Moving bodies: captured life in the late works of Harun Farocki

Moving bodies

At the time of his sudden death in July 2014, Farocki was at work on a project that will remain unfinished. With the working title of Bewegte Körper, or Moving Bodies, it was planned as a multi-screen installation that would draw upon a vast archive of found footage and possibly some newly shot material in an effort to answer a question Farocki (2014a) posed in an email to his collaborator Matthias Rajmann on 19 January 2014: ‘What can one see today in a moving body?’ The next day he started an email folder devoted to the project, a gesture that might mark its official beginning.

The project would interrogate the capture of human and animal movement, its analysis and its synthesis. Farocki contemplated a vast array of materials for inclusion. The chronophotographic studies of Marey and Eadweard Muybridge formed his historical starting point. Muybridge and Marey are often considered together as chronophotographers, a grouping that risks overlooking the significant differences that exist between their respective undertakings. As Marta Braun (1992) has detailed, Muybridge considered himself first and foremost an artist and made use of a multiple-camera set-up that was unreliable for scientific purposes, yet poised to achieve aesthetic results. In Braun’s words, unlike Marey, Muybridge ‘could not hope to undertake a truly scientific investigation of movement: he simply did not have the background, training, instruments or knowledge’ (pp. 53–54). In the case of Moving Bodies, rather than seeing Farocki as mistakenly collapsing these two figures into a shared enterprise, one might instead see him as interested precisely in their divergences, in understanding the field of chronophotography as internally differentiated, reaching across art and science to pursue multiple ends. That Farocki was interested in the aesthetic investigations of chronophotography is supported by a remark he made to Rajmann in the project’s inaugural email, connecting Marey and Muybridge to Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 (1912). Art and science at the turn of the 20th century may have possessed different investments and methods, but the investigation of bodily movement cuts across both – something that chimes very much with the diverse applications of the new forms of motion analysis and synthesis that exist today, appearing in the domains of ergonomics and warfare as much as in popular cinema and videogames.

Farocki (2014b) called the images of Marey and Muybridge Vorbilder – model images, precursor images – from which he would go on to examine their 21st-century descendants. Whereas earlier works like I Thought I Was Seeing Convicts (2000) and Eye Machine (2001–2003) examined the regime of surveillance and the rise of operational images in mediated warfare, the images that interested Farocki in Moving Bodies tended to have to do with the movement of individual bodies. He planned to explore how the production of images of bodies might allow for movements to be compared, to be deemed normal or abnormal, or might enable the modulation of these movements for enhanced efficiency. For instance, with the help of Rajmann, Farocki researched technologies for identifying individuals based on the way they walk and explored the use of special treadmills to check the fit of shoes and the distribution of weight. He collected television coverage of downhill skiers that superimposed in slow motion two skiers on top of one another so as to compare their movements. And, crucially, he collected many demonstration videos made by companies working in robotics and computer animation. One folder, dedicated to Boston Dynamics – a company founded in 1992 and best known for BigDog, a canine-like robot designed for the US military – contains 11 test videos, in the laboratory and in the field, of various prototypes. He saved a copy of Futureworld (1976), cited as the first major feature film to use computer animation, in this case of a hand and face, and named another folder ‘Virtual Bodies’, using it to collect clips of videogame avatars.

The footage assembled for the project, collected on Farocki’s laptop, spans from the late 19th century to the early 21st century. With small exceptions – such as Futureworld and a related video that purports to be the first ever 3D animation, an image of a human hand rendered by Ed Catmull and Fred Parke in 1972 – the 20th century is present primarily as a structuring absence. As Anselm Franke (2014) has noted in relation to the Moving Bodies project:

Between Marey and motion-capture technology lies the twentieth century: the industrialization of death, and the victory of capital; technology in the service of the absolute negation of life, and the reconstruction of life as its inscription into what would be called the ‘social factory’, the subsumption of life under capital.

These are, of course, themes that Farocki dealt with extensively throughout his career. The research archive assembled for Moving Bodies proposes a bifocal perspective; the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 21st century stand side-by-side, as two parallel moments during which new technological developments were put into the service of capturing bodily movement. Both are moments of analysis and synthesis: in the late 19th century, this double movement of decomposition and reconstruction was located in the film image while, in the early 21st century, algorithmic forms emerge that are able to analyse motion and reconstitute human and animal movement by simulated means, in robotics and CGI.

