Co-presented with Goethe-Insitut San Francisco
These pieces by radical German film essayist Harun Farocki explore the complex and shifting relationships between violence, visibility and technology in the context of war. Produced at the height of Vietnam, Inextinguishable Fire (1969) presents a Brechtian analysis of the production and use of napalm, corporate involvement in the technology of terror, and how violence is rendered (in)visible. Thirty-four years and dozens of films later, Farocki’s War at a Distance (Erkennen und Verfolgen, 2003) brilliantly navigates and explores the connections between machine-vision, violence and capitalist production practices in the context of the Gulf War and the global economy. Farocki demonstrates that our naive anthropocentric notions of vision and the visible are obsolete in today’s world. This is a special Bay Area preview. (Irina Leimbacher)