As You See + The Expression of Hands
Harun Farocki is one of the leading figures of the film-essai movement in recent decades. His ambitious cinema takes viewers on an in-depth journey into the history of moving images and media, offering a sometimes scathing analysis of them. His approach goes beyond cinema, embracing literature and the visual arts. This cycle concludes with the opening lecture of a symposium dedicated to the filmmaker on the tenth anniversary of his death.
My film As You See is an essay film. The contemporary opinion industry is like a huge mouth, or maybe a paper shredder. I compose a new text out of these scraps and thus stage a paper-chase. My film is made up of many details and creates a lot of image-image and word-image and word-word relationships among them. So there's a lot to chew on. I searched for and found a form in which once can make a little money go a long way. (Harun Farocki)
Historically, the cinema close-up was initially employed to convey emotions through facial expressions. But soon filmmakers also began focusing their attention on hands. Using film extracts, Farocki explores this visual language, it's symbolism, Freudian slips, automatisms and its music. Often, hands betray an emotion which the face tries to dissimulate. They can also function as a conduit (exchanging money) or witness to a form of competence (work). (harunfarocki.de)
Harun Farocki
Born Harun Faroqhi in 1944 in Neutitschein, Bohemia-Moravia (in today's Czech Republic), to an Indian immigrant father and a German mother, Farocki grew up between India and Indonesia in the post-war period, before his family relocated to Germany in the late 1950s. Influenced by Bertolt Brecht, Theodor Adorno and Jean-Luc Godard, he studied at the German Film and Television Academy in Berlin and began directing his first films in the 1960s. From the outset, he turned to essays, experimental documentaries and installations, constantly questioning the political weight of images. He was also editor of the journal Filmkritik, and taught at the University of California in Berkeley, and at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna.
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