Farocki planned to adopt a double-channel format that would enable a soft montage of simultaneity to occur across screens so that mimetically captured movement would be visible alongside its analytical representations. In particular, Farocki (2014b) expressed interest in what he called the ‘Hilfslinien’ or ‘helping lines’ generated in motion capture by connecting sensor points to form a schematic diagram, finding in them an abstraction that graphically indexes the transformation of quality into quantity. A process of abstraction – of simplification, reduction, or distillation – is always already at play in the production of a moving image: motion is sampled from the continuum of reality, subject to quantization. In some sense, so-called analogue film is in fact digital; it may not be based on binary code, but it does rely on discrete units. Yet the lost time between sampled instants in the cinema tends to be obscured, in that our eyes are incapable of seeing the dark interval between frames in filmic projection. The material ontology of film offers a relationship to segmentation markedly different from the illusion of continuity that characterizes the spectator’s phenomenological apperception. The helping lines, on the contrary, are a second-order abstraction that is manifest visually. Farocki (2014b) was interested in images that relinquish the aim of mimetically reproducing appearances to instead fulfil a technical function. As a representative of Swedish motion-capture company Qualisys puts it in a video that forms part of Farocki’s research materials, leaving behind the reproduction of appearances allows for a quantitative analysis of movement, so that ‘we really know what’s happening and not just what we perceive’. Marey, too, was dismissive of the illusion of synthesized movement, claiming that ‘chronophotography should renounce the representation of phenomena as they are seen by the eye’ (Braun, 1992: 255). Machine-readability supplants human vision, yielding insights not available to the eye alone.

Hilfslinien are a key element of Marey’s chronophotographic studies, where interventions are made within profilmic space that will facilitate legibility after the image has been developed but at the cost of obscuring the body the apparatus ostensibly aims to interrogate. As Mary Ann Doane (2002: 52) has noted, photography suffers from an ‘overcrowding of detail’ since its analogical surface captures too much useless information. The photograph offers a riot of non-signifying detail. It risks producing, in Doane’s words, an ‘archive of noise’. To resolve this problem, Marey’s geometric chronophotography undertakes what Doane calls a ‘de-iconization’ of the photographic image through the use of a black screen and reflective materials. The integrality of the body vanishes into an array of lines. Paradoxically, in order to analyse the motion of a body, the body itself must disappear, as it is replaced by symbolic representation. In his work on biometrics, Zach Blas (2016) has described this operation as a form of disembodiment, drawing on Katherine Hayles’s (1999: 196–197) distinction between the body as a normative, idealized construction, to be distinguished from embodiment, which is understood as contextual, excessive, and possessing the ability to baffle attempts at calculation. In Blas’s (2016: 86) words, ‘Biometrics does not capture embodiment but rather produces a body that is an aggregate of information.’ A similar abstraction marks the forms of motion analysis Farocki investigated: the camera captures situations of embodiment, only to transform them, through the helping lines, into a normative body scrubbed clean of all that overflows the grammar of capture.

A new iteration of this disembodiment is present in more recent practices of motion capture, as seen in another short Qualisys video from Farocki’s research collection. The video begins with a woman riding a horse on a treadmill, both figures fitted with sensors (Figure 1), before cutting to an animation in which horse and rider appear only as an array of dots moving on a grid, showing how the motion-capture process quantifies movement through the use of sensors tracked by multiple cameras. The results are then used to create a third image, in which the array of dots yields computer-animated skeletons moving in place within a black void (Figure 2): it is a virtual simulation in which the real bodies of the horse and rider have disappeared. Life has been expulsed from the image.

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Figures 1 and 2.

Screen grabs from Qualysis motion capture demonstration video. Screen grab. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wtWliY1yQXY (accessed 15 September 2019).

