Harun Farocki is a footballer. Not primarily, of course; not professionally. Harun is one of the world’s most esteemed documentary filmmakers and has been an important figure in German cinema for over 40 years, even before Cahiers du Cinéma published an essay asking ‘Who is Farocki?’ back in 1975. The current season of Farocki documentaries at the newly-opened Point Centre for Contemporary Art in Nicosia (seven films, running till February 15) is a major event. Yet, in addition to making sharp, often political cine-essays, the thin bespectacled man sitting opposite me in the lobby of the Holiday Inn has also played football, turning out for the same (amateur) Berlin team every Saturday for 25 years, work permitting.
‘What position did you play?’ I ask.
“Always a defender,” he replies, and laughs. His laugh is dry and peppery, sprinkled lightly on his conversation; his English is heavily accented. “The German position. Always to destroy! Not a modern defender.” He laughs again.
So he used to foul people?
He shakes his head. No, his game “was correct” – but he tackled hard, and often won the ball by brute force: “Good old German virtues!”
There are two reasons why the football story makes a good entry-point to Harun Farocki. The first is that he himself used football as an entry-point, inviting any interesting people he met – especially students attending his seminars at the Berlin Film Academy – to join the team. One of those students was Christian Petzold, a film director in his own right who’s since formed a fruitful collaboration with Harun: pupil and mentor recently co-wrote Barbara (directed by Petzold), one of last year’s most acclaimed European movies. Football was the only team sport he played as a younger man (he also did a lot of long-distance running), and may have been untypical – a rare opportunity to bond for a man whose natural tendency is to be something of a loner.
The second reason why the football is significant is because of where he played: deep in defence, every week for 25 years. Harun Farocki isn’t the centre-forward type; even his best-known films are essentially observational, a reason perhaps why it wasn’t till his late 30s (he’s now 68) that he really began to find his voice. “From the 80s on,” he recalls, “when I became aware that I’m not paying enough attention to the world in which I’m living, I made a so-called ‘documentary turn’ and really tried to observe what was going on in our society”. Sitting here in the Holiday Inn, getting ready to present his movies at the Point Centre, he’s polite but distant, his thin face wrinkled, almost cadaverous. His answers are sensible and modest. Pressed to talk about his non-professional life, he laughs and supplies the bare minimum.
Is he good with people, I ask, or an outsider by nature?
“The latter,” he replies dryly.
What does he do for fun?
“I have six grandchildren, that’s already a lot of fun.” He smiles, shrugs: “Talking to my friends, having a beer on the street. All these very simple things.”
There’s another significant point about his football career: the fact that this rather professorial type was – by his own admission – something of a hard-man on the pitch. There’s a steely aspect to Harun Farocki: one of his best-known films, Images of the World and the Inscription of War (1989), talks about a photograph of Auschwitz that was taken during the war, and might’ve led to an air-raid if the Allies had chosen to act on it – but they didn’t, and the film contrasts that useless, arm’s-length knowledge with the direct action of inmates who actually did something, tried (in vain) to break out and burned down one of the gas chambers. Harun himself was shaped by direct action, the political upheavals of his youth: “I was very much informed by the Vietnam protest of the 60s, that is somehow an ongoing topic in my work”. He and 17 others were expelled from film school after occupying the office of the Director to protest an “anti-democratic” law being considered by the West German parliament.
Even before that, it sounds like he had some anger in him. He “ran away from home”, which admittedly sounds worse than it is – he was 18, so not exactly a child – but German law at the time conferred no rights till the age of 21, and besides a break with one’s parents is significant at any age. ‘Why did you leave?’ I ask, but he grows evasive.
“I had good reasons.” He laughs his dry laugh. “Family stuff, and so on.”
Harun’s father was from India, studying to be a doctor when he married his mother – and the family moved to Asia after the war, spending a few years in India and Indonesia which must’ve reinforced Harun’s sense of being an outsider, though he claims he’s always felt entirely German. “For years I didn’t even think about my background,” he insists. “Especially because Berlin was always a place where nobody cared so much”.
