Commenting upon images with images. Dialogic-visual critique in the films of Harun Farocki

Abstract

The act of connecting images is central to all of Harun Farocki’s body of work in film, video and art installations. Whether it is by using a montage of ideas, based on the principle of joining and separating (Elsaesser, 2004b: 150), through double-screen techniques, or simply by allowing an image to collapse into its own production context, as happens for instance in Ein Bild [An Image] (1983), what Farocki is after involves critically interrogating images not only as inscriptions of an all-embracing visual culture, but also as political agents that are increasingly involved in surveillance processes, armed conflicts, sentimental relationships, training or marketing. This paper offers a dialogic-visual critique as an analytic category with which to approach Farocki’s work and its relevance in relation to contemporary visual culture. This formula stems from the specific need to connect the critical stance which pervades his oeuvre with the concept of ‘dialogism’ as a mechanism for meaning construction based on the constant socio-ideological tension between different signs in a particular system. This paper does not take a purely theoretical approach, however, but aims to apply the aforementioned concepts to the analysis of key moments in Farocki’s work and, more concretely, to his use of montage as a self-reflexive approach to the study of images.