Spotlight on a radical filmmaker
A recently opened exhibition at the Fundació Tàpies traces the creative life of German filmmaker Harun Farocki from his first political films to his anti-capitalist video installations
In Inextinguishable Fire (1969), German filmmaker Harun Farocki puts a cigarette out on his arm. Seemingly untroubled by the pain, he looks into the camera and says: “When we show you pictures of napalm victims, you'll shut your eyes. You'll close your eyes to the pictures. Then you'll close them to the memory. And then you'll close your eyes to the facts.”
Farocki (1944-2014) made this film when he was a student and was beginning to explore the political potential of cinema. Seeing how the public in general quickly became used to the bombardment of horrific images coming out of the Vietnam War caused a reaction in him: “This was the paradox that disturbed him: the information society allowed us to see everything but not to act,” points out Carles Guerra, the curator of the exhibition Harun Farocki. Empathy, which opened recently in the Fundació Tàpies.
From the first, Farocki made it clear that his filmmaking would not be complicit with this production line of images that merely achieved to create anxiety in the spectator. His mission would be to make films that would attempt to genuinely affect and change the mentality of viewers. He remained faithful to this radical way of challenging the concept of entertainment until the end.
Focus on Empathy
The Fundació Tàpies exhibition, which lasts until October 16, is an in-depth retrospective of Farocki's work and, as the title suggests, focuses on the filmmaker's empathy, or “a sympathy that is a little aggressive,” as he defined it himself not long before his death.
And yet, in his final writings he confessed to not having given empathy enough importance during his career, something which “the enemy”by contrast did know how to take advantage of. He showed this in his 2012 documentary, A New Product, in which he follows a group of business experts charged with optimising employee workspace in order to improve productivity in a factory. Farocki reveals the cynicism underlying the seemingly empathetic positivity of the consultants' methods.
It is one of eight video installations in the exhibition and all of them in some way or another deal with the same concept: capitalism and how it modulates labour. It was a central theme in Farocki's career and the exhibition includes his first effort made in 1996 for the Lille's modern art museum. From this moment on his career would take an unexpected turn: “Farocki blew up the distinction between contemporary art, cinema, visual culture and critical thought,” says Xavier Antich, president of the Fundació Tàpies.
In Interface, the installation that began this new period in his career, two screens conduct a dialogue of images in which the filmmaker examines his own work. In Labour in a Single Shot (2011-2014), his last major work before he died, dozens of screens suspended in the air show the work that he and his partner, Antje Ehmann, carried out with film directors and artists from 15 cities around the world. They organised workshops that became translated into 400 one to two-minute films about the multiple ways of working. The Tàpies exhibition has a selection of 54 of these films.
Ehmann shares the curation of the exhibition with Guerra, and she declares herself happy to be involved in an initiative taking place in a city that Farocki loved. As for Guerra, this exhibition, which is simultaneously linked to another in the Institut Valencià d'Art Modern, is his first as director of the Tàpies foundation. And, it gives a clue to the future direction the institution under his tutelage: Farocki's political films are mixed with works created by Tàpies between 1966 and 1976, a key era in which the Catalan artist also incorporated politics into his creative life.