Sauts temporels et dé-placements: Le souvenir du travail dans les machines de vision de Farocki

The essay argues that Harun Farocki’s films have always been poised between the institutional constraints and aesthetic faultlines of (state and television-funded) independent cinema and (commissioned) gallery art. But his films’ and installations’ moral authority and aesthetic credibility come from the fact that their "critique" cuts both ways: they are critical in the sense that their gestures of reflexivity are directed also at the director himself, and that the feedback loops implicate the artist as well. As one walks through his art/works, one realizes that he may be one of the few filmmakers today capable of countering the self-surveillance of the world as machine eye, with moments that re-instate the eye and the hand as instances of self-implication and solidarity. The true topicality and urgency of Farocki’s work may thus be nothing less than an effort to rescue the cinema from its own dialectic of memory and forgetting, of nostalgic evocation of a lost plenitude and modernist self-reflexivity, by reinventing "work" as "art", and "art" as "work".