Harun Farocki: Film Schooled
Harun Farocki Workers Leaving the Factory in Eleven Decades 2006 Video still Courtesy of the Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery
Problems of translation between experience, language and visual representation inform the experimental documentaries of veteran German filmmaker Harun Farocki. Active since the 1960s, Farocki has directed more than 90 films and been featured in prestigious contemporary art festivals such as the 2005 Carnegie International and documenta 12. Yet his work remains relatively unknown in North America.
A landmark retrospective of the artist's installations—the first of its kind in Canada—changes all of that, offering viewers a rare glimpse into the full scope of Farocki's filmic investigations. Curated by Michèle Thériault for Montreal's Leonard and Bina Ellen Art Gallery and opened last week at Kingston’s Agnes Etherington Art Centre, “one image doesn’t take the place of the previous one” features six of Farocki’s projects that manipulate found footage from iconic films. Works include the ambitious Workers Leaving the Factory in Eleven Decades, an overview of 12 depictions of the space immediately outside the factory culled from the history of cinema, and Dubbing, a three-minute looped video that playfully translates, dubs and subtitles the famous “Are you talking to me?” scene from Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver in English, German, French, Italian and Spanish.
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Harun Farocki Interface (Schnittstelle) 1995 Installation view Courtesy of the Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery / photo Paul Smith |
It is Farocki’s documentary work, however, that offers a fresh perspective on the role of the artist-as-producer in contemporary visual culture. Interface, for instance, is a self-referential documentary about the process of filmmaking itself. Presented as a double-monitor installation, the narrated video borrows from the stylistic conventions of instructional how-to manuals and documents Farocki’s own editing and production practice as he splices, manipulates and montages sequences into a final creation. The video serves as an apt illustration of a claim Farocki once made about working in the gallery space: “I try, when showing in a museum, to be a documentarian rather than a visual artist.”
Yet, as Thériault points out in the new bilingual publication that accompanies the exhibition, whereas the boundary between documentary and art practices used to appear firm, it has been increasingly blurred in the past decade, resulting in a new paradigm where approaching visual culture as a documentarian is seen as a central tenet of artmaking, becoming the focus of a new kind of “exhibitionary gaze and experience.” It’s a new set of conditions for Farocki to grapple with—and one, it’s certain, he’ll continue to shed a flickering cinematic light on. (Queen's University, Kingston ON)
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Harun Farocki Workers Leaving the Factory in Eleven Decades 2006 Installation view Courtesy of the Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery / photo Richard-Max Tremblay |
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