random quotes from Harun Farocki articles in "Filmkritik"

Ten years on, it is always the article on the back of the newspaper cutting that is of interest, but half a column is missing.

I have always wanted to have a creative job. I gave up track and field athletics, did
not go near the girls in our row-house suburbwho read Bravo [German equivalent of
Who Weekly – ed.]. I dropped out of school to lead a life with more variety. In Berlin, I lived in a cellar. In the mornings, I went to a brewery to deliver beer, afternoons I distributed pamphlets to tenement houses, evenings I collected beer glasses in the first discotheque, nights I went to night school to get on, around midnight I took part in dance competitions in the Eden saloon and on several occasions was voted Mister Twist, and I saw dawn break beside the runway of the Tempelhof Airport in spotlessly white Pan Am overalls. But I couldn’t write anything. After three lines, I feared that life wouldn’t let itself be grasped in this way and I went to look for it somewhere else. Then, for seven years, a woman sheltered me and I learnt everything. I could do my work. But what I experienced made no sense. Marriage, the company, life – all fakes.

Wenn eine Tote (When a dead woman) ... is a boring novel, but sometimes it is this mechanical aspect that is needed on a rainy day in a hotel room in a strange city to reassure oneself of one’s own singular being.

If you do not read thrillers you might not understand why such a film deserves to be admired. This lightness of touch, perfect timing, and a feeling of happiness is only achieved when I succeed in throwing the wash into the machine, register a letter at the post office and return to the laundromat at the very moment the tub stops rotating. Red Line 7000 (Howard Hawks, USA 1965) is about the stupidity of life, excessively so, without letting itself be affected by it.

Why does dramaturgy have to be smooth, why is there no crisis in acting! Actors still play cute like orphaned babies in a crib wanting parents to adopt them. This gurgling, dribbling and crooning! (...) Then the actors travel to the USA in the summer, and in loft workshops they learn how to let it all hang out, instead of going to a Swiss clinic to have their facial muscles severed.

In 1890, the basic plan of action was for someone to kick the ball ahead and the others to run after it. Since then there have been a hundred methods and applications. In the 1960s, the defensive approach did a lot of damage to soccer, but the game put all this behind it. Soccer gives the impression of being a strong culture capable of renewal through formal innovation, like prostitution and drugs. Film seems to lack this vitality. There were a couple of times when film was part of everyday culture, and philosophy had its physical expression, you could see it with your eyes. It was like that in 1972, when West Germany beat England 3-1 in London, and you could see the thoughts on the playing field.

Once I saw a film called Tarzan und die Nazis (Tarzan Triumphs, William/Wilhelm Thiele, USA 1943). Tarzan couldn’t care less what the Nazis did to the blacks,
but when they harassed Cheetah (or was it Jane, or the child?), Tarzan was seized
with rage and he entered World War II. Pearl Harbor looked like the idea of a script-
writer who writes for films like Tarzan und die Nazis. Again and again the question was raised whether the USA hadn’t staged the Japanese attack. [...] Pearl Harbor, the Reichstag fire aswell, the assassination in Dallas, I’d like to call these stories, core stories. [...] But what is a core story: one with the power to attract denials, confirmations, additions, deletions, legal and parliamentary investigations, and finally, scholarly studies. One layer on top of another accumulates around the nucleus, and as with freshly fallen snow, when you’re rolling a great ball for the snowman, eventually the green of the grass appears. [...] Thus they (the nuclear stories) tell how you cannot know how the world works, but you can imagine it. The way these interesting women teach you how it cannot work out with love but still instil in you the idea of what it would be like if...