Public Talk by Harun Farocki at Ashkal Alwan

Ashkal Alwan is hosting a public talk with Harun Farocki, a visiting professor of the Home Workspace Program 2012-13 and a filmmaker.

Abstract: If you only know the documentary film from television then you might believe that such a film could not exist without a voice-over commentary. It is easier to produce or to rework words than images; in industrial documentary film production, words are therefore used to compensate or to amend what images do not have.

We have to examine the functions a commentary can have in a documentary film. If it represents the images like a company represents its work with a business report; or if the commentary really opens up the images or if it takes the effort to study them.

Without the commentary we could hardly align the heterogeneous image subjects of Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil; but nevertheless, each episode has to reveal Marker’s worldview – beyond the commentary. We have to examine in which order the images are structured, independent from any value a commentary ascribes to them.