NEW YORK, NY.- Over the next four months, 80 Washington Square East and Anthology Film Archives will screen films and videos by Harun Farocki. Screenings will take place first at Anthology Film Archives and later at New York University.

Harun Farocki was born in 1944. He lived in India and Indonesia before moving with his family to Germany at age 10. In his early twenties, he left for West Berlin to further his studies in cinema, and spent most of his working life there. By the time of his death in 2014, he had a prolific body of films to his name. Laboring under the burden of Europe’s history, a history in which the Holocaust loomed large, Farocki was a naturalist of loss. One’s ability to forget what they do not want to know, to overlook what is before them, was seldom put to the test better than in Germany’s reconstruction after the Second World War. The writer W.G. Sebald said that postwar Germany was “an almost perfectly functioning mechanism of repression.” Farocki, on the other hand, did not sweep things under the rug. His work, often graceful in its observations, was never far from the injury of our world. “He was endlessly patient,” Antje Ehmann wrote, “with the strangeness, the beauty, the stupidity, and even the unbearable cruelness of our world.”

His films often track the effects that free markets, war, and their attendant technologies have on the individual. His films invariably reflect on the methods we use to construct and distribute images and the uses to which these images are put. Frequently, he went to places of focused production – a prison, a virtual reality facility used to train soldiers, a commercial photo shoot – and managed to describe the abstractions, the rules, the exercises and negotiations of power behind the surface of such images. About his method, Farocki once remarked, “My maxim was: I tell a company that the movie is an advertisement for what they are doing and tell the TV station [Farocki’s employer] that the film is a criticism of this practice. And try not to do either one or the other.”

Screening updates and information here.