Abstract
Harun Farocki: ERZÄHLEN
film essay ‘on narration’
Harun Farocki
not a program
essay, a term from written literature, unity of science and art, unity of social and individual knowledge.
models in written literature:
the literary diary, either real or fictional, the ‘novel of a novel’.
in film no real equivalent to this genre:
films depicting the shooting only have a truncated notion of production and authorship (1)
not a program
the concept of authorship: as wide as ‘tel quel’ would define it: text can mean spoken word, written word or image. author can be a professional writer, anyone, or an indefinite number of people (fairy tale, myth)
the labor of authorship is not aimed at producing a definite result, it is not about pursuing the process towards a single final text. instead, the manifold work of having experiences and processing them.
the “narrating I” of this programme is essentially me, but expanded by the experiences of other authors with whom I have hitherto collaborated or will collaborate.
a reconstruction of past experiences;
particularly those that are made during the rather long period of work.
what happens is true, but not factual.
the program, 2 × 45 minutes of duration, consists of up to 60 single items. some things appear only once, others are picked up again and again. I now characterise some conceptual groups that single items can be attributed to.
(1) comparable rather to a film in which everything occurs which lies before the shooting. this is a film i have never seen.
Footnotes