Harun Farocki

Three films by the German-Czech film artist

Experience a selection of German filmmaker Harun Farocki’s films:

Serious Games I-IV (2009-2010)
The work consists of four short films, originally created as an installation for the Biennale in Sao Paulo in 2010. Through the four films, Farocki follows a group of American soldiers who, before and after being deployed to the Iraq war, use Virtual Reality war games to train combat actions and treat their war trauma. The films are shown in a double perspective, which allows the viewer to dwell on the soldiers while they play through the simulations, and at the same time immerse themselves in the VR game. By establishing a place that is both inside and outside the VR game, the films reveal what the simulations hide.

Inextinguishable Fire (1969)
The film focuses on the production of napalm, used in napalm bombs by the Americans during the Vietnam War. As narrator, Farocki rolls up his sleeve and puts out a cigarette on his own arm. He notes that napalm burns at seven times the temperature. The film is a caricature of a well-known napalm-producing company, and depicts the employees in their acceptance of their own role in the production of a painful death. The film can be seen as a critique of the Vietnam War and debates how artistic production can contribute to political action.

War at a Distance (2003)
The film is based on images from the Gulf Wars and treats a large number of technical, ‘operational’ images from several different wars. The viewer is presented with images produced by machines that read objects without human intervention – e.g. bombs that find their targets by themselves. Images not intended for the human eye, but created by machines for machines. The film asks the question what happens to our understanding of the war and its consequences when we see the war through the lens of the machine, devoid of anything other than what the machine is trained to see.

The films are free with paid admission and will play from 3 November – 3 December 2023 during our opening hours, except when other events take place in the Art Cinema.

Background for the film program:
When Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, 2022, the war returned to the European continent. Since then, several wars have arisen around the world, most recently the situation in Israel and Palestine is on the threshold of developing into a regular war, just as the Nagorno-Karabakh region again became the scene of hostilities in the late summer.

What these wars and conflicts have in common is that the vast majority experience them mediated through a myriad of different images. We see the war through live reports, drone images and private recordings from mobile phones on various platforms. In this endless stream of images, we quickly forget that all these images are mediations of the war, just as all images are always mediations of what they purport to show.

The German-Czech film artist Harun Farocki (1944-2014) worked throughout his large production with images and mediation as central themes. A large number of his films are about the images of war, how they work and what effect they have on us. If we want to better understand the images of today’s wars, it is interesting to delve into Farocki’s films and their distinctive mix of art, fiction and documentary. The films’ unique mixed form and depreciation of traditional categories make them in themselves experiments in mediation.

The film program is an addition to the series of events Nye krige, nye billeder, which will take place on 2., 16. and 30. November 2023 and which is based on Farocki’s film followed by talks with a number of professionals and researchers. The talks will be in Danish.