11/10 - ARTISTS ON FILM: ASAD RAZA ON HARUN FAROCKI'S 'WORKERS LEAVING THE FACTORY'/ 'RESPITE'
NYU’s PROGRAM FOR ASIAN PACIFIC AMERICAN STUDIES presents: Asian American Visual Cultures series ARTISTS ON FILM: ASAD RAZA ON HARUN FAROCKI'S 'WORKERS LEAVING THE FACTORY'/ 'RESPITE' (1995/ 2007), 36/ 40 min. When: 7.00pm, Tuesday 10 November 2009 “My films are made against the cinema and against television” Over the course of nearly fifty years, and more than a hundred films, Harun Farocki has established a ‘Workers Leaving The Factory’ (1995) is propelled by an rueful observation: “The first camera in the history of cinema was pointed at a factory, but a century later it can be said that film is seldom drawn to the factory and even repelled by it.” Drawing on an assemblage of factory-departures scenes, all the way from the Lumiere brothers to directors as various as DW Griffiths, Lang, Pudovkin, Chaplin and Antonioni, Farocki offers a penetrating “archaeology of the (non)representation of labor” In the little-seen ‘Respite’ (2007), Farocki resurrects a silent black-and-white film shot at Westerbork, a Dutch refugee camp established in 1939 for Jews fleeing Germany; in 1942, after the occupation of Holland, its function was reversed by the Nazis. In 1944, the camp commander commissioned a film, shot by photographer, inmate and ultimate camp-victim Rudolph Breslauer, whose ambiguous contents, eerily redolent of modern-day corporate videos, are here accompanied by Farocki’s intertitle commentary.
Queries: ss162@nyu.edu |
|
towering reputation as one of the most important image-producers of his generation. Born in Czechoslavakia to an Indian father and a German mother, the former pavement painter has created an extraordinary body of work, spanning documentaries, children’s television and installation art, that deep-mines and illuminates the profound ways in which emergent technologies of surveillance, data capture and image-circulation have transformed civil society. A pivotal figure in the development of the cine-essay, his probing and ruminative works, often deploying the techniques of bricolage and archive-hacking, excavate forgotten or undiscovered visual geologies – mall-cams, prison footage, topographic photographs of Auschwitz – to create a meta-cinema of enormous political potency. 
Asad Raza is a writer, filmmaker and producer. In the latter capacity, he has spent the last year working with the artist Tino Sehgal on an exhibition for the Guggenheim Museum, New York, which will begin January 29th, 2010. He also produces Alia Raza's film and video works, including the ongoing series, ‘The Fragile White Blossoms Emit a Hypnotic Cascade of Tropical Perfume Whose Sweet Heady Odor Leaves Its Victim Intoxicated,’ featuring Kim Gordon, Chloe Sevigny, and Devendra Banhart. Asad Raza writes on topics as various as contemporary art, academic labor, food culture, and professional tennis. He is a columnist for the highly regarded website 3 Quarks Daily and writes frequently for ‘Tennis’ magazine; the Italian magazine NERO has just published a dialogue between Raza and the artist Dan Graham. In March, Raza directed his first music video, for the Irish songwriter David Kitt. He studied literature at Johns Hopkins and NYU, and film production at NYU's Tisch Scho ol of the Arts.