HARUN FAROCKI
Born in 1944, Jicin (Czech Republic). Lives in Berlin.
Nicht loschbares Feuer (Inextinguishable Fire), 1969
16mm film transfered to video, 25'
Harun Farocki Filproduktion
Harun Farock's work Inextinguishable Fire is a powerful accusation levied at America's military politics during the Vietnam War, the example of a report from a hypocritically concealed character of the tertiary aesthetic. This true/false documentary about an industrial company displays a seductive representation of the tertiary sector (immaculate office of the secretary, fitted carpet, pot plant, logo, etc.) and the disturbed exhibitionism that accompanies it in a set that mixes elegance, cleanliness and functionality.
However, the film reports the perversion of a logic that hides the real activity behind formalism and a condescending pseudo-transparency. Its executives never name the product of the activity, substituted, as it is, by a service rhetoric “I can offer you what you need”…”what the clients ask for” etc., and we must turn to the off screen voice to learn that napalm is made here. A sordid reality totally masked by a semantic field, the aesthetic of the set and the logic of the structural dispersion of activity. The transparency of the neat spectacle (that permits us to see everything but understand nothing) camouflages industrial violence and shows it as the spiritual ideal of tertiarisation, developing a principle of equilibrium that has erased industrial specificity, and constitutes one of the biggest hypocrisies of contemporary capitalism.
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