Friday, August 29, 2014
On Video / RIP / Education / Film Where to begin with late filmmaker and video essayist Harun Farocki
Posted By Ben Sachs on 08.29.14 at 03:34 PM
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Facets has released several Farocki titles on DVD, and these are fairly easy to locate. Last week I caught up with The Interview, a 1996 documentary about a career-coaching seminar that's prescient in its analysis of video imagery. Interview focuses on how the counselors use video to record their mock job interviews, then scrutinize their clients' every gesture while watching the playback. Often they advise their clients to alter their body language, their speech, even their conversational manner—in effect, to pretend to be other people. Farocki's filmmaking fights fire with fire, scrutinizing the scrutinizers and exposing their servo-mechanistic view of human interaction. This pedagogical documentary asks us to consider the relationship between video recording (with its instant playback and the flat-looking way it captures light) and the dehumanizing worldview espoused by the career coaches. In the smartphone era, video imagery is so pervasive that Interview practically seems quaint. This would suggest that Farocki's work will remain relevant for quite some time.
Below you can find the first five minutes of The Interview and the entirety of Farocki's 1969 short Inextinguishable Fire.
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