ABSTRACT
The essay discusses Harun Farocki’s preoccupations with filming work routines and practices (often associated with manual labour) and his enduring concern with simulation, make-believe, and role-play (often connected with the eye, particularly as an instrument for control and surveillance, but also as an organ easily deceived in its assumption of knowledge, and occasionally deceived for pleasure and play). Elsaesser places Farocki’s work in relation to cinema’s evolution from novel recording technology to mass medium and from being a tool for political emancipation to being an instrument of surveillance. The essay discusses Labour in a Single Shot in relation to – and as a culmination of – Farocki’s earlier approaches to filming labour in his 1970s workers’ films and in his cinematic meditations on the concept of Verbund, a principle of recycling and repurposing apparently unrelated or even mutually antagonistic elements. The essay demonstrates how Verbund becomes Farocki’s own working method, as he “bends” art in his attempt to negotiate questions of artistic production under a capitalist system that tends to play artists out against each other. This attempt entailed moving away from traditional modes of film production and exhibition towards digital film-making and its new exhibition spaces.
