Harun Farocki and the Work of Images Beneath the Information, the Operation
By Tom Holert
1. Against the Creepage Current
During a panel discussion at the third Berlin Documentary Forum in 2014, Harun Farocki addressed the moment in the early twentieth century when film eventually became “entertainment, education, and so on,” ceasing its vital function in producing objective knowledge. The filmmaker compared it to a loss of employment and the recognition that accompanies work: “That’s not good!” he declared indignantly. “It’s better to have work to do. We know that liberation is very often linked to having a job.”
In a sense, Farocki had rediscovered a version of that missing “work” in the 1990s with his “operational images.” However, the distinction underlying his 2014 statement on the “work” of images had been there for some time. In 1970, outlining the theoretical context of The Division of All Days (Die Teilung aller Tage), a Marxist Lehrfilm introducing the concept of surplus value, he and his collaborator Hartmut Bitomsky wrote:
What is called “film” comprises a whole bundle of functions. Roughly speaking: Film exists to reproduce the commodity of labor power (vulgar entertainment). Film exists to convey information (productive force) and to provide it (science as productive force). Film exists to confer qualifications. It turns out that these functions interfere with and cancel each other out if they are not first separated.
For the young Farocki, the actual “work” of film went beyond information and entertainment. Though it could be found in the early history of film’s scientific applications, Farocki saw a need for it to be updated and mobilized for agitational purposes in a potentially revolutionary present following 1968. This preference for images at work—especially for photography and film in the fields of photogrammetry, microcinema, industrial motion studies, chronophotography, and other forms of visual research and production using images—was to remain an integral part of Farocki's approach to filmmaking and his critical engagement with visual culture. The conceptualization and theorization of operational images, Farocki’s most influential intervention into the semantics of visual and media studies, was largely prompted by the agonizing abundance of images that signify, represent, and metaphorize rather than “work.” For Farocki, the way out of this predicament inevitably meant creating a counterweight to a corrupted capitalist visuality. It was, however, a different kind of exit than was hinted at in the German title of his most comprehensive text on operational images, “Der Krieg findet immer einen Ausweg” (“War Always Finds a Way,” quoting directly from Brecht’s Mother Courage and Her Children).
