Shock and Awe – Images of war between documentation and ideology

Harun Farocki: Images of the World and Inscription of War, 1988, 75 min.
with a commentary by Hito Steyerl

Aerial photographs from 1944 show the concentration camps in Auschwitz. The American Air Force scouts happened to photograph them when they captured the IG Farben factories in Monowitz for bombing. Comments on the aerial photographs make it clear that it was only decades later and with the knowledge of the post-war years that what the Allies did not want to or could not see was discovered: The gas chambers, the wall of death and hundreds of people. The appropriation of the world through images and the dispossession of the human senses and ability to interpret them is the central theme of the film. In a transfer of historical and current strategies of war images, their media stereotypes, their “inscription of war” are unmasked.

Born in Nový Jicin (Neutitschein) in 1944, studied at the German Film and Television Academy Berlin (DFFB) from 1966-68. After teaching in Berlin, Düsseldorf, Hamburg, Manila, Munich and Stuttgart, 1993-1999 visiting professor at the University of California, Berkeley. Farocki’s oeuvre comprises around 90 films, including three feature films, essay films and documentaries. Numerous publications since 1966. 1974-1984 editor and author of the magazine  Film criticism (Munich). Since 1990 also numerous exhibitions in galleries and museums.

“The images therefore show the truth – but not the “whole” truth. They prove to be a Janus-faced construct in which “moments of truth” can be articulated.”

Hito Steyerl, Documentarism as a Politics of Truth, 2003.

In her most recent works, the author Hito Steyerl devoted herself to the philosophical concept of truth and examined its meaning in the context of the current popularity of documentary strategies.

Lives in Berlin, studied fiction and documentary film at the Academy of Visual Arts in Tokyo and at the Academy for Television and Film in Munich. She has published cinematic and literary essays on globalization, racism and post-colonial criticism.