Dispersion and Montage: A conversation between Harun Farocki, Georges Didi-Huberman and Ludger Schwarte at Schaulager in Basel on September 9, 2008

Harun Farocki, In-Formation, 2005.

The conversation was first published in German on the website of Texte zur Kunst on August 24, 2015, with an introduction by Philipp Eckardt. It was translated into English by Selma Rezgui and Benedikt Reichenbach in autumn 2024. The French translation will be available shortly here as PDF.

One year ago, the filmmaker and author Harun Farocki died unexpectedly. His work was not only one of the most important contributions to cinema, film criticism and film theory, but also in the field of contemporary art, where he contributed to numerous museum and gallery exhibitions, often in the form of installations. Shortly before his death, Farocki responded to questions posed to him by the editors of Texte zur Kunst for the issue “Art vs. Image / Bild vs. Kunst” on the differences between working in the fields of film and art, as well as on the influence of new image technologies.
In memory of Harun Farocki, we are presenting here a previously unpublished discussion that was held in Basel in 2008 with the art historian Georges Didi-Huberman and the philosopher Ludger Schwarte, both of whom participated in the same issue of Texte zur Kunst. The Basel discussion in particular touched on questions of montage and the possibility of image criticism. The starting point was a screening of Farocki’s film In-Formation (2005), created together with Antje Ehmann, which undertakes a critical analysis of visual documents and representations with which labor migration and migrants were and are portrayed in Germany. In the face of today’s rampant expressions of racism and the willingness to allow refugees to be crushed against the various barriers of Fortress Europe, the political significance of Farocki’s work once again becomes clear.

Ludger Schwarte: First of all, I would like to ask a question to Georges Didi-Huberman: What relationship do you see between the visualisation of a piece of information and the critical work of montage that Harun Farocki pursues in the film In-Formation (2005)? How can we be sure that the film eventually is not merely a reproduction of the same procedures that it observes and criticises?

Georges Didi-Huberman: This film is an extraordinary object on which Antje Ehmann and Harun Farocki worked together. It is an object that consists of an ensemble of text and image. It appears that the images have their own legend, and the inserted or appended texts, which are usually called captions, take on the status of something pictorial.

In this film, we simultaneously find an argument with regard to history and one with regard to representation: the montage allows us to situate things in history. And at the same time, we become very sensitive to the history of representation, even to the history of graphics.

Schwarte: Harun, could you perhaps explain to what extent you yourself see the principle of montage as making something visible? In this case, unlike your other works, the montage makes for a silent film. Whereas in other works you comment by means of sound, here there is a kind of self-commentary, an effect where one image says something about the other. In what sense does this have to do with a specific principle of montage?

Harun Farocki: The material at hand does not usually receive any aesthetic or political attention. This won’t occur with the small drawings that illustrate statistics and graphs, usually in newspapers, and also magazines and books. When many Turks came to Germany in the 1970s, the illustrators didn’t know how to depict them. Sometimes they referred to the 19th century Moor, the mocha drinker from coffee advertisements. Later, the fez was omitted, and the Turk was given a moustache and straight hair, in contrast to the curly-haired Italian. The Turk was usually a bit chubby. Incidentally, the Turk is not laughing in these depictions, unlike the Italian. At most, the Turk smiles once he has made himself comfortable in Germany. I have arranged such details into a sequence. How is the Turk depicted? For example, in the case of “guest workers”  [Gastarbeiter], the transfer of money to their countries of origin is almost more interesting than their typification as foreigners. It looks as if the migrant workers have stolen their wages and are taking them to safety in their home country.

Harun Farocki, In-Formation, 2005.

Schwarte: And in what way does montage come into play here?

Farocki: In my montage, we see how in these drawings completely unequal things are made equal. I begin with a sequence about the migration of the Frisians and Anglo-Saxons. Soon, we arrive at Germany’s defeat in the First World War. Next, a Nazi drawing shows the daily immigration of Jews into Germany. It is also eerie to see a drawing lamenting the high unemployment rate in the Weimar Republic and listing the fatal figure of six million unemployed. The arrows showing the German advances in the war against the Soviet Union are similar to those intended to depict how refugees and displaced persons from the East poured into the Western zones and the later Federal Republic after the Second World War. The deportation of Jews to the extermination camps is also depicted with colourful arrows. However, this is from a book on demographics from the 1990s.

