Raven Row - Harun Farocki

I thought I was seeing Convicts, 2000, Video, 2 screens, 23minutes.

Some of this film was shot on location in California while its surveillance images come from various sources, including a civil liberties group who provided CCTV footage from inside Corcoran State Prison. This shows a prisoner shot dead by guards during a fight. Farocki has written: 'The camera and the gun are right next to each other. The field of vision and the gun viewfinder fall together...'

Eye/Machine III, 2003, Video, 2 screens, 25minutes.

This is the last in the Eye/Machine series, which explores 'operational images' made only for technicians, or not for the human eye at all. Cruise missiles are programmed to find their way by comparing a stored image of a landscape and an image taken during flight, which Farocki describes as montage, because 'montage is always about similarity and difference.'

Workers leaving the Factory in Eleven Decades, 2006, Video, 12 monitors, 36 minutes.

The Lumiere Brothers 1895 film workers leaving the lumiere factory is the earliest motion picture. Farocki researched its senario through 110years of film history. The original 45 second film is placed alongside eleven clips including Antonio's Red Desert, 1964, starring Monica Vitti, and von Trier's Dancer in the Dark, 2000, with Bjork. Farocki and ehmann have written: 'The existence of factories and movie stars are not compatible...Factories - and the whole subject of labour - are at the fringes of film history.'

Comparison Via a Third, 2007, 16mm transfered to video, 2 screens, 24 minutes.

16mm film shot on location in Burkina Faso, India, France, and Germany compares the ancient labour of brick-making in traditional, newly industrialising and industrial societies.



Picture taken on Bishopsgate, opposite Liverpool Street Station.