Farocki (2014b) wrote that all images to be included in Moving Bodies should partake of the abstraction of the ‘helping lines’ so as to forge a connection back to the Vorbilder of Marey. The media archaeological importance Farocki attaches to the helping lines is perhaps explained by their double function. First, they facilitate the production of knowledge about real movement and enable its subsequent modulation through a process that could be called abstraction or grammatization. And second, insofar as they form the ground for the production of simulations, the helping lines facilitate the complete forgetting of real bodily movement and enable its replacement by a discrete space of calculable norms. There are many files within the archive of footage amassed for the project that do not include these helping lines. Perhaps unsurprisingly, these tend to be images of motion simulation that fall into roughly two categories: first, videos made to document tests of robots that replicate human and animal movements; second, in the ‘Virtual Bodies’ folder, clips of digital avatars, created from wireframes generated from models now vanished. These are the synthetic results of the analytic power the helping lines possess; they are measurements turned into pictures. In the twin functions of the helping lines, one encounters images of calculation in which lurk the same fantasy – a fantasy of the submission of life to the machine, of the defeat of embodiment and the production of bodies as aggregates of information, of the reduction of quality to quantity. It is a fantasy of vanquished contingency in which chance gives way to predictability. In the 19th and 21st centuries alike, motion analysis emerges as a form of quantification closely aligned with the regulation and management of life. In the 19th century, motion analysis found its counterpart in the synthesis of filmic movement, a production of quality out of quantity that gave rein to the lure of contingency. In the 21st century, in contrast, motion analysis finds its counterpart in the synthesis of robotic movement and computer-generated imagery, realms of programmability and calculation that do not represent human and animal movement, but merely simulate it.

It is impossible to know what Moving Bodies would have been in its completed form. There are, however, certain questions that emerge from Farocki’s correspondence about the project and the footage he amassed for it. What does it mean to understand bodily movement as something made calculable, quantifiable, through imaging technologies? What is at stake in this fantasy of achieving mastery through the systematized vanquishing of contingency? What does it mean as a goal, however impossible, in the management of life? Franke (2014) notes that interrogating the body in movement would have been a ‘logical continuation of [Farocki’s] work, an explication of a concern with “life” and its mobilization and reconstructability that was already implicit in most of his films’. Given this continuity of practice, it is in the projects Farocki completed just prior to commencing Moving Bodies – namely, Serious Games (2009–2010), Parallel I–IV (2012–2014), and Labour in a Single Shot (2011–2014) – that the search for answers to the questions raised by this final, unfinished work can begin.

Asymmetrical images

Serious Games (Figures 3 and 4) shows that the image does not merely picture war, but is an instrument of warfare. Across four episodes, Farocki examines how various forms of simulation, particularly the computer-generated environments of video games, are used in the training of US soldiers and their treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder. Virtuality and actuality collide, as the interfaces and procedures of gaming are put to work in situations in which real lives are at stake. Shot primarily in Twentynine Palms, a military training centre in the California desert, Serious Games adopts a largely observational style. Farocki’s camera patiently details the schematic avatars and flattened landscapes of the software and captures the experiences of those who use it. Throughout the first three episodes, Farocki refrains from offering any overt commentary on what is seen, at times strategically confusing the distinction between what is real and what is simulated. It is not until the fourth instalment, ‘A Sun with No Shadow’, that intermittent titles appear onscreen to guide Serious Games to its conclusion. The imaginary sun of the training programme casts imaginary shadows, while the therapy programme has none. And yet, as the final title card puts it, ‘Both use asymmetrical images.’ What is an asymmetrical image? Farocki never provides an answer to what is perhaps the central question of the work, leaving it to the spectator to undertake a labour of thought.

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Figure 3.

Harun Farocki, Serious Games 4: A Sun with No Shadow (2010). © Harun Farocki GbR.

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Figure 4.

Harun Farocki, Serious Games 4: A Sun with No Shadow (2010). © Harun Farocki GbR.

In Serious Games, the image of war itself has gone missing; we see only the before and the after. Images of the messiness of war have given way to calculable virtual spaces imbued with fantasies of mastery. As Rodowick (2017: 101) puts it, the installation reveals ‘the computer-generated interface as an environment of interactive control where instructor and soldiers may be adversaries but the rules are fixed and determinable, as to make the future predictable and manageable.’ Enemies and weapons are selected from a drop-down menu of known options, and embodied combatants are replaced by proxies.

The adjective ‘asymmetrical’ appears once earlier in ‘A Sun with No Shadow’, when Farocki describes the enemy figures that can be placed on the virtual battlefield: they are ‘badly armed enemies in asymmetrical wars’. The wars might be said to be asymmetrical in the differences in technology, resources and casualties of the parties involved. But these asymmetrical images of asymmetrical wars might be said to be so in the sense that they do not simulate intersubjective encounters, or unforeseeable events. Often making use of the first-person point of view, these simulations offer rather a visual field that seems to be constituted not just by but also for the viewing subject, who controls it via the gaze. Though it is meant to simulate the contingencies of a conflict situation, this virtual space is imbued with the promise of conquest and mastery; it is stripped of all but the most schematic particularities. The training programme promises a predictable and manageable future, while the therapy programme promises that past trauma will be neutralized and conquered. Here the world is grasped as a programmable picture. A truly symmetrical image would do justice to the reality of what it represents; in this, it is perhaps an impossibility. But in the technologized experiences depicted in Serious Games, shadows or no shadows, one finds an image markedly asymmetrical in that it offers both more and less than the real. It offers more control, but less complexity. As Farocki (Eshun, 2012: 76) put it, these images ‘are asking reality to be as calculable as these systems are’.

