Tampere Film Festival: A Tribute to Harun Farocki

Harun Farocki: Bilder der Welt und Inschrift des Krieges / Images of the World and the Inscription of War (DE 1988).

Among the rich special programmes of the Tampere Film Festival there was a tribute to Harun Farocki, with Harun Farocki as a special guest.

Revisited Bilder der Welt und Inschrift des Krieges (Images of the World and the Inscription of War, DE 1988), 16 mm, English version, commentary read by Cynthia Beatt, screened at Tullikamari with e-subtitles in Finnish by Eeva Heikkonen, 12 March 2011. – An excellent and original film essay about the science and art of seeing, and also about the many military uses of photography and cinematography. The simulators of bomber pilots are a special source of interest, as well as the art of camouflage. The Auschwitz tragedy, why the railroads and the gas chambers were not bombed, is a main theme.

Exhibition: FestArt: Harun Farocki: Six Video Installations
At the TR1 Exhibition Centre: Serious Games 1-4 (2009–2010), Counter Music (2004), and Workers Leaving the Factory in Eleven Decades.

From the official presentation: 
"In Farocki's works, war is the manifestation of the West's technological sovereignty, but it also reveals our vulnerability. The mindlessness of the conflicts and the mental suffering of the soldiers participating in battles are just as concrete, although harder to perceive, as the destruction of the physical world. Serious Games (2009–2010), consisting of four video installations, explores the virtual technology used by the U.S. army as a part of the military training and also as an aid in demobilizing soldiers.

Farocki engages in dialogue between images created from the human and the mechanical perspectives. He tells the story of the mechanisms and the control sustaining our society, based on the information that security cameras extract about our lives. Counter Music (2004) depicts the highly dominating cacophony of noise in our surroundings, the respiration of the urban environment that almost resembles a biological organism, and its mechanical repetition.

Film cameras have received workers returning from their work ever since the birth of assembly line production. Workers Leaving the Factory in Eleven Decades presents twelve points of view to the lives of the working people, from Auguste and Louis Lumière's 1895 documentary Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory to Lars von Trier's Dancer in the Dark, first screened in 2000."

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