Harun Farocki: Images of the World and the Inscription of War

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Harun Farocki, Germany 1988, colour and black and white, sound, 16mm, 75min 

Harun Farocki’s classic essay film launches the dedicated film series for the exhibition Confict, Time, Photography. The series features key films that question how memory and confict are explored in cinema with films by John Gianvito, Serge Bozon and Nobuhiro Suwa among others from 30 January – 15 February 2015.

Made 43 years after the second world war, Harun Farocki’s film Images of the world and the Inscription of War 1988 is one of the most celebrated works by this influential artist and filmmaker. The film focuses on the ‘blind spots’ in the interpretation of aerial photographs taken during an American bombing raid in 1944 of an industrial plant in Germany. Only decades later, when the photos were analysed by the CIA, was it realised that the Auschwitz concentration camps were also captured in these images. Farocki shows the links between war and photography, exploring how perception during times of conflict is conditioned by what people want or don’t want to see, rendering observers as either passive accomplices or victims in times of war.

Harun Farocki who passed away on 30 July 2014 was the subject of a retrospective at Tate Modern in 2009 curated by Stuart Comer, Antje Ehmann and the Otolith Collective.

This event is the first in a series of events on the work of Harun Farocki to be held in London throughout 2015.  Brave New Work: A Reader on Harun Farocki’s Film A New Product will be held at The Showroom on 25 February and a larger project on Farocki co-curated by The Otolith Collective and Antje Ehmann will be held there in the autumn of 2015

Presented in collaboration with the Goethe-Institut London

Tate Film is supported by LUMA Foundation