Aufschub

Media Name: 5c49c505-581b-4547-bea9-bb15af694625.jpg

Respite

Aufschub
Harun Farocki
Retrospective 2021
Documentary Film
Germany,
South Korea
2007
40 minutes
German captions
subtitles: 
None

Credits DOK Leipzig Logo

Harun Farocki
Harun Farocki
Antje Ehmann
Christiane Hitzemann
Lars Pienkoß
Matthias Rajmann
Jan Ralske
Harun Farocki
Rudolf Breslauer
Lars Pienkoß
Harun Farocki

Anyone interned in the Nazi Jewish transit and collection camp Westerbork in the occupied Netherlands faced death: The trains left to Auschwitz from here, to Sobibór. In 1944, the camp commander ordered the prisoner and cameraman Rudolf Breslauer, who was murdered shortly afterwards, to film the camp, presumably as visual evidence of his own “work performance”. Harun Farocki, West German doyen of essayistic image criticism, used the surviving silent material to compose an equally silent sequence analysis commented only in title cards. It is surgery on the hidden narrative, not open heart surgery.

Sylvia Görke