Event

Harun Farocki Recent Work

Harun Farocki (1944-2014) is an internationally acclaimed filmmaker and artist who began making films in the late 1960s. His early work was made for theatrical release and/or television and includes Inextinguishable Fire (1967), Between Two Wars (1978), and Images of the World and the Inscription of War (1988). In the mid-90s, Farocki began exploring the possibilities of multi-channel installations, showing his work in galleries and museums, and participated in international exhibitions such as Documenta and the Venice Biennale. Work from this period includes I Thought I was Seeing Convicts (2000), Workers Leaving the Factory (1995), Eye Machine I, II, III (2002-03), Respite (2007), and Immersion (2009). Parallel I-IV (2012-13) is Farocki's last completed work, and was first exhibited at Greene Naftali gallery in September 2014, shortly after his death. IHP will be screening the single channel version.

Screenings of Parallel I-IV (2012-14) and A New Product (2012) will be followed by a panel discussion with Farocki scholars: Nora M. Alter (Film and Media Arts, Temple University), Homay King (History of Art, Film Studies and Visual Culture, Bryn Mawr College), and Thomas Y. Levin, German and Comparative Literature, Media and Modernity, Princeton University).

A New Product
Harun Farocki, Germany, 2012, digital, German w/ English subtitles, 36 min
"Scenes from meetings within a company which advises corporations how to design their offices -- and the work done there. The film shows that words are not just tools, they have become an object of speculation." -- Harun Farocki

Parallel I-IV
Harun Farocki, Germany, 2012-14, digital, 43 min
The four‐part cycle Parallel deals with the image genre of computer animation. The series focuses on the construction, visual landscape and inherent rules of computer-animated worlds. “Computer animations are currently becoming a general model, surpassing film. In films, there is the wind that blows and the wind that is produced by a wind machine. Computer images do not have two kinds of wind.” -- Harun Farocki  "This series continues the late filmmaker’s long-standing investigation into the rise of calculable, actionable images possessing a relationship to reality very different than that of the cinema before them. Tracing the evolution of video game graphics from the two-dimensional schematics of the early 1980s to the photorealistic environments of today, Farocki foregoes the obsession with novelty that too often characterizes discussions of so-called “new” media, instead situating games within a longer history of representation. The Parallel series is a major achievement that exemplifies a key attribute of a singular practice cut far too short: Farocki joins poetic speculation with analytical strength to call upon the viewer not simply to look and listen carefully, but also to think along with him."-- Erika Balsom, Artforum, November 2014
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This free admission program is co-sponsored by the Department of Film and Media Arts at Temple University, the Cinema Studies Program at the University of Pennsylvania and the International House of Philadelphia