While these pre- and post-combat simulations explore very different uses of the moving image than those encountered in Moving Bodies, in the concept of the asymmetrical image the works share conceptual territory. In both, Farocki is interested in the ways that imaging technologies, and particularly uses of computer animation, are engaged in efforts to tame contingency and inculcate a worldview based on planning and predictive models. In both, a relationship between reality and representation is at stake, wherein representational practices are engaged in attempts to tame, manage and master. They do not simply depict the world, but aim to transform it. In its documentation of processes of simulation and occasional subversion of the viewer’s expectations as to what is real and what is simulated, Serious Games might seem to venture into Baudrillardian territory. Yet if, for Baudrillard (2000: 62), ‘In our virtual world, the question of the Real, of the referent, of the subject and its object, can no longer even be posed’, the question of the Real, of the referent, is precisely the question Farocki poses when considering the asymmetry of these computer images. Moving Bodies and Serious Games together interrogate forms of algorithmic reduction that seek to manage qualitative complexity of lived experience.

A new constructivism

If Serious Games questions the use of computer-animated images to tame the real, Farocki’s subsequent major work, Parallel I–IV (Figures 5 to 8), explores the ontological grounding of CGI in operations of calculation and ex nihilo creation. Here, Farocki foregoes any sociological approach that would question whether games have positive or negative effects to instead examine them as a representational system. ³ Whereas Serious Games looks to a specific use of computer-generated images, Parallel’s first section examines the ontology of the image before proceeding, in subsequent sections, to explore the creation of game worlds. In addition to probing the formal characteristics of video games – for instance, the absence of montage and the role of navigation – Parallel asks what the ramifications of the increasing dominance of these computer-generated images might be.

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Figure 5.

Harun Farocki, Parallel I (2012). © Harun Farocki GbR.

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Figure 6.

Harun Farocki, Parallel IV (2014). © Harun Farocki GbR.

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Figure 7.

Harun Farocki, Parallel IV (2014). © Harun Farocki GbR.

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Figure 8.

Harun Farocki, Parallel I (2012). © Harun Farocki GbR.

Importantly, Farocki begins by turning to motifs from the natural world – wind, trees, clouds – which are closely tied to contingency and which have historically been allied to the mimetic power of cinema. Farocki finds in these charged motifs sites at which computer animation’s striving for verisimilitude is most profound. The voiceover of Parallel I tells us, ‘In cinema, there is the wind that blows and the wind blown by a wind machine. In computer images, there is only one kind of wind: a new constructivism.’ In positing a ‘new constructivism’, Farocki here again offers a key concept that is never explicitly defined. Computer-generated images are free from the encounter with alterity that is fundamental to lens-based capture and, as such, are able to fulfil the fantasy of creating a totally administered world. Digital tools can create an onscreen universe in which every detail, down to the pixel, is subject to specification. The camera cedes its place as a primary means of image creation to the computer, a condition the Belgian artist David Claerbout (2016) has called ‘the silence of the lens’. Now, measurements are turned into pictures. There is no more rustling of the wind in the trees, thought by DW Griffith and others since to be such a central part of cinematic fascination, but merely a simulated wind. As Adam Jasper (2017: 139) pithily puts it, ‘realism here is but a kind of truthiness.’

Parallel IV details the extent to which the movements of the virtual bodies encountered within these game worlds have been codified into a limited series of actions and gestures. The continuities of bodily movement have been parsed into a grammar. Unlike the screen actor, the video game ‘hero’, as the voice-over calls him, inhabits a rule-based universe in which comportment exists not as quality but as code – indeed, as command. Farocki shows repertoires of named actions: ‘pushing/bumping’, ‘protest/cry for help’, ‘pulling a gun’, even ‘resistance’. The hero has only a limited number of pre-programmed movements available to him. At times, he becomes trapped in loops of limited possibility, as is the case with a threatened sales clerk who can only flee and return, flee and return. Bodies fail to enter into contact with one another, as the hero encounters ‘twilight beings’ – non-player characters, or NPCs – that he is unable to shoot or touch, as they exist ‘somewhere between a person and a prop’. Deep within the fixed repertoire of movements available to these avatars perhaps lie points of data captured from real bodies, but any encounter with the specificity, corporeality and finitude of such bodies has long been foreclosed.

