Film Screening: Harun Farocki’s Images of the World and the Inscription of War

In his film Images of the World and the Inscription of War (1988), the late German theorist and filmmaker Harun Farocki presents a free-associative cinematic essay on technology, perception, and morality. At the center of the film is a series of aerial photographs of Auschwitz taken inadvertently by American bombers searching for Nazi munitions factories in 1944. Somehow, American authorities failed to notice the death camps in the photos at the time. Thirty years later, CIA analysts revisiting the photographs recognized their remarkable content for the first time.

As the story unfolds, Farocki weaves in other histories in a complex montage, linking Enlightenment-era ideals of scale, realism, and perspective to modern warfare’s concern with invisibility, camouflage, decoys, and hidden identities. The result is a 75-minute meditation on how visual technologies can be used to record and preserve historical truth, as much as they can obfuscate and even destroy it.

Introducing the film will be BISR faculty Shimrit Lee. The screening will take place Monday, March 29th and will stream live on the BISR Facebook page. For a reminder and any updates, please RSVP below.

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