How does a filmmaker approach a museum art form like video installation? Harun Farocki finds himself among a small, but eminent group of like-minded directors – Chris Marker, Chantal Akerman, Raul Ruiz and Peter Greenaway – whose films negotiate the relationship between word and image in equally radical fashion, and conduct in their installations similar inquiries into their own images and those of others. They try to account for the metamorphoses cinema has undergone in recent audio-visual configurations, by restaging its public mise-en-scène.

Perhaps what is at issue here is giving images back their distance, so that a question like ‘what is an image?’, for example, threads its way like a leitmotif through Farocki's films and videos so that it can be posed anew, and whose formulation is to be found – somewhat programmatically – in film titles such as Ein Bild (ANIMAGE, 1983) or WIE MAN SIEHT (AS YOU SEE, 1986). It is a question Farocki has long linked to the aesthetic changes in information technology, and is now more relevant to cinema than ever before.With the installation SCHNITTSTELLE (SECTION/INTERFACE, 1995) an essential element of this issue is touched upon, namely how moving pictures are formally organised. And this from the perspective of an auteur who now presents himself more as an engineer than as a creator: ‘What happens at the editing table, is this comparable to a scientific experiment?’

SCHNITTSTELLE is a double challenge to the spectator's capacity to remember and to perceive. Like the editor at his editing table, the spectator is first confronted with sequences of parallel images simultaneously shown on two monitors. The twin image tracks are, in the following step (which is also a temporal one, because the visitor has to enter another space), re-integrated on a third monitor, which presents them for a rereading.