In the closing sequence of Parallel IV, images from the video game Red Dead Redemption show a rider on horseback knocking over a woman. Dismounting, he approaches her perhaps lifeless body, hovering near it, but taking no action to assess her condition. Parallel concludes as a graphic stating ‘WANTED: $20’ appears. Knowing nothing of Moving Bodies, this seems a rather curious way to end; it might be understood primarily as a reference to the classical western, part of Farocki’s insistence throughout Parallel on drawing out the ways in which cinematic genres are rearticulated in video games. But, after encountering the research materials assembled for Moving Bodies, more becomes visible: this post-cinematic image rhymes with the icons of proto-cinema, as the horse invokes Muybridge and resonates with the many analytical images of the movements of horse and rider present in collection of research footage. The woman’s corpse presents an image of utter depersonalization, in which intersubjective encounter is impossible and the individual life is eminently fungible, worth but $20. Parallel ends, in other words, by gesturing at once to chronophotography and to the quantified, expended body, to capital as triumphing over extinguished life.

Farocki (Balsom and Farocki, 2017: 130) claimed that, in each age, there was a ‘standard image’. He proposed, ‘You feel this very strange force that from the beginning on, these images’ – computer-generated images – ‘are in competition with cinematographic/photographic images. Just like socialism wanted to defeat capitalism, they want to defeat these images and probably they are on the verge of defeating them right now. I think computer-animated images are becoming the standard images.’ The standard image is a symptom: by thinking about it, we can learn something about that age and the power relations that construct its ways of being and knowing. When discussing Serious Games, Farocki (2012: 63) wrote that part of his interest there was to show how ‘worlds of artificial imagery from computer games . . . are used constructively in ways that go beyond self-contained fictional universes’. Parallel is sited determinedly within such fictional universes, but it nonetheless asks how these artificial worlds might extend beyond the sphere of gaming, to be taken as a symptom that would suggest something about a broader condition. Given that Parallel proposes the CGI image as the dominant image of our time, the question becomes: what does the increasingly hegemonic status of this practice of worldmaking reveal to us?

The informatics of domination involves applying computational models to all domains of life. In the gridded control-space of the computer-generated image, we encounter a representational form fit for such a system. Certainly, computer animation can be a realm of creativity free from the laws of gravity, opening avenues of plasmatic and imaginative transformation; moments from the middle sections of Parallel suggest such a consideration of CGI. Yet, in tension with this, and when considered alongside Farocki’s other works of this period, a different understanding of the computer-generated image emerges: it appears as an allegory of control. These new ‘standard images’ are not simply a matter of spectacle, entertainment, and creativity; they bespeak a fantasy of rationality and mastery, of a completely administered life, at a time of ubiquitous crisis and uncertainty.

Rehabilitating observation

Near the end of Parallel I, two images of nature are placed side by side: one rendered using computer animation and one originally shot on photochemical film. A voiceover intones, ‘Maybe the computer images will assume functions previously held by film. Maybe that will liberate film for other things.’ Farocki, who himself provides this commentary for the German version of the work, here echoes André Bazin’s (1967: 16) claim that the invention of photography freed painting from its obsession with the reproduction of likeness. What functions can computer images fulfil better than film? The notion of a new constructivism is key: computer-generated imagery remains unable, at least at present, to equal the iconic resemblance of lens-based capture, but it can better fulfill the desire for a completely controllable world. If filmmakers seeking a highly controlled mise-en-scène abandon or at least mitigate their use of lens-based capture, embracing the painterly possibilities of animation instead, the uses and meanings of recording are opened for a possible reframing.

In its return to Marey, Moving Bodies situates lens-based capture within a nascent informatics of domination. But alongside and against this, motion picture recording also possesses the capacity to create a frame within which there might be time and space for the unplanned, the unforeseeable – in short, for that which exceeds the grid and resists algorithmic calculation. Today, metrics proliferate everywhere: it is as if value only exists if it can be measured. The quantification of life, behaviour and affect is ubiquitous and distressingly often sold as something that will improve productivity and lead to increased self-mastery. Countering this, one might propose that it is through engagements with the cinema as an apparatus devoted to the lens-based capture of qualitative movement that we experience an ethical encounter with the fragility and incalculability of our world. In this world picture, heterogeneity and quality might be able to thrive.

