Documenting Change: Questions of Agency, Visibility, and Territory

If I am interested in how the technological, and subsequently electronic media have transformed civil society, I can find no better chronicler of their histories, no more intelligent observer of their unexpected connections, no more incisive critic and yet interested party to their epoch-making significance than Harun Farocki. The fact that Farocki is both a writer and a filmmaker is therefore as much a sign of the times as a choice of vocation. Having early on decided to be, in the spirit of Arthur Rimbaud and Charles Baudelaire, ‘resolutely modern’, Farocki availed himself of the most resolutely contemporary medium. But a filmmaker, by making images, not only adds images to their store in the world; he comments on the world made by these images, and does so with images. Aware that the medium chose him as much as he had chosen it for documenting public life under the rule of the image, he treats cinema with the utmost respect. So central are the technologies of picturing and vision to the twentieth century that there is little Farocki cares about which is not also a reflection on cinema itself. In this perspective, however, its role as our culture's prime storytelling medium is almost secondary. Instead, cinema is understood as a machine of the visible that is itself largely invisible. This is why talking about airports, schools, or prisons is as much a part of the post-history of the cinema, as a fork in the road leading to the foundation of cities, the Jacquard loom with its programmable sequence of coloured threads, or the deployment of the Maxim machine gun at the battle of Omdurman are part of the pre-history of cinema.

Certainly since the early 20th century, and probably since the invention of the camera obscura, the most pervasive – material and mental – model by which to picture ourselves in this world and acting upon it, has been the ‘cinematic apparatus’.