ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on how one reverberate with Harun Farocki's reworking of particular forms and ideas from the early and silent era of film. It argues, a number of recent pieces suggest that such a potentially "globalizing, encyclopedic" moment of early cinema and visual culture resonates in several respects with an expanded visual-symbolic field in the twenty-first century. Farocki's On the Construction of Griffith's Films features approximately six minutes from Intolerance's three-hours-plus footage, and it only portrays encounters, between men and women. Griffith's work speaks to a particular moment within early cinema, one that demonstrated, global and encyclopedic ambitions, specifically to respond to a newly emerging "worldly" consciousness and techniques of world-picturing. In-Formation's flood of imagery and messy parallel narratives, akin to the silent "drama of comparisons" in Intolerance, babelize the historical narratives masked its stereotypical International System of Typographic Picture Education (ISOTYPE) imagery. The "speaking signs" in In-Formation effectively silence its diverse historical subjects through stereotyping and abstraction.
