Harun Farocki

Harun Farocki (9 January 1944 – 30 July 2014) was a German filmmaker, author, and lecturer in film.^[1]

Farocki was born as Harun El Usman Faroqhi in Neutitschein (now Nový Jičín) in the Czech Republic.^[2][3][4] His father, Abdul Qudus Faroqui, had immigrated to Germany from India in the 1920s. His German mother had been evacuated from Berlin due to the Allied bombing of Germany.^[5][6] He simplified the spelling of his surname as a young man.^[2] After World War II, Farocki grew up in India and Indonesia before the family resettled in Hamburg in 1958.^[5][6][7]

Farocki, who was deeply influenced by Bertolt Brecht and Jean-Luc Godard, studied at the German Film and Television Academy Berlin (dffb) from 1966 to 1968.^[8][9] There, in the mid-1960s, he began making films which, from the very beginning, were non-narrative essays on the politics of imagery.^[2]

Farocki made over 90 films, between the 1960s and his death in 2014, the vast majority of them short experimental documentaries.^[10][11] His practice combined essay film, political analysis, media archaeology, and installation art. Farocki was particularly concerned with the politics of images, how images are produced, circulated, and operationalized within systems of power such as the military, industry, surveillance, and advertising.^[12][13]

From 1974 to 1984, when its publication ceased, Farocki edited the magazine Filmkritik, which served as a crucial forum for politically engaged film theory in West Germany.^[2][14] From 1993 to 1999, Farocki taught at the University of California, Berkeley.^[4] He later was a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna.^[4] In his 2000-2003 three-part installation, Eye/Machine, Farocki coined the term "operational image".^{[15][16][17][18]}

Farocki's works Serious Games I-IV (2009-10) are a series of four video installations featuring footage recorded at different US military sites where computer-game technology was used to train soldiers, as well as treat them for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).^[19] The work was named by Frieze as No.20 of "The 25 Best Works of the 21st Century".^[12]

Farocki's work was included in the 2004–05 Carnegie International at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh. Pennsylvania.^[20]

A first major UK retrospective of his films was held at Tate Modern in 2009. ^[21]

The 2011 exhibition "Harun Farocki: Images of War (at a Distance)" at the Museum of Modern Art was the first comprehensive solo exhibition of Farocki's work in a U.S. museum. It featured a major acquisition of around 36 works spanning four decades, including the U.S. premiere of Serious Games I–IV and seminal works such as Videograms of a Revolution.^[22]

Images of the world and the inscription of war and Respite were released on Region 0 DVD on 7 June 2011 by Survivance.^[23]

In 2015 ^[24][25] and 2019^[26] Farocki's works were exhibited in major showcases in Brazil at Paço das Artes (curated by Jane de Almeida) and Moreira Salles Institute (curated by Antje Ehmann and Heloisa Espada).

Farocki's first wife, Ursula Lefkes, whom he married in 1966, died in 1996.^[27]

Farocki died unexpectedly on 30 July 2014, aged 70.^[2] His survivors include his second wife, Antje Ehmann, whom he married in 2001; twin daughters from his first marriage, Annabel Lee and Larissa Lu; and eight grandchildren.

(D = Director, E = Editor, S = Screenplay, P = Production, A = Actor)

• Harun Farocki Official site
• Harun Farocki at IMDb
• Harun Farocki in the Video Data Bank
• 'Harun Farocki. Empathy', Exhibition at Fundació Antoni Tàpies, Barcelona
• Vídeo of the talk by Antje Ehmann about the Harun Farocky's work 'Labour in a Single Shot' at Fundació Antoni Tàpies museum, Barcelona, 2016 Archived 11 September 2016 at the Wayback Machine

• Embodied histories. Harun Farocki and Andrei Ujică's Videograms of a Revolution.
• Pantenburg, Volker: Farocki/Godard: Film as Theory. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press 2015.