What Farocki taught

Duration: 30

Year Published: 1997

Creator: a film by Jill Godmilow.

Format: 16mm

Color: Color & B&W

Sound: sound

Credits: Godmilow, Jill, direction.; Farocki, Harun, direction.; Loncar, Kevin, camera/lighting.; Auerbach, Bruce, production design.; Blandford, John, cast.; Burrell, David, cast.; Cavadini, John, cast.; De Anda, Mario, cast.; Donnelly, R. (Rick), cast.; Jordan, Sonja, cast.; Laboratory for Icon & Idiom, Inc.

Description: Copyright notice: c1998 The Laboratory for Icon & Idion, Inc.; Pacific Film Archive collection; non-circulating. Access by appt. only. CBPF.; PFA 1612-01-14440. Restricted: For PFA exhibition only.; Director of photography, Kevin Loncar ; lighting director, Alan Smith ; set designer, Bruce Auerbach.; John Blandford, David Burrell, John Cavadini, Mario de Anda, Rick Donnelly, Sonja Jordan, Bill Kjrier, Denise Massa, Esther-Mirjam Sent.; "Taking as its subject the political and formal strategies of Harun Farocki's 1969 film Inextinguishable Fire, What Farocki Taught is literally and stubbornly a remake-that is, a perfect replica, in color and in English, of Farocki's astute, some would say crudely made film, produced in Germany at the height of the Vietnam War. In 1969, Farocki attempted to make "visible," and thus comprehensible, the physical properties of Napalm B, and to demonstrate the impossibility of resistance to its production and use. Because Farocki's film was not distributed in the U.S. at the time of its making, What Farocki Taught was conceived as a gesture of film distribution, taking this small footnote to war-a barnacle stuck on the side of the mothballed vessel of Vietnam- flicking it forward past the recent, more sophisticated, and successful technologies of Panama and the Persian Gulf, to see if the "ping" of recognition and the radical potential of the documentary film project can be revived. Farocki's film is radical in technique, taking up one of the hottest of political questions-the production of terror-and cooling it down to frank, rational substance through the strategy of underrepresentation, refusing the pornography of documentary "evidence" and replacing it with Brechtian reconstruction and demonstration.-Jill Godmilow. Pacific Film Archive program note.; PFA 1612-01-14440. D0277; PFA 1612-01-14440. CONDITION NOTE: Last checked: 2011/01 /24 Very good condition.

Metadata Source:BERKELEY ART MUSEUM AND PACIFIC FILM ARCHIVE