In his analysis of media coverage of the first Gulf War for the newspaper Libération, French film critic Serge Daney proposed a conceptual distinction between the ‘image’, which he qualified as cinematic, and the ‘visual’, which he attributed to the media (television, advertising, techno-military images). Daney defined this distinction as follows:

If one observes how Harun Farocki incorporates elements that might be considered ‘visual’ (images of civilian or military surveillance, advertisements, propaganda films) into his essay films and installations, one might conclude that the filmmaker's aim is to confront them with the possibility of the image, which is restored by his writing.

Since his early days as an activist in the late 1960s, the Berlin-based Farocki has always been a profoundly contemporary artist, capable of grasping – indeed of anticipating – the symptoms of discontent in civilisation, either by capturing on-the-spot action or by reworking existing images. This emerges quite clearly from his installation I THOUGHT I WAS SEEING CONVICTS (2000), where there is a difference between the recording of the gestures repeated by the trainee guards, freely observed by the filmmaker, and the ways in which prison ‘reality’ is presented by the surveillance cameras. The difference lies in the system of observation that is established in a supervised area such as this. The filmmaker's ‘re-view’ of a prison visit (which comes to an abrupt end after the prisoner's unsuccessful attempt to conceal his gesture of affection) demonstrates the omnipresence of a form of observation that knows no bounds. The prisoner leaves the room without so much as a backward glance for his visitor; the surveillance has blinded him to all else.