Apologies, now I’m talking a bit too much – the general order is very simple, I begin with the first so-called guest workers at the end of the 1950s and follow the history of labour migration to the Federal Republic up to the present day. This presentation is interrupted by a small iconographic series: small studies of the representation of Turkish women, the map with arrows, or a chapter on the suitcase. The suitcase is the signifier of the migrant. The images of workers and asylum seekers leaving Germany again in the present day convey a sense of relief and malice that even the illustrator and those who print his pictures are probably not fully conscious. “Ali packs his suitcase” is a quote from a language course for migrants.

Didi-Huberman: Above all, you’re building an argument. The montage isn’t at your service, which, incidentally, is where we must situate the difference to Jean-Luc Godard. Montage doesn’t serve you in order to master this object, to stage yourself as the master of these images, pages or documents. You don’t take control of the images. Rather, you make them visible to us. This also seemed to me to be the direction of the other films of yours I’ve seen: a fundamental approach that has something to do with what I referred to as captions, or Bildegende, earlier on, whereas I was actually thinking of Walter Benjamin’s term “inscription”.

Harun Farocki, In-Formation, 2005.

Schwarte: Could you elaborate on that?

Didi-Huberman: The task for this kind of generic image research is to make the images legible. I used to reject this term “legibility” because of its association with iconography, or even iconology in Panofsky’s sense, that is, a reduction of the visible to the legible. But when I read Walter Benjamin, I realised that legibility does not end with the visible. On the contrary, it is what opens it up in the first place. You, or rather your montage, take on this precise task. Your work is a rendering legible [mise-en-lisibilité] of the visible. This legibility is not a reduction of the images to one meaning, but rather, the disclosure of what we see.

Schwarte: This raises the question of the possibility of critique. Harun, where exactly can we situate the element of critique that runs through your work? How does it come into effect in these contexts – or is it simply a preoccupation with something neglected as an extension, if you will, of artistic or aesthetic playgrounds?

Farocki: Of course, it’s easier to fight on the sidelines, with less heavyweight equipment. At school I was already fascinated by the illustrations in the textbooks – why weren’t they ever mentioned in class? They did exist after all. Let’s take the drawing from the 1960s, which is supposed to illustrate a statistic about the fact that guest workers are often unwanted as tenants. A man with a moustache reaches towards a doorbell. A German landlord has opened the door and is making a dismissive gesture with his hand. At first glance, it seems as if the drawing shows sympathy for the person looking for an apartment. However, if you look at the gesture of rejection in detail, it turns into a pictogram meaning “begging and peddling undesirable”. If we look closely at the outstretched arm and finger of the apartment-hunter, the search for an apartment is shown here to be an act of violence. The rejected man with his moustache actually looks like a caricature of Hitler. This also probably has to do with the fact that you have to be very good at typifying to draw a moustache that doesn’t remind you of Hitler. So we are talking about blunders of varying degrees. They can be found both linguistically and figuratively in serious newspapers as well as in tabloids. What I am doing here is criticism of ideology, and my method of selecting details and making comparisons corresponds to the citation methods that others have developed for understanding language.

Schwarte: So if this work is directed at imagery that constitutes the everyday, how would you, Georges, describe the relationship between scrutinising a material that is often dismissed as all too comprehensible and relating this imagery to a wider context that is not referred to by the images themselves, and in which the critical element of this work could be seen? This classification and critical work, through which images gain legibility in Benjamin’s sense, then might also be translated and misunderstood as an addition: as a transformation of something quotidian into an object of bourgeois erudition. In what way can this expansion of knowledge itself be critical? Is montage a work of critique?

Farocki: And always against the bourgeoisie, right?

Didi-Huberman: And in any case anti erudition… So why do we see a critical effect here? First of all, there is a certain use of quotation in this film. It’s a dis-organisation, but you gain something by quoting, and you also change the sequence, the order.

Harun Farocki, In-Formation, 2005.

I always wondered if you knew this. Harun, there is an article by Siegfried Kracauer from 1931 about the development of cinematography. He speaks about how there was a kind of new group of leftists who didn’t have the means to produce alternative cinematographic news, i.e., they didn’t have the money to make movies. So they simply edited together the existing cinema news strips in a different way, such as the official news broadcasts of the Weimar period, and, apparently, added a different caption or commentary. Kracauer said of these films that it was enough for them to quote and reassemble [remontage] in order to obtain what he calls “Schaukraft” [demonstrative power]. Compared to this, the news semiologists and media theories only work with generalities! Now, I would like to ask you a question, Harun. I remember the way Eisenstein explains the difference between his idea of montage and the one found in Griffith’s work. Wouldn’t it be interesting to extend your work on Griffith with a work on Eisenstein?

