The filmography of Harun Farocki, a German independent filmmaker, the son of an Indian doctor spans sixteen titles and twenty-one years. To the best of my knowledge, only one of his films (BETWEEN TWOWARS) has ever been shown in North America until now. A travelling group of eleven films put together by the Goethe-Institut began showing in Boston last November, and this April [1992] will reach Houston, the last of the tour's ten cities. Nine of the eleven films are currently showing at Chicago Filmmakers and I presume that the other two, both 35-millimeter films, aren't being shown because no 35-millimeter venue is available or willing to screen them. The larger question, however, is why it has taken so long for most of Farocki's films to be seen on this side of the Atlantic. I would venture that this is because they belong to an intellectual and artistic tradition in Europe that has never taken hold on these shores – an approach to filmmaking that regards formal and political concerns as intimately intertwined and interdependent.

A relative recently asked me whatever happened to all my Marxist and communist friends I knew in Paris in the late-1960s and early-1970s. If I understood him correctly, the subtext of his question was that with the virtual collapse of European communism, European communists and Marxists today must feel rather obsolete, made irrelevant by the forces of history.

What this question seems to overlook is that European Marxism encompasses a lot more than what Americans understand as ‘politics’. The aesthetics of most American Marxists and communists, at least in my lifetime, tend toward socialist realism and – more recently – multiculturalism.