Berlin film-maker Harun Farocki re-entered the world of visual arts with his installation Schnittstelle using a system that he repeated in his following installations: he presented the viewer-visitor with a choice similar to the one facing him in his editing room, in his role as film-maker and artist, by placing two monitors (or screens) side by side. Schnittstelle is a sort of artistic self-portrait of Farocki looking back on his own work. The artist settles down at his editing, or rather mixing table (as he is working on video), to go through his works one by one. This confrontation-installation places the artist's body at various points of intersection within his work. Taking fragments of his videos, Farocki comments on them and gently shifts sound and image, sound and sound, image and image, in order to position a pensive viewer into the space between. The installation spatializes the editing effects and makes the relationships between images virtual. Farocki often uses images originally destined for a specific strategic purpose or which circulate in the public sphere. These “working” images, as he calls them, derive from advertising, military reconnaissance or else civil surveillance. In the same way that these images are the object of scrutiny, the artist has always been able to view his own productions from a critical standpoint. For Farocki, any political stance is subject to this awareness of author as producer, in the Benjaminian sense of the term. The author is demythologized and “socialized” by Farocki in order to transform “readers and viewers into participants”, as Benjamin proposed. In this way, the artist's audiovisual writings reflect on their montage, for which he finds allegories – for example, showing his hands drafting a new combination of images, in Zwischen zwei Kriegen; or, more explicitly, in this self-portrait, Schnittstelle, in which he uses echoes of his own voice from one of his first films. By confronting the viewer with two videos running simultaneously, complexly structured with intermittent pauses and repeats, Farocki positions the viewer virtually at the intersection of images, at the spot where a syntagmatic or paradigmatic choice needs to be made between two possibilities. The bodily presence of the artist in the image is not for narcissistic reasons, but serves as a figurative and reflexive link. Faced with his machines and videos, Farocki plays with the hybridity of cinematic and videographic time. He incarnates not only the editor scrolling through his work from the standpoint of present time, but also a sort of smooth talker reiterating conclusive gestures while trying to understand (convey a better understanding of) the logic behind the virtual construction of a video. In this investigation into gesture and body, we also discover the notion of the Brechtian game (as a quote and not as an embodiment of a text) that the notion of “live” is a performance of a shift in reality that has always already occurred. Along those lines is Farocki's militant film from 1969, Nicht löschbares Feuer (Inextinguishable Fire), in which, to demonstrate the unspeakable violence of napalm, he puts a cigarette out on his arm. He evidently does not repeat the gesture in Schnittstelle, but he shows the scar and the artist's skin thus becomes likened to the reel of film or “skin” as a memory support. It is clear, however, that this video fi lm is not founded on a belief in the image and already marks a shift. In Farocki's work we move on from the Bazinian notion of image as a recording of a trace, to suspicion towards any notion of image authenticity, be it cinematic or utilitarian. In Schnittstelle another repeat is equally significant of a transition in Farocki's work: from the live recording of social gestures to the idea of listing cinematic gestures, a kind of audiovisual archive. In Videogramme einer Revolution (1993), a film exclusively composed of found images, the film-maker appears with his film camera, playing the role of a Romanian amateur video-maker. The man turns his camera from his television towards the window to see if the televised event he has just witnessed has led to “consequences” in the street outside. The fact that Farocki “repeats” this gesture in the editing room shows to what point the critical editor reflects on the conditions of the possibility of an image, before even thinking of associating it with another. In Schnittstelle, Farocki presents the electronic mixing table as a laboratory, where the aesthetic dialectics between cinematic montage and digital mixing become visible. In one of his repeats, the artist expresses clearly the logic of architecture in Bilder der Welt und Inschrift des Krieges (Images of the World and Inscription of War), following a principal of permutation, and also as a complex relationship between movement and fixity, word and image. The thematic and verbal insistence on abstract mathematical models therefore already appears as a memory building exercise for the viewer, together with the complex problem of analogy and digitality. In Schnittstelle, Turing's machine represents the setting in motion of a series of images from Farocki's cinema, confronted with the computerized time coding that reorganizes cinematographic space into an abstract structure determined through calculation.

Christa Blümlinger
Translated by Diana Tamlyn