Realism(s) #7, or: bolts

Hamaca paraguaya - Paz Encina, 2006, 35mm

When Jean-François Millet paints two peasants praying in a field and calls it The Angelus, the title matches the reality.

--Jean-Luc Godard & Anne-Marie Miéville, The Old Place, 1999.

The Hay Trussers - Jean-François Millet, 1850-51

NÕ - Sharon Lockhart, 2003, 16mm

The Old Place - JLG & Anne-Marie Miéville, 1999, video

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Today you don't see the image, you see what the title says about it. It's modern advertising.

--JLG & Anne-Marie Miéville, The Old Place, 1999.

Realism(s) #6, or: hands

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Cinema is not a medium of touch, but of vision. Cinema translates most sensations of touch into glances.

--Harun Farocki, Der Ausdruck der Hände, 1997.

Hitchcock poses the question: what is death? How can it be portrayed? Can it be portrayed at all? It must be visible, for visibility is the foundation of the cinema. The audience believes it has seen a murder, but it has not taken place; no injured body, no wounds. Hitchcock operates with a cinematography of deception. He cannot show the murder, even though we think we've seen it. From the drain the image fades over to Marion Crane's eyes. They are rigid and unseeing. Seeing is, at the same time, seeing nothing. Not-seeing is the closest approach to death that Hitchcock can conceive of.

--Hartmut Bitomsky, Das Kino und der Tod, 1988.

Psycho, 1960 / Das Kino und der Tod - Hartmut Bitomsky, 1988, video

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North by Northwest, 1959 / Der Ausdruck der Hände - Harun Farocki, 1997, video

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The dead pile up, under attack. No one is left alive. A hand sticks out of the bodies. Where to turn to in this godforsaken place?

A landscape was chosen that exposes the man as if served on a plate. Without knowing it, he's being used. He has stumbled into an identity that was constructed by the C.I.A., and brought to a place where he does not belong. The film suggests that any identity is false, but nonetheless he runs for his life.

--Bitomsky, Kino Flächen Bunker, 1991

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North by Northwest, 1959 / Kino Flächen Bunker - Hartmut Bitomsky, 1991, video

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There are two types of dead in films. One has a destiny which the film is trying to communicate, the other(s) are nameless and faceless. They are numbers, indicating the extent of the losses. If you count up all the scenes; the killing, the dying, then there is a gigantic civil war going on.

--Bitomsky, Das Kino und der Tod, 1988.

Realism(s) #5, or: notes on factory gates

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Sortie d'usine - ph. Louis Lumière, 1895

Most narrative films begin after work is over.

--Harun Farocki, Arbeiter verlassen die Fabrik, 1995.

Trop tôt, trop tard - Straub-Huillet, 1981, color, 16mm

If we line up one hundred years of scenes of people leaving factories, we can imagine that the same shot had been taken over and over and over. Like a child who repeats its first word for one hundred years to immortalise its pleasure in that first spoken word. Or like Far Eastern artists who repeatedly paint the same picture until it is perfect, and the artist can enter the picture. When we could no longer believe in such perfection, film was invented.

--Harun Farocki, Arbeiter verlassen die Fabrik, 1995.

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Exit - Sharon Lockhart, 2008, color, 16mm

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None of these directors impose their world view on the spectator – they don't hit you on the head with their visions, leave you lying there paralysed, ready for a serious brainwash; rather, they approach the world, describe it. They show people at work and in their free time, and the dynamics of groups. Their pictures remain clear, the style is unadorned; a multiple exposure or a superimposed image is the wildest manipulative special effect their films admit. They reject the classical bourgeois notion of the functionality of art, in which everything is finally resolved and ascribed its meaningful place.

--Olaf Möller on the filmmakers of Filmkritik, Passage along the Shadow-Line, 1998.