Farocki: When I went to film school and learned about the Eisenstein–Griffith opposition, I naturally took the side of the former. Not only because Eisenstein represented revolution and Griffith traditional narrative cinema, which seemed to be on its way out. The future was no longer about storytelling but about creating thoughts cinematically. Moreover, Eisenstein’s idea of montage stood for the avant-garde revolution, not for the revolution that later degenerated into socialist realism. It turned out, though, that the montage of contrasts, of ideas, allows only for simple oppositions: poor/rich or light/dark. In narrative cinema, the order of the montage is derived from the story. However, in the details, there are also oppositions at the interface. In the end, there are only two principles of editing: resemblance and contradiction.

Didi-Huberman: At the end of Eisenstein’s The Strike, there is a scene, you’ll remember, in which the woman is edited together with a documentary sequence of a cow in a slaughterhouse. We see a shot of a crowd and then a close-up, a sequence from the documentary, with the cow finally slaughtered, its throat cut. Many believed, Eisenstein himself that, voilà, this is a metaphor: the people are going to the slaughterhouse, the people are a cow that is being slaughtered. At this moment, the montage should serve to create a synthesis of ideas. Here, I would like to know your point of view because I didn’t see this scene that way at all. Ultimately, the montage associates an overview and a close-up, an image of people running desperately and an image of a motionless cow that is about to die. Visually, I was never able to create this synthesis. Also, montage is effective in its critical function precisely when it doesn’t produce synthesis but rather exposes difference. This kind of montage I find in your films. The way in which montage produces difference is what makes us doubt what we believe we have just seen with certainty, preventing us from producing falsifying syntheses. On this point, your work is also similar to Godard’s.

Farocki: Well, I think I understand. For our exhibition Cinema like never before at the Akademie der Künste in Berlin, Antje Ehmann and I came up with the idea of distributing shot/countershot sequences across two monitors. The man is on the left monitor and looks at the woman off-screen; when she comes into the picture, she appears on the right monitor, and so on. I also used this method in my work On Construction of Griffith’s Films (2006). The result is astonishing: the film narrative handles this intervention well. The sequence is dissected, spatially divided, and yet continues to function. Regardless of whether it is a shot/countershot or a movement forward or back, in continuous montage I’m seeing interruption.

It’s a bit like what you said, Georges, with the cow and the strikers: precisely when it is so obvious to read one as a metaphor for the other, we become aware of the disparity between the two scenes. Perhaps it works like a denial – the story montage calls out in one go: I am continuous, I am continuous. And so the opposite becomes true, like the punk song: “This is not a love song, this is not a love song.” It was Godard who, already in his narrative films, such as those made up to 1968, made montages like in narrative cinema but with a shift in emphasis. The close-up was too abrupt. It was too long. The shots were given autonomy from the narrative context.

Harun Farocki, Cinema Like Never Before, 2006, exhibition view, Generali Foundation, Vienna.

Schwarte: Now Georges, what do you see as the difference between Godard and Harun Farocki? You did announce that.

Didi-Huberman: Godard can be said to be taking possession of his images – entirely. That also accounts for Histoire(s) du Cinéma (1988). It’s a masterpiece, it’s a monumental, lyrical symphony, but it also has flavours of Malraux. It is lyrical, and at the same time, it is extremely controlled. This domination of the visual material is something fundamental because it also concerns what we referred to as the caption. The mastery of the material is expressed in Godard’s melancholic commentary, which speaks the truth about the things that we do not possess but that possess us. Everything happens so quickly that we don’t learn anything about the origin of the images. Often, watching Histoire(s) du Cinéma is like an exercise in cinephilia, a test of film-historical knowledge, where one is happy to recognise this or that passage; and the longer it goes on, the less interesting this game becomes because, of course, this guessing of provenance is not the task at all.

In short, I think the big difference is that you use the montage perhaps less symphonically, perhaps contrapuntally. It becomes less of a grand symphony, but you give us the image [rendre l’image]. While Godard has it in his possession, at his disposal, we can do nothing but bow before the master.

Harun Farocki, In-Formation, 2005.

