Thinking with Farocki 1

Filmmaker, mentor, and teacher: this day is dedicated to Harun Farocki. Long-standing friends, companions, and associates will trace his work and influence in an intensive series of presentations and reflective discussions.

Moderation: Michael Baute (writer, curator, Berlin)

Program

11 am – 11.30 am
Film, Architecture, Movement
Alexander Alberro (art critic and art historian, Columbia University, New York)

11.30 am – 12 pm
Two or Three Things I know about Harun Farocki
Nora M. Alter (film and media theorist, Temple University, Philadelphia)

12 pm – 12:30 pm
Pourquoi Harun
Raymond Bellour (film and literature researcher, Centre de Recherches sur les Arts et le Langage, Paris)

12.30 pm – 1 pm
Rhetorik eines unwissenden Lehrmeisters
Christa Blümlinger (film scholar, University Paris 8 Vincennes-Saint-Denis)

Contributors

Alexander Alberro is an art scholar and theorist. He is the Virginia Bloedel Wright Professor of Art History at Barnard College, Columbia University, New York. He has just completed the book-length volume Abstraction in Reverse on the emergence and development of abstract art in Latin America, and is presently working on a project that explores the new forms of art and spectatorship that have crystallized in the past two decades. He is the author of Conceptual Art and the Politics of Publicity (2004) and editor of a number of books on contemporary art, including The Ruin of Exchange (2012) and Institutional Critique: An Anthology of Artists’ Writings (2010).

Nora M. Alter is a professor of film and media arts at Temple University. She is the author of Vietnam Protest Theatre: The Television War on Stage (1996), Projecting History: Non-Fiction German Film (2002), and Chris Marker (2006), and coeditor of Sound Matters: Essays on the Acoustics of Modern German Culture (2004) with Lutz Koepnick. Alter has written on artists including, among others, Daniel Buren, Maria Eichhorn, Stan Douglas, Dan Eisenberg, Harun Farocki, Renée Green, Hans Haacke, and Mathias Poledna.

Michael Baute is an author, lecturer, and media worker. Since 1992, he has published writings on cinema in various books, catalogues, and magazines, as well as the blog newfilmkritik.de, which he cofounded in 2001. He published Minutentexte: The Night of the Hunter (2006) jointly with Volker Pantenburg and coauthored the associated radio play Minutentexte (2008). In 2008/2009 he served as artistic director of the project Kunst der Vermittlung. Aus den Archiven des Filmvermittelnden Films (kunst-der-vermittlung.de), which dealt with the research, collection, and distribution of audiovisual forms of education on film and cinema. Since 2010, he has regularly held seminars and workshops on film education, as well as on film itself as a means of film education, including the production of video essays.

Raymond Bellour is a writer and emeritus research scientist at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (Centre de Recherches sur les Arts et le Langage, Paris). He was responsible for the edition of the complete works of Henri Michaux in the Pléiade (1996-2004) and in 1990 co-curated the Passages de l’image exhibition at the Centre Georges Pompidou. His books include L’Analyse du film (1979); L’Entre-Images. Photo, Cinéma, Vidéo (1990); L’Entre-Images 2. Mots, Images (1999); Le Corps du cinéma. Hypnoses, Émotions, Animalités (2009); and La Querelle des dispositifs. Cinéma – installations, expositions (2012). He is a founding member of the film journal Trafic.

Christa Blümlinger is a professor of film studies at the University Paris 8 Vincennes-Saint-Denis. Previously, she taught at the Free University Berlin and the University Sorbonne Nouvelle, and in 2013 was a research fellow at the IKKM Weimar. She works as a curator and film critic in Vienna, Berlin, and Paris (advisory member of the boards of Forum Expanded and sixpackfilm). Her numerous publications are devoted especially to film theory, documentary and avant-garde film, and media art; they include selected writings by Serge Daney and Harun Farocki. Her book Kino aus zweiter Hand. Formen materieller Aneignung im Film und in der Medienkunst (2009) was published in French in 2013 (Editions Klincksieck). Blümlinger’s latest publication (Eng./Fr.) is “Attrait de l’archive,” Cinémas, vol. 24, nos. 2-3, 2014.