The interview took place in Berlin on July 25, 1999.

Rembert Hüser: In your film-installation at the Generali Foundation in Vienna, ICH GLAUBTE GEFANGENE ZU SEHEN (I THOUGHT IWAS SEEING CONVICTS, 2000), the dead prison convict,William Martinez, lies in the yard for nine minutes before he is taken away. Everything follows a precise choreography.

Harun Farocki: I’m sure you are using the term ‘choreography’ because the yard resembles a stage. Guards, ready to shoot, have their guns trained on Martinez; a camera is lying in wait for an incident worth recording. Martinez is an inmate of a high security prison in Corcoran, California. He starts a fight with another inmate and is shot down. The surveillance video is silent. You see the white smoke from the gunshot glide through the frame. Then it takes nine minutes before Martinez is taken away on a stretcher. Allegedly the yard has to be cleared for security reasons, which takes some time. Though the event looks very different from a movie, it gives the impression that it has to take place and could only occur in this staged, dramatic way; it looks predestined.

RH: These nine minutes – during which prisoners are being cleared from the yard, one at a time, making the yard a cross between a chessboard, a billiard table, and bowling alley – have been staged. When the two men in business suits finally enter the yard and pronounce Martinez dead, the dramaturgy of the images approximates silent film style: ‘and then Martinez is gone’ (here Farocki quotes a voice-over excerpt from an educational film which a civil rights group made about the event). And so your film contains another film, in colour this time, of the prison guards watching the role play of a similar situation and laughing. We have graduated to a role play, which stages the education of educators. What formal techniques do you use to counter or comment on the alien material – material that represents the perspective of power, that's comprised of faded, black-and-white images, probably a result of frequent over-taping?

HF: I show these pictures in double projection, which results in a softer montage. The simultaneous words and images are suggestive rather than descriptive. Apart from this, I try to be spontaneous, like the sudden ideas one gets during good conversations. This is also supposed to counter the merciless logic of execution.