For Harun Farocki, even as visual media raced from film strips to computers, one thing remained constant: Pictures reveal more than they intend to.
Naming the ideologies embedded in workaday images was Farocki’s life’s work. The German filmmaker and artist was born in Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia in 1944 to an Indian father and German mother, lived in a divided Germany, and died in 2014, in a booming, unified Berlin. He spent six decades scrutinizing visual culture with a leftist eye, making more than 100 films and videos.
His meticulous style of essay film, combining found images and formidably researched texts, has become essential to the cinematic tool kit.
Eight of his works on the perennial theme of war, curated by Antje Ehmann, an artist and Farocki’s widow, are on view at Greene Naftali. (So are 12 of his T-shirts, bearing political slogans, some soft and stained from wear.)
Farocki’s previous three shows at the gallery mostly featured new work, but this show presents projects made between 1967 and 2010, pointedly screening Vietnam War-era films (albeit digitized) alongside Iraq War-era videos.
As a film student in Berlin, Farocki tried his hand at agitprop. His 1968 film “White Christmas” pairs Bing Crosby’s crooning hit song with footage from Vietnam and a Pieta-like picture of a mother holding a dead child. Title cards throughout promise that Uncle Sam has addressed exploding gifts to the Vietcong.
But Farocki grew uncomfortable with using the Vietnamese people’s suffering to gain the attention of European intellectuals. “Inextinguishable Fire,” from 1969, focuses on the West’s complicity at home, dramatizing the development of napalm at Dow Chemical. The specialized chemists (played woodenly by actors in white coats) can’t see the big picture of what they’re brewing: agonizing death from above. Farocki’s film argues that large-scale industry is never innocent, although the guilt is strategically spread around.
In his later films, Farocki peeled apart image production itself. He thought the unspoken motivations of governments and companies waited to be decoded in the obscure newsreels and B-roll they shot for their own purposes.
In “Respite,” a silent film from 2007, Farocki performs a methodical reading of black and white film showing the dissonant cheer of life in Westerbork, a Nazi camp in the occupied Netherlands where Dutch Jews and other victims were held before being routed to death camps.
A captive woman leads vigorous group exercises in the yard, and prisoners wave at the camera while the SS chitchat. Farocki’s title cards dryly note that the footage, from 1944, was part of raw material for an unfinished documentary commissioned by the camp commander, who had hoped to convince his superiors to maintain Westerbork as a labor camp once its grim deportations finished.
Gradually, under Farocki’s inspection, chilling details appear through the cracks in the pretty picture: The address on a suitcase identifies a woman destined for Auschwitz; the cinematographer, an inmate named Werner Rudolf Breslauer, was murdered there, too.
In image technology, Farocki showed, civil and military innovation conspires. The 2005 video “A Way” offers a brief history of remote-guided munitions, from bombs equipped with TV cameras in World War II to satellite-targeted missiles in Iraq, using eerily bloodless, dappled images of bridges and warehouses rushing closer to the lens. “An enemy is missing,” the title cards say, arguing that industry always seeks another war in which to test its inventions. (One imagines Farocki seeing industry finding such an opportunity in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine: Those battlefields have become skunk works for turning consumer tech into autonomous weapons.)
Farocki was wary of propaganda but knew the limits of analysis. A film can’t stop a war, though it can demonstrate how to decrypt the buried meaning of images. But by the time you make a film unpacking the ideology of a new medium, that technology has moved on. In that sense, this selection of his work, all made before our age of A.I. and deepfakes, feels unfinished — not a conclusion but a plea: Here’s the torch, take it.
Harun Farocki: Inextinguishable Fire
Through Aug. 16, Greene Naftali Gallery, 508 West 26th Street, Manhattan; 212-463-7770, greenenaftaligallery.com.
Read More: This Filmmaker Saw War Everywhere, and So Can You
