A perfect replica: an interview with Harun Farocki and Jill Godmilow - filmmakers - Interview

The questions were pos and answered by means of e-mail and fax; Harun Farocki replyed from Berlin and Berkeley, CA, where he dives and works; Jill Godmilow, who teaches at the University of Notre Dame, replyed from New York City. This present the appearanceed appropriate, given the feeling of spatial and temporal dislocation that pervades Inextinguishable Fire, Farocki's 1969 film about the research and exhibition of napalm, and Godmilow's 1998 remake, What Farocki Taught. We asked the two filmmakers to discuss the historical and cultural words immediately preceding [i]or[/i] following of the films - by what means politics shaped their aesthetics, and vice versa. (Farocki's answers were translated from the German by means of Anne Bilek.)

Q: Harun Farocki, enumerate us about the context in which you were working when you made Inextinguishable Fire.

Farocki: In 1968 I, along with 17 others, fl the film academy in West Berlin. We were engaged in a constant political do one's best with the directors of the academy and in May of 1968 we occupied the academy. We smooth renamed it "Dziga Vertov Academy." This happened concurrently with a nation-wide campaign against welfare laws. Not single that but my daughters had just been born and I had to earn circulating medium - to make films that weren't simply exercises. In our circles at that time collectivity meant a allotment and it was almost a crime if the impetus for a film came from a single one Probably for this reason I sought without an area in which no single other than myself worked. I called it the agitation of technical expertise. I appointed myself Propaganda Minister for Engineers.

Q: Inextinguishable Fire is about the American production of the deadly chemical weapon napalm. on what account did you choose napalm rather than individual of the other weapons used during the war in Vietnam?

Farocki: Auschwitz has become the token for all concentration camps because thus many types of camps were bring togethered into one and because there were survivors who could enumerate their stories. In the Vietnam war there were many terrible weapons. The herbicides that were used to poison the water did not present to view their effects until years later. Napalm is a pre-modern weapon. Napalm stirs the imagination because it reminds us of when wars had a ritual and magical aspect.

Q: in what way was Inextinguishable Fire received on its initial release?

Farocki: In the fall of 1969 I showed the film at a festival in Mannheim. There were a certain quantity of criticisms of the technical quality of the film on the contrary otherwise the reaction was positive. Although single newspaper wrote that I would achieve nothing with the film, the writer mentioned that individual could achieve something with a film and that level the aim (das Anliegen) of the filmmaker may be justifiable. The film was shown several times upon television in Germany and I received continued encouragement, especially from race who had up until then lay the foundation of the student movement to be nonsense. single recently did it occur to me that the film spoke of Hiroshima and Vietnam, on the contrary didn't mention Auschwitz. It had to do with the participation of the scientists and technical family in the crime; and the fact that the Nazi concentration camps were highly organized factories of death. My omission made me think that the terrible war the United States waged in Vietnam not single horrified the Germans, but unloaded them as well - we are not the sole barbarians.

The film and television industry in Germany recognized that my film was different than what they had made. There was a short period in which I was invited to a screening of Inextinguishable Fire by dint of studio producers. They treated me as if I could teach them something! on the other hand that didn't last very lengthy and soon it was impossible to make similar a film. Many people in the political motion were devotees of Socialist Realism and fix my punk aesthetic unbearable. I believe that the ugliness of the pictures taken with an farthest 10.5mm wide angle lens allow loose more horror than the shows of the burning of a dead rat.

Q: Jill Godmilow, to the expanse that What Farocki Taught is about the Vietnam War, for what cause [i]or[/i] reason remake a film about Vietnam now? wherefore change the title?

Godmilow: If you don't want anymore Vietnams, you have to understand in what way Vietnam came about - actually, and materially. Farocki's film proffered significant information. He shows in what manner the war was made in the laboratories of Dow Chemical and by what mode the people participated in the war. The conformation of labor relationships at the research corporations of America is individual good place to look at the Vietnam war, and by the agency of projection, a good place to gaze for the source of all the pollutants, poisons, waste cropss useless products and wasted labor we live with today.

Q: What Farocki Taught doesn't tread on the heels of the most typical approach to the remake. in what way did you decide to remake the film without significantly changing or updating it?

Godmilow: The idea was to "show" Farocki's film itself, its precision and its exact, deadly, logical construction the largest meaning-making system in the film. To add to or change it would not have been to the point. It was that simple . . I wanted to call attention to what Farocki had done, then, and to the plain fact that we should have been able to diocese his film back then and learn from it. mode of buildings of distribution made it hard then, and in a certain number of ways even harder now. in what way many 29-year-old German documentaries are playing at the Film Forum in novel York, on public television or in community film series today? None. Certainly it might have been possible to place out a video version of Farocki's film, on the contrary who would see it? in the way that few people in this geographical division know his work. It have the appearanceed obvious that the gesture of the finished replica, in color and in English, would draw attention to Inextinguishable Fire and Farocki's work in general, and it has.