A hybrid attempt at coming to terms with a specific instance of amnesia amongst the West German left in the late 1970s/early 1980s, Harun Farocki’s 1982 feature film BEFORE YOUR EYES – VIETNAM combines ideas about the distant, image-guided participation in the war in Vietnam with speculations on Vietnam as a laboratory of advanced modes of capitalist production, whilst reflecting intensely on the dyad of love and work.

Significantly expanding the scope and functions of the HaFI pamphlet series, Ben Alper and Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa present visual unknowns and forgotten gestures from the defunct archives of American mid-century news photography. Carefully curated and collated, their iconographic essay, a Bilderatlas of sorts, explores in depth the notion of “hide,” and of what forces normative relations to the visible serve to veil. How can, how should these images be looked at? And how do they unsettle the contemporary gaze?

Werner Dütsch (1939-2018), together with other commissioning editors of the film department of Westdeutscher Rundfunk (WDR) Cologne, devoted his work to the past and present of the cinema like few others.

A small selection of texts written by the outstanding film critic and translator Frieda Grafe, complemented by the speech that Harun Farocki gave when Grafe and Enno Patalas were given the “01 award” in 2000.

Ein Heft zur Entstehungsgeschichte von Harun Farockis Film Bilder der Welt und Inschrift des Krieges (1988), der sich zwischen 1985 und 1988 in mehreren Etappen aus dem unverwirklichten Projekt „Zur Geschichte der Arbeit“ heraus entwickelte.

Ein Heft zur Entstehungsgeschichte von Harun Farockis Film Bilder der Welt und Inschrift des Krieges (1988), der sich zwischen 1985 und 1988 in mehreren Etappen aus dem unverwirklichten Projekt „Zur Geschichte der Arbeit“ heraus entwickelte.

In 1976, Harun Farocki and Hanns Zischler directed Heiner Müller’s plays The Battle and Tractor for Theater Basel. For Farocki, this production remained his only directorial work for theater. With Heiner Müller, however, he remained in intellectual exchange. The two collaborated on the adaptation of Müller’s text The Hamletmachine for radio in 1978; for the May 1981 issue of the magazine Filmkritik, they conducted a conversation.

“I also don't know the five new federal states and, if I want to film there, I have to have a leading figure. It is the profiteer, development aid worker and missionary all in one. He breaks into the accession area from the West in army strength. The film is about such a salesman.” –– Harun Farocki, 1990/91

In 1977 Ingemo Engström and Gerhard Theuring embark on a journey through France. They trace the escape route of the German emigration in France 1940/41, documenting the places, talking to witnesses, relating the temporal layers. The film ESCAPE ROUTE TO MARSEILLES that was the result of this journey, carries the subtitle “Images from a working journal (1977) on the novel Transit (1941) by Anna Seghers”. Produced by the WDR, it premiered in Mannheim and had success at international festivals. Accompanying the film, Theuring and Engström conceived an issue of the journal Filmkritik that extends the movie, comments upon it, provides an insight into the research and production process. On the occasion of its theatrical release in Great Britain, Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media published the comprehensive essay by Engström and Theuring in English translation. HaFI 009 republishes the essay from Filmkritik and its English translation in facsimile. In addition to the essay by Theuring / Engström, the booklet contains two texts by Paul Willemen and Steve Neale, who contextualized the film in the UK for Framework, as well as a commentary by the Harun Farocki