WHITE CHRISTMAS (1968) zieht eine Parallele zwischen den christlichen Feiertagen in den USA und den kriegerischen Auseinandersetzungen in Vietnam. Unterlegt sind die Szenen und Bilder des Films mit dem wohl bekanntesten amerikanischen Weihnachtslied ― dem von Irving Berlin komponierten und von Bing Crosby gesungenen „White Christmas“ (1941).

Peter Lorre achieved international fame for his performance in the myth-making role in M. This character has held a peculiar fascination for generations of cinephiles. However, at the time, whilst such success meant recognition, it also weighed on the Hungarian actor as a constrictive burden. Using photographs and film extracts, Das doppelte Gesicht reconstructs the ups and downs of Lorre's career, taking into consideration the economic imperatives and workings of the film industry at the time. (Arnold Hohmann, 1984)

An advertising agency has to pitch a marketing concept to an optician's consortium, represented by the manager who is the first to see the campaign. The logo submitted is examined from every angle: it must simultaneously express both the company's dynamism and its reliability. A fascinating, dispassionate glimpse behind closed doors, where every detail is dramatized to win that lucrative contract.

Harun Farocki’s work Deep Play is made up of various perspectives on the final of the 2006 World Cup.

"As if pictures could think! Einschlafgeschichten doesn't really speak of bridges or railroads but rather of two girls filling the space between daytime and dreamtime with a poetic game, an endless game, a game with no end. A game which can fade out without becoming fragmentary. "Are you asleep?", one of them asks at the end of a clip – and the final shot is of the two, asleep; the game is over. The girls are played by Lara and Anna, Farocki's daughters." - Hans J. Wulff

"As if pictures could think! Einschlafgeschichten doesn't really speak of bridges or railroads but rather of two girls filling the space between daytime and dreamtime with a poetic game, an endless game, a game with no end. A game which can fade out without becoming fragmentary. "Are you asleep?", one of them asks at the end of a clip – and the final shot is of the two, asleep; the game is over. The girls are played by Lara and Anna, Farocki's daughters."

"As if pictures could think! Einschlafgeschichten doesn't really speak of bridges or railroads but rather of two girls filling the space between daytime and dreamtime with a poetic game, an endless game, a game with no end. A game which can fade out without becoming fragmentary. "Are you asleep?", one of them asks at the end of a clip – and the final shot is of the two, asleep; the game is over. The girls are played by Lara and Anna, Farocki's daughters." - Hans J. Wulff

Harun Farocki: Serious Games I–IV (2009–10) explores the use of virtual reality and gaming technology in U.S. military recruitment, training and after-action therapy, revealing fundamental links between technology and violence in a time of war. Young recruits engage in simulated combat training, which barely differs from video games produced as entertainment. Footage is included from a workshop demonstrating the use of computer re-enactments in the psychological care of veterans suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. As a large-scale installation, Serious Games critically focuses on the role of audiovisual culture in the spectacle of war.

The city today is as rationalised and regulated as a production process. The images which today determine the day of the city are operative images, control images. Representations of traffic regulation, by car, train or metro, representations determining the height at which mobile phone network transmitters are fixed, and where the holes in the networks are. Images from thermo-cameras to discover heat loss from buildings. And digital models of the city, portrayed with fewer shapes of buildings or roofs than were used in the 19th century when planned industrial cities arose, amongst them the Lille agglomeration. Despite their boulevards, promenades, market places, arcades and churches, these cities are already machines for living and working. I too want to "remake" the city films, but with different images. Limited time and means themselves demand concentration on just a few, archetypal chapters. Fragments, or preliminary studies.

"War always finds a way (Brecht). If there is a relationship between production and destruction, between the development of productive and destructive forces, then the atom bomb is the ultimate weapon of the post-industrial age. Greatest tonnage, highest mortality, maximum devastation. But what comes next, what are the weapons of the post-industrial age ? Post-industrial products are characterised by a declining proportion of material components, meaning that they depreciate more slowly. In order to prevent them clogging the market they have to be artificially aged, or as Marx put it, morally depreciated. The same is true for monopolists : only through constant innovation can products age and lose value ; competition is no longer needed. Until now it was competition that gave rise to enmity. Now, the competition is internal and an external enemy is no longer to be found. The enemy is amongst us and within us. Weapons are needed that can hit one person amongst a thousand. The economics demand wars with maximum precision targeting. Such as : wars fought on humanitarian grounds." (Harun Farocki)

Harun Farocki plunders 40 years of advertising films, which he orchestrates to constitute an ironic 24 hours in the life of typical consumer. Mixing different colours, periods, various "ideologies of well being" to hold up a mirror up to our times, values, worries, hopes. This collage of "beautiful images", gleeful and chaotic, deconstructs not only the domestic reference points which punctuate our daily life, but also gives full rein to an off-beat humour in the tradition of Brechtian distanciation.