Schwarte: I would like to come back to the term “dispersion” in the title of our conversation. Since montage was already established in the early avant-garde as a principle that has both aesthetic and political repercussions and effects, today it is once again questionable how we should think of montage, as it was often misunderstood as a technical process. As an introduction to the program, In-Formation had the advantage that it helps us recognise this political-aesthetic montage as something that has been continuous since the 1930s – we can already see this in the material that you presented and with which you work. We also learn that montage affects both the aesthetic work and what occurs politically: the montage of a people, of a coherent story. And I wonder to what extent one can introduce the concept of dispersion and whether dispersion can possibly be discussed and understood as a scattering of elements without a system, as a condition abolished by montage, or as the concept from which montage sets out.

Could you, Harun, perhaps accept something like dispersion as a counter-movement to montage, as a move towards disordered, spontaneous distribution, as an escape from montage? Perhaps, following Georges’ remarks, one could say that montage, as a construction-like operation, is always a technique of domination, which on the other hand certain aesthetic phenomena in your work bypass by means of dispersion. They are not forced into a system that would establish you as the dominating power.

Farocki: I haven’t thought about the term “dispersion” so much. For example, with the film Respite (2007) about the Westerbork transit camp, all I had in mind was an edition. I intended to make accessible the material that was recorded by a camp inmate, Rudolf Breslauer, a photographer who had fled from Germany to the Netherlands and who had been deported to Westerbork with his family. At the Westerbork memorial, you can buy a DVD with around ninety minutes of his footage, which was commissioned by the camp commandant. This I watched a few times with my students in Vienna. By the first screening, it was obvious that you couldn’t access the images without additional information. Apart from the uniforms of the SS and the Dutch auxiliary police, everything looks ordinary. There are so many work scenes that you might think you’re watching an industrial film.

Only once you know or realise that a train departed from here every week to Bergen-Belsen, Theresienstadt or Auschwitz do the images open up. Or, if you know that the camp management and inmates feared the camp would be dissolved at the time of the filming – the inmates feared being sent to the camps “in the east”, and the SS men feared being transferred to the eastern front – you understand why the work is shown here in such detail. So I read, for example, the report In dépôt by Philip Mechanicus, which was written in the camp. Because I had seen so many films about the camps in which material from different sources were put together – images filmed by the Nazis, images taken by the Allies when they liberated the camps, re-enacted images – here I wanted to take material from only one source and to leave the images in the order in which they are in the archive and in which they were probably filmed. When I show a sequence here, it has not been shortened or extended.

I organise the images mainly by commenting on them with intertitles, and, of course, I’m going for what you probably mean by dispersion. When I comment on individual people in the scenes on the platform in front of the deportation train – the woman in the wheelchair, the child waving goodbye, the man helping to close the door of the wagon in which he is being deported – my aim is for others to pick up on other details. My work must be that of a foreman. It must not make it look as if the work is now done.

Didi-Huberman: This is precisely where the question of dispersion becomes central. Because in the debates on the question of montage, let’s say,  in the era of Ernst Bloch, Georg Lukács, Bertolt Brecht, Sergei Eisenstein, etc., and to put it very briefly, for ideologues of the Lukács type, the operations of montage, in literature for example in James Joyce’s Ulysses, were no more than a dispersion, incompatible with the meaning of history, with a precise partisanship, etc. Brecht uses montage beyond partisanship, although at the same time, he shares the concern for a clear taking of positions, from which the principle follows for him: montage, yes, but not too much dispersion. Too much dispersion: that is surrealism. The surrealists indulge in total dispersion: Why? Because their imagination, at least for Brecht, is too strange, too extravagant, so that the political meaning disappears.

However, there is another position, and that is Walter Benjamin’s. It is also Georges Bataille’s, where a certain use of dispersion means nothing other than a certain redisposing of elements, the possibility of endowing new, different relationships between things.

Schwarte: So there may be two montage traditions: one that sees in dispersion only an incompatibility with taking a position, with taking sides, with speaking out for an incompatibility with working on historical progress. For the other, there is a use of dispersion that leads to a redisposition, a rearrangement, to the creation of new relationships.

This, perhaps, as a conclusion. At this point, I would suggest we end the discussion and then watch Harun’s work Transmission (2007). Thank you very much for this conversation.

The conversation was first published in German on August 24, 2015 on the website of Texte zur Kunst.
Translated in English by Selma Rezgui and Benedikt Reichenbach.