Prison images (2000) - Harun Farocki

A film composed of images from prisons. Quotes from fiction films and documentaries as well as footage from surveillance cameras. A look at the new control technologies, at personal identification devices, electronic ankle bracelets, electronic tracking devices. The cinema has always been attracted to prisons. Today's prisons are full of video surveillance cameras. These images are unedited and monotonous; as neither time nor space is compressed, they are particularly well-suited to conveying the state of inactivity into which prisoners are placed as a punitive measure. The surveillance cameras show the norm and reckon with deviations from it. Clips from films by Genet and Bresson. Here the prison appears as a site of sexual infraction, a site where human beings must create themselves as people and as a workers. In Un Chant d'amour by Jean Genet, the guard looks in on inmates in their cells and sees them masturbating. The inmates are aware that they are being watched and thus become performers in a peep show. The protagonist in Bresson's Un Condamné à mort s'est échappé turns the objects of imprisonment into the tools of his escape. These topoi appear in many prison films. In newer prisons, in contrast, contemporary video surveillance technology aims at demystification.

- Harun Farocki

War at a distance (2003) - Harun Farocki

In 1991, when images of the Gulf War flooded the international media, it was virtually impossible to distinguish between real pictures and those generated on computer. This loss of bearings was to change forever our way of deciphering what we see. The image is no longer used only as testimony, but also as an indispensable link in a process of production and destruction. This is the central premise of "War at a Distance", which continues the deconstruction of claims to visual objectivity Harun Farocki developed in his earlier work. With the help of archival and original material, Farocki sets out in effect to define the relationship between military strategy and industrial production and sheds light on how the technology of war finds applications in everyday life.

- Antje Ehmann

Pictures of the world and inscriptions of war (1988) - Harun Farocki

The film concentrates on the use of images as used by human beings post-enlightenment to distance them from reality. In April 1944, American pilots had made aerial photographs of the Buna works, without even suspecting that in doing so, they had also photographed the concentration camp Auschwitz for the first time. It was not before 1977 that the photographs were properly evaluated. During enlightenment, images of buildings were used for the first time to scale buildings instead of actually climbing them for the same purpose. In the '60s, Algerian women were photographed for the first time to create photo-identity cards issued by them by the then ruling French.
How do images change your perception to create a reality that is farther away from you, preserving it for posterity at the same time, seeming to absolve you from taking any action? How does that distance make it easy to destroy things?

One must be just as wary of pictures as of words. There is no literature without linguistic criticism, without the author being critical of the existing language. It's just the same with film. One need not look for new, as yet unseen images, but one must work with existing ones in such a way that they become new.

http://www.farocki-film.de/