The work of Harun Farocki, director and theoretician of German cinema, a key figure in militant, documentary and experimental cinema, is being celebrated this week on Tënk.

Associated with the development of a rhetoric of the image, the filmmaker's work invites us to emancipate ourselves from the meaning, the discourse and the dominant use that we attribute to them. Harun Farocki demonstrates through written or oral narration superimposed on the editing of archival excerpts, that each image originally serves one or more specific purposes, which serve a power, or even an ideology. His films unravel and decipher the processes that underlie the making and processing of images in order to uncover new possibilities, both in terms of meaning and function. An Image is a case in point, as we discover the behind-the-scenes process of making a commercial image for Playboy magazine. To make these implicit devices readable, the filmmaker plays with the horizon of expectation, refusing the type of editing and narration that viewers are usually confronted with. In particular, he leaves room for silence rather than the expected voice-over to deal with a historical subject in Respite, a film in which the filmmaker exhumes the rushes of an unfinished film shot in the Westerbork camp. Using documentary and fictional film archives, he reveals and relates the common motifs he detects in the cinematic representation of workers leaving the factory in Workers Leaving the Factory.

By an anti-pedagogical approach, the filmmaker does not try to affix a fixed and unique meaning to the images that he delivers, but instead leads us to consider them so that we question ourselves about their function, their meaning, and the potential detour that we could project onto them. It is not only a question of assimilating a knowledge which would result from the only contents of the film but to acquire a form of meta-knowledge which would tool and would make it possible to free oneself from the "armour" which cements the images. In this sense, Harun Farocki's films can be approached as a socio-political praxis, in that they express the way our societies function, notably by bringing to light the system of signs that governs images.

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