Berlin – actually West Berlin – was where he ended up after running away, “trying to live an underground, bohemian life or whatever” for a few years before film school beckoned. (He must have a few juicy stories from those years, I prompt – but he only says “Ja…” and laughs soundlessly.) It was a strange time. West Berlin, he explains – much to my surprise – was dirt-poor, much poorer than the rest of West Germany. “Every qualified person had left Berlin, and only the poor, the handicapped and unqualified remained”; it sometimes felt like the “entire bourgeoisie” had moved to Hamburg or Munich in the mid-60s. The old neighbourhoods grew sleazier and more decrepit, at least till the so-called ‘guest workers’ started to arrive from Turkey, breathing new life with their raw immigrant energy; suddenly, he recalls, “you could buy vegetables again”, as opposed to the canned stuff from the supermarket.
In the midst of all this, he developed a voracious appetite for movies. Harun and his friends were rabid cinephiles, studying films in editing suites “so we could look at a film closely and say, ah, there are 10 cuts and not five as you read in the books”, or else perched in cinemas annoying fellow patrons with their constant armchair analysis, “‘did you see that lamp on the right side’, and so on”. Yet films were still imperfectly understood; film literacy was nothing like it is today. “When you wrote something, nobody knew what you meant when you talked about a cut, or camera pan, or whatever. And that has totally changed.”
In fact, you might say Harun Farocki has been lucky: his kind of observational, low-tech, ruminative documentary, typically made quite simply (he hates working with a big crew), might’ve seemed strange a generation ago, but now seems entirely natural. After all, everyone’s making movies. One of his recent projects was a workshop asking people in 15 different countries – from the Middle East to South America – to make a short two-minute film on the subject of “labour”, the results screened in exhibitions worldwide. The whole world has changed, he points out; “everybody is participating so much” now. He recalls working on construction sites as a teenager, and seeing what a “strict separation” there used to be between workers and bosses – but now the workers often sound like bosses, and if they’re fired “they understand why they are fired, they say yes, there’s not enough profit, they have to fire us”. At least in Germany.
In many ways, it’s the kind of egalitarian world he and his fellow revolutionaries must’ve dreamed of, back in the 60s – with film, his kind of film, as one of its guiding forces. Maybe that’s why he’s happy to travel the world, presenting his work and even giving interviews though he’s far too shy and sensible for the glamour game. What’s he like as a person? Does he get angry? Does he lose his temper? “Not so much,” he re
plies with a laugh. “It’s been a long time since I lost my temper often”. But “I need a lot of time for myself,” he adds carefully. “So when I’m travelling, and I don’t have time to read a book or do some writing work or whatever, then I start losing my temper”. Books have become more important in the past few years, ever since he tried writing an unofficial memoir of his life, for his kids (he has twin daughters, both working in the visual arts), and started looking closely at other books and how they’re constructed. “I read a page of [Robert] Musil, then I think so much [about it] I forget already what is written there.”
hat’s what we talk about with Harun Farocki: the books of Robert Musil, and the revolution in Romania (the subject of one of his films, the 1992 Videograms of a Revolution), and the Arab Spring and the “politics of the gaze”, whatever that is. He’s not a traditional filmmaker; he’s an intellectual. Film shoots tend to exhaust him, he admits: there’s “no time left for some distance and rumination, and I need that”. His dry, down-to-earth personality fits the man of letters and mordant observer, making perceptive points in cine-essay form, more than it does the assertive film director. He himself seems to realise this: he started out trying to make films that were both dramatic and political (his idol was Jean-Luc Godard), but at some point decided that “I didn’t have the ability to do both” – at which point he took his “documentary turn” and became a kind of cine-academic, occasionally helping out with ‘proper’ films like Barbara.
38 years on, that Cahiers du Cinéma headline still applies: ‘Who is Farocki?’. He’s self-effacing, yet also a star (in an arty way): his documentaries are the opposite of flamboyant, yet people watch them because they’re made by Farocki. “It’s a strange niche I’ve found,” notes the man himself with a thin smile – but he can’t complain. After all, “my stuff gets shown, and finds a response worldwide. Just because at the age of 20 I sketched it out this way, why should it happen this way?”.
True enough – yet that fiery, angry, Vietnam-protesting young man can still be found, even within the rather pinched, wrinkled form of the 60-something essayist. “Luckily, I see a lot of continuity in myself,” he says – then recalls a friend who once tweaked a Calvin Klein slogan to fit Harun’s persona. ‘Never the same, always myself” was the marketing tag-line – but Harun Farocki was (and is) the opposite: “Always the same, never myself”. A man with a fixed core but many different facets: artist, revolutionary, intellectual. And of course footballer.
