Harun Farocki: Images of the World and the Inscription of War

As a part of the exhibition at the Tate called Time, Conflict, Photography and at the recommendation of my professor at UCL, Stephanie Schwartz, who teaches a seminar that I am participating in called American Media: Publicity and the Logics of Surveillance, I attended a screening of Harun Farocki's film, "Images of the World and the Inscription of War". The film was probably one of the most complicated that I have ever watched and I feel as though I should screen it several times before I could really sense that I have come to some kind of palpable understanding of it in its entirety.

"Images of the World and the Inscription of War" tells the story of how images of Auschwitz during the World War II were captured by the American surveillance cameras attempting to take aerial photographs of an industrial plant nearby in Germany. It was only in the 1970s when the CIA noticed that the concentration camp in operation was visible in these shots. The images show a queue of dots - prisoners lining up for their death in the gas chambers.

The film pieces also together a variety of seemingly unrelated shots as a sort of recurring collage, one of which includes scenes showing close-ups of a woman who remains still as makeup is applied to her face and then removed from it. Farocki sews in a multitude