Introduction: Harun Farocki
26 March 2015

Thomas Elsaesser

Harun Farocki“Who is Farocki?” was the now famous heading that Cahiers du cinéma used in what was probably the very first essay about Farocki in 1975. That is a long while ago, and it confirms that ‘Harun Farocki’ has been around for a long while: already by 1975 he had been making films for a decade. The first time I wrote about Farocki was in 1983, the first time I introduced him to a live audience was in 1993, by which time I could with some justification call him “Germany’s best-known unknown filmmaker”. A year later, Farocki had his first major retrospective in the United States, following several festival screenings of his Images of the World and Inscription of War (1988). more