Thursday, 29 January 2009

Harun Farocki on the web and in London

Image above taken from The Interview (Video, Harun Farocki, 1997):

'In the summer of 1996, we filmed application training courses in which one learns how to apply for a Job. School drop-outs, university graduates, people who have been retrained, the long-term unemployed, recovered drug addicts, and mid-level managers - all of them are supposed to learn how to market and sell themselves, a skill to which the term "self management" is applied. The self is perhaps nothing more than a metaphysical hook from which to hang a social identity. It was Kafka who Iikened being accepted for a job to entering the Kingdom of Heaven; the paths leading to both are completely uncertain. Today one speaks of getting a job with the greatest obsequiousness, but without any grand expectations.' (Harun Farocki on The Interview)

Film Studies For Free can testify that there is no better written introduction to the fascinating work of Berlin-based, visual artist and writer Harun Farocki's films and video installation work than a 2002 essay that Thomas Elsaesser (also editor of the 2004 collection Harun Farocki: Working on the Sight Lines - see HERE) wrote for Senses of Cinema. Here are a few insights from the conclusion to this piece in which Elsaesser sets out the reach of Farocki's artwork:

[...] Farocki has also noticed for us how prisons and supermarkets, video-games and theatres of war have become 'work-places' – of subjects as much as of commodities. They are spaces that are converging, once one appreciates how they all fall under the new pragmatics of the time-space logic of optimising access, flow, control. These sites a filmmaker has to take cognisance of and recognise him/herself implicated in, but so has the spectator, whose role has changed so much.

As one walks through Farocki's works, which have become our worlds, one realises that he may be one of the few filmmakers today capable of understanding the logic of this convergence, contesting its inevitability and yet feeling confident enough to continue to believe in the wit, wisdom and the poetry of images. This certainly makes Harun Farocki an important filmmaker: probably Germany's best-known important filmmaker.

Inspired by Farocki's films -- which seem more and more relevant to our daily lives -- as well as by Elsaesser's many perceptive words about them, Film Studies For Free wanted to publicize the ongoing exhibition "Harun Farocki, 3 Early Films" at the Cubitt Gallery, London (17 January – 22 February 2009), as well as the surrounding events to be held at the Goethe-Institut and Cubitt Gallery (31 January-20 February).

For those of you in search of more information about, or analyses of Farocki's work, FSFF decided to produce as extensive a list of live links as it could to some relevant online resources of note:
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Tuesday, 27 January 2009

Touching on Touch of Evil: Projecting Latin America at the Movies

Film Studies For Free (returning after a short unplanned break filled with unfortunate technical hitches of the sick computer kind) is happy to bring its loyal readers news of a wonderful weblog devoted to studying

the ways in which Latin America has figured in Hollywood and European cinema. Rather than lamenting the distance between stereotype and reality, it is interested in the functions served by the innumerable projections of fantasized Latin Americas onto the silver screen.
This website - Projections - was founded in 2005 by the renowned Latin-Americanist scholar Jon Beasley-Murray, currently Assistant Professor in the Department of French, Hispanic, and Italian Studies at the University of British Columbia, Canada. As his university website testifies, Beasley-Murray is a longstanding practitioner and exponent of Open Access scholarship with numerous of his excellent publications archived online. He is also author of the important weblog Posthegemony.

Projections' project is to write about Hollywood and European movies 'in which Latin America plays a part, however small'. Beasley-Murray asks: 'Is there some shared element beyond the contingent commonality of location or theme? My wager is that there is, and that it's something worth writing about. Indeed, my suspicion is that when Hollywood goes Latin, it reveals something essential about cinema tout court.' The index by title of the many films so far examined can be found by clicking HERE.

For Spring 2009, this project has been aided by a UBC grant to hire three undergraduate student researchers to expand this online database of Latin America on screen. As Beasley-Murray notes in a blurb on the UBC website of his encouragement of students to write blogs

The idea is in large part to get beyond the ghetto of closed, proprietary educational software (WebCT and the like), to give students a sense that they are producing research on a public stage, and to integrate their learning with their own real world experience of the internet.
Important work, indeed. To conclude its celebration of the achievement of Projections, Film Studies For Free decided to drill down and produce an extensive series of high-quality, online-resource links pertaining to one of the films studied on that blog (and a great favourite of this blogger, too): Orson Welles's 1958 Touch of Evil. The list is headed by Projections's great entry on this film.
Online analyses of and information about Touch of Evil:
Online discussions of and information about the making, remaking, and DVD production of Touch of Evil:
On Orson Welles, with significant discussion of Touch of Evil:
Also see the wonderful Wellesnet, the Orson Welles Web Resource, together with its sister project The Museum of Orson Welles which continues to 'compile and present the available radio and recorded works of Orson Welles'.
Posted by purnawan at 04:41 0 comments
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Tuesday, 20 January 2009

A Good News Day

Film Studies For Free is happy today for lots of reasons but one of the two chief explanations is that there has been a positive development in the case that this blog has been harping on about for a wee while now (see Shooting Down YouTube: Bring Back Kevin Lee's Videos! and L'Affaire Lee: follow up links).

Today, Kevin Lee announced on his blog that:
Thanks to the Copyright Team at YouTube for getting into the spirit of Martin Luther King Day, and agreeing to temporarily reinstate my account while my counterclaim against INA over the fair use of “…And God Created Woman” is under review. And thank you EVERYONE for your emails and messages of support, and for those who wrote about my ordeal on their respective websites. The publicity surrounding this mess had everything to do with YouTube contacting me last Friday and offering guidance on what steps I needed to take to get my account back online (at the time I didn’t know how I could still file a counterclaim despite [the fact] that I was shut out of my account).
A temporary respite only, it should be noted, but at least it means that Lee's YouTube channel is mostly back online, including many videos that weren't in dispute at all (OK, OK... So FSFF knows that it's not the most serious instance of collective punishment going on in the world right now but it certainly was a disproportionate response in its own way...). Lee has also posted the putative 'offending' video (Shooting Down Pictures #932: And God Created Woman) on Veoh.com, so check it out there, along with three other great video essays of his (Hour of the Star, O Lucky Man, and Seventh Heaven).

Now Film Studies For Free is off to find a television set to which it can glue itself gleefully for the rest of the day, but please feel free to enjoy this link in its absence.
Posted by purnawan at 04:45 0 comments
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