Disappearing Suffering: Desire, Modern Work, and the Problem of Images in the Films of Hartmut Bitomsky

Hartmut Bitomsky shows how suffering, in both its catastrophic and quotidian modes, can be made to disappear from view by mobilizing images. Films manifest what he calls an “Arbeit am Verzicht” (literally “work on doing without”) that inheres in modern political, economic, and cultural structures. From Nazi Kulturfilme through the development of the Autobahn and automotive industry in the FRG, the relationship between different forms of human labor and the machines that tend to make that labor vanish is especially at stake in “Arbeit am Verzicht,” which reaches an apex in the representational and destructive power of the American B-52. This essay explores “disappearing” in the aesthetic that Bitomsky investigates and produces.