Such an investment in the documentary possibilities of lens-based capture is a central component of Farocki’s practice. As Volker Pantenburg (2016) has noted, although it has been Farocki’s essayistic, highly reflexive work that has tended to attract the most attention from scholars and critics, for over 30 years, throughout its widespread disparagement, Farocki maintained a consistent interest in observational documentary. Pantenburg writes:

Starting in 1983 with Ein Bild (An Image) and concluding in 2013 with Sauerbruch Hutton Architects, Farocki has made no less than fifteen films and videos of varying length that are exclusively based on the principle of observation and refrain from explicitly commenting on the material via voiceover or intertitles.

He notes that these works, particularly in the early years, were often motivated by economic expediency – they were relatively cheap to produce and were often funded by television stations – but also emphasizes that the practice remained so consistent for Farocki that it deserves to be considered as an integral part of his filmmaking. In an interview with Hito Steyerl, Farocki (Farocki and Steyerl, 2011: 20) proclaimed himself to be a ‘devotee of cinema vérité’. Serious Games uses intertitles only in its final section and is otherwise an observational work; Farocki (2015) has even called it a ‘Direct Cinema film’. In a published text (Farocki, 2012: 66) that outlines his plans for shooting Serious Games 3: Immersion, he writes, ‘Our approach to documentary filmmaking means we never intervene in the situation, we simply allow it to unfold as (it would) if we were not there.’ With this statement, Farocki might have been attempting to reassure his funders – or, indeed, the US military – but it is striking how much it adopts the rhetoric of Direct Cinema and its fly-on-the-wall ethos.

This commitment to observational filmmaking is notable given how maligned this mode has been in recent years. As Anna Grimshaw and Amanda Ravetz (2009: ix) have written, observational documentary has been ‘widely criticized as a form of scientism in which a supposedly detached camera served to objectify and dehumanize the human subjects of its gaze’. Such positions were especially pronounced in the postmodernist critiques of concepts such as objectivity and neutrality. The observational mode of documentary tends to emphasize direct engagement with the world, often with an unobtrusive camera, making it a prime target for such arguments. In recent years, as documentary has achieved a new level of visibility within contemporary art practice, performative and reflexive documentary modes, to use Bill Nichols’s (2010: 172–211) terms, have come to dominate. What was once vanguard critique is now commonplace as it has become de rigueur within creative nonfiction practices for a film to continually interrogate its own processes of signification and foreground that its access to reality will never be direct or complete, often by embracing fiction to give shape to a contaminated, hybrid form.

Labour in a Single Shot, a collaborative project made with Antje Ehmann between 2011 and 2014, together with the participation of dozens of filmmakers in cities all around the world, departs markedly from the paradigms of docufiction and the essay film to instead espouse an ethos of observation. In 15 cities, people made short, single-shot films, one to two minutes in length. In Ehmann and Farocki’s (Ehmann and Farocki, nd) words, ‘The subject of investigation is “labour”: paid and unpaid, material and immaterial, rich in tradition or altogether new.’ If Moving Bodies returned to the late 19th century to examine the modulation of bodily comportment, Labour in a Single Shot returns the same moment, but finds there something very different. Ehmann and Farocki resuscitate the single-shot actualités of the Lumières and reassert the contemporary relevance of this form’s ability to create a frame for the qualitative registration of contingency. The Lumières’ film of workers leaving the factory is famous, but 19th-century films capturing work itself are relatively rare; ⁴ Ehmann and Farocki propose a 21st-century corrective.

Labour in a Single Shot’s titular rule of avoiding montage consolidates the association with the preclassical actualité, while also preserving the continuity of time. By foregoing the segmentation of profilmic action into numerous individual shots, the project rejects the action of parsing, that operation necessary for the violent transformation of quality into quantity. Rationalized sampling still occurs at the level of the individual frame, as it does with all moving image recording – this is not capture without loss – but there is a deep investment in reproducing an appearance of qualitative continuity for the spectator. In Cristián Silva-Avaría’s ‘Textile Printing’ (Figure 9), a contribution to the project shot in Rio de Janeiro in 2012, a single static take shows a worker undertaking the action of screenprinting an image of a butterfly on fabric. Rather than breaking up the depiction of this action into numerous shots – thereby mirroring the seriality of the screenprinting process, as well as the way that Taylorism segmented the actions of work in the interest of maximizing productivity – the film offers an insistence on quality and continuousness, one that is all the more powerful given that it is produced dialectically from within a medium based on grammatization.

