mainly in the field of child psychology (The Psychoanalysis of the Child) and object relations theory. The action takes place in London in 1934, which sees twenty-five-year-old Melanie Klein mourning the death of her son Hans, who came to life in a mining accident. Your daughter Melitta interprets the incident as suicide and your mother as a culprit.
Johanna (Katharina Thalbach) has fled Nazi Germany to visit a friend in Finland, and from there she continues on to her friend's family's estate. Once at the estate, Johanna passionately argues with her friend's pro-Nazi brother and at the same time, falls for the second, good-looking brother who shares her own anti-fascist feelings. The two are soon engaged in an active sexual relationship that continues as they travel north to an Arctic port.
Documentary in two parts that blends dramatized reconstructions, personal reminisces and newsreel footage to tell the story of the flight of German refugees through occupied France to Marseilles in 1940. In 1977 Ingemo Engström and Gerhard Theuring embark on a journey through France. They trace the escape route of the German emigration in France 1940/41, documenting the places, talking to witnesses, relating the temporal layers. The film Escape Route to Marseilles that was the result of this journey, carries the subtitle “Images from a working journal (1977) on the novel Transit (1941) by Anna Seghers”.
Depicts a murky masochistic relationship.
Ingemo Engström’s graduation film DARK SPRING was made at the Hochschule für Fernsehen und Film in Munich, where she began studying in 1967. After the premiere at a festival in Mannheim, Uwe Nettelbeck wrote in "Filmkritik": "Films like DARK SPRING […] do not translate into the language of those who immediately think they know what such films are about […] But more, DARK SPRING is the film of a woman and a women’s film in which women say something, namely: how they see things."
Like the wife of King Arthur in the legend, the main character in Ginevra, actress Cecilia Linné, is a figure of inspiration torn between two worlds and two men. She gives up her “contract” with society and its entanglement of love, work and money.