History Is Not a Matter of Generations: Interview with Harun Farocki

European cinema is in transformation. The geopolitical changes of the European map as well as the new transnational economy have altered the politics of film. To provide reflections on these transformations the German director Harun Farocki proves an excellent source. A filmmaker, critic, theorist, academic, and writer very familiar with the United States as well as Europe, Farocki's work has appeared here in the pages of Camera Obscura, among other places. He is thus especially well situated to articulate an analysis that can bring some clarity to US perspectives on the European film scene.

Farocki has been a truly independent filmmaker. His films, from agitprop to essayist, have developed along a unique path. Yet the theme that connects his films and his written work is the constant exploration of the possibilities and influences of the cinematic apparatus. His extensive exploration of the potential of film has required Farocki to remain critically aware of transnational developments in film. In the interview below, Farocki reflects on how the medium of film is defined by distribution, funding, and technology, among other topics. Here his comments are marked by a certain dialectical realism that recognizes both limitations and possibilities in the current conditions. For example, the transformation and, to a great extent, privatization of European television has brought a great need for programming, filling airtime mainly with reruns of Baywatch, Knightrider, and anything else starring David Hasselhoff. Nevertheless, these transformations have also resulted in increased opportunity for Farocki's work.

Such analysis coming from one of Germany's most important independent filmmakers is perhaps especially significant as a document for a US audience waxing nostalgic for the "Golden Age of Foreign Film," the title a recent film retrospective in New York gave to the roughly forty years of film production that followed the end of World War II. There is no dismissing the fact that popular commercial film production is up in Europe and that such production has changed the parameters of high culture. For various reasons, many of them having to do with the film policy of the European Union (EU), the European share of the film market is up as Europeans choose to view European productions with greater frequency. ¹ However, the noise that surrounds the production of predictable and generically conventional films does not mean that avant-garde, experimental, critical, and/or political film production has been drowned out. Prompted to compare the relationship of his production to contemporary popular films, Farocki humorously expresses the hope that the number of people who go to see his films would be higher than that of the number who leave during a contemporary German comedy. However, it would be a mistake to assume that those who see a Detlev Buck film do not also see a film by Lars von Trier, Jean-Luc Godard, or Farocki, for that matter.

The terms of political engagement and the system of cultural production are dynamic. They have not remained stagnant over the last fifty years, neither in the US nor in Europe. Farocki certainly gives insight into that dynamic process. Yet in the US, where it is possible to generate the designation "Golden Age of Foreign Film," it seems that there is a desire among cinéphiles to freeze European production in time and dismiss current production as not living up to past glories. Such nostalgia is itself a longing for forms that appeal according to static aesthetic criteria--the visual pleasure of viewing what one knows. I would suggest that when we hear such nostalgia, it is not really for a film "as good as" Wild Strawberries (dir. Ingmar Bergman, Sweden, 1957), but actually, perhaps paradoxically, nostalgia for a moment in which people were viewing things they did not know, when people were open to engagement with new aesthetic forms. The desire to view according to static aesthetic...