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Figure 9.

Christián Silva-Avária, Textile Printing (2012); part of Antje Ehmann and Harun Farocki, Labour in a Single Shot (2011–2014). © Harun Farocki GbR. Reproduced courtesy of Antje Ehmann.

At the core of Labour in a Single Shot is not the delivery of fact-based information or even a claim to the exemplarity or authenticity of the labour practices presented. The project is much more about making work visible than it is about any effort to assert or stabilize the meanings one might attach to it. As Farocki takes pains to emphasize in his discussion of the aerial photographs of Auschwitz in Images of the World and the Inscription of War, making something visible does not necessarily mean that it becomes knowable or even legible – but it is a beginning. Labour in a Single Shot manifests a desire to make the world available for close attention, across time and distance. The algorithmic body is left behind in a return to situated embodiment. This gesture is as much about a form of image production as it is about the creation of a possibility of reception: Labour in a Single Shot establishes a situation in which those actions most subject to the imperative of value production, most monitored, most expropriated, can be subject to a different kind of looking. It is an ethics of attunement that does seek to intervene, optimize, or extract, but to witness. It is towards this attentiveness that Thomas Elsaesser (2008: 49) gestures when he writes that Farocki ‘may be one of the few filmmakers today capable of countering the self-surveillance of the world as machine eye with moments that reinstate the eye and hand as instances of self-implication and solidarity’.

To return to Farocki’s initial question: what can one see in a moving body today? The materials amassed for Moving Bodies seem to suggest that, first and foremost, one sees scenes of training and modulation, of life as it is subject to technical apparatuses – all themes Farocki has long investigated. One sees figurations of the reduction of movement’s qualities into quantity, of the violent quashing of embodiment in the production of normative bodies, and forms of recording destined for machine recognition rather than for the human eye. One discerns a fantasy of overcoming the body’s weakness, its defects, inefficiencies and fatigue through measurement and calculation; in other words, the persistence and elaboration of Marey’s dream of an interchangeability between organism and machine. Robots join with the virtual bodies of computer animation as sites at which we glimpse the redundancy of real bodies as they fail to fulfil these fantasies, with very different implications in each case. When Moving Bodies is considered in conjunction with Serious Games and Parallel, we see a continued concern with the transformation of quality into quantity, with these calculating machines that make pictures out of numbers and rules. This concern with algorithmic capture as the defeat of quality is articulated not just in relation to ways of managing life, not just in the rise of operational images and machine vision, but also in an analysis of the computer-animated image as symptom and as signal participant of and in these processes. If, as Seb Franklin (2015: 96) asserts,

It is the tension between digital–symbolic representations of the social and the continuous, rich and multiple experience of actual social existence – as well as the very real forms of subjectification and exploitation this tension occludes – that must form the central concern of any investigation into the cultural logic of the digital,

then Farocki’s late work may be understood to take up this call, probing contemporary imaging technologies and, if Moving Bodies had been completed, situating them within a longer media-archaeological trajectory that finds the logic of digitality operative already in the late 19th century.

The critique of computer animation’s dream of mastery and its vanquishing of contingency that Farocki articulates in Serious Games and Parallel must be understood alongside his simultaneous and longstanding commitment to observational documentary. In works such as Labour in a Single Shot, one comes to see something else in moving bodies: namely, an attunement to their incalculable qualities, to their singularity and irreducible contingency, to that which exists in them that is not deemed valuable, to their continuous entanglement in a world beyond measure. This is an attribute lens-based capture has always possessed, but which arguably takes on new importance at a time when the banalized perfections of CGI proliferate in synergy with ever-intensifying techniques for the management and diminishment of life. If the computer-animated image is our ‘standard image’, to invoke Farocki’s concept, tied to the desire for plannable futures and managed contingency, what other pictures of the world can be imagined beyond it? There is the violent capture that quantifies and instrumentalizes, an operation embedded in the production of moving images from their very beginnings. But there is also a second form of capture, found in the non-instrumental observation of reality – one that might open on to a possibility of encountering the world in its immeasurable complexity.