Harun Farocki utilizes a vast collection of image sequences from laboratories, archives and production facilities to explore modern weapons technology. This trilogy examines "intelligent" image processing techniques such as electronic surveillance, mapping and object recognition, in order to take a closer look at the relationship between man, machine, and modern warfare.

Harun Farocki utilizes a vast collection of image sequences from laboratories, archives and production facilities to explore modern weapons technology. This trilogy examines "intelligent" image processing techniques such as electronic surveillance, mapping and object recognition, in order to take a closer look at the relationship between man, machine, and modern warfare.

Farocki's newest film portrays a brainstorming session about new concepts for mobile workstations which would grant employees a high degree of autonomy - and leave experts grappling for words. The product concept is bold, but intellectually flimsy, and best serves as a reflection of existing world order. Once again, colored markers and eye-catching graphics are used to disguise heartless capitalism. The cutesy branding of neoliberal market economics is grotesque... and fascinating.

"Three months in an architects’ firm in Berlin. From the architecture down to the tiniest door handle, a questioning of matter and the verb." -- Harun Farocki "Architects at work: a priori nothing lends itself better to cinema, nothing is more graphic than shots that alternate between the drawing and the built structure, between the two-dimensional plan and the three dimensional result. Yet this film, with its corporate-sounding title, shot over three months in a large Berlin-based firm abandons this clarity to instil a generalised doubt — not so much about the value of those it films as about its own critical viewpoint. Certainly, it is no trifling matter that in one of their on-going projects (a Virtual Reality Centre in Laval), the architects are trying to merge the building into the landscape: the invisibility justified by the end use of the building operates as a clue to the fact that, in architecture, during the design phase there is nothing to see, and that actual construction is less a matter of a change in scale than a sudden, demiurgic leap where there is no going back. In this group portrait, the creators appear both as master rhetoricians and children playing with materials and colours. Through their changing opinions, what Farocki is questioning is nothing less than the relationships between word and matter — which inevitably finds a mirror of cinema in the renewed mystery of architectural art: producing form from discourse." -- Charlotte Garson, Cinema du Reel

Places of memory set in stone are the subject addressed by Harun Farocki. Transmission examines the pull and adoration of monuments scattered all over the world that have become goals for pilgrims and tourists and now serve to meet a whole range of different needs, from personal memory to spiritual enlightenment and religious sentiment. Farocki’s journey starts from the Vietnam Memorial in Washington, a wall of black granite engraved with the names of all the 58,249 Americans killed in the Vietnam War. Thousands of people visit it every day, touch the letters and trace the names of family and friends in an attempt to establish a link between their own lives and the past. Other objects of pilgrimage – including the foot of the statue of the Apostle in St Peter’s and the Bocca della Verità in Rome as well as the devil’s footprint in the Frauenkirche in Munich and the monument in the Buchenwald concentration camp – meet the same need for understanding and purification. Stone is the material in which the collective memory of a life or an event in the past is immortalized and becomes an object of worship. At the same time, the memory of thousands of visitors is preserved in the traces of wear it displays. (Anita Beckers)

Images from the maximum-security prison in Corcoran, California. A surveillance camera shows a pie-shaped segment of the concrete yard where the prisoners, dressed in shorts and mostly shirtless, are allowed to spend half an hour a day. When one convict attacks another, those not involved lay flat on the ground, arms over their heads. They know that when a fight breaks out, the guard calls out a warning and then fires rubber bullets. If the fight continues, the guard shoots real bullets. The pictures are silent, the trail of gun smoke drifts across the picture. The camera and the gun are right next to each other.

Again, in 29 Palms, we embarked on an exercise with around 300 extras who represented both the Afghan and Iraqi population. A few dozen Marines were on guard and went out on patrol. The town where the maneuver was carried out was on a slight rising in the desert and its buildings were made from containers. It looked as though we had modeled reality on a computer animation.