Harun Farocki

 

 

Harun Farocki was born in 1944, in German-annexed Czechoslovakia. The variety of his works - going through film, documentary or avant-garde cinema - makes it difficult to put him into one division or classification. That led critics to call him several times an essay-film maker, specially because of his style, based on the montage of images with critical voice-over commentary. According to Thomas Elsaesser, the essay in Farocki ́s cinema is his signature, as his cinema can be called as a meta-cinema, constantly reflecting about the role of the images (consequently about the cinema itself) in the exertion of power and control of the world. Farocki once said ̈My films are made agains the cinema and against television ̈, paradoxically meaning that images could only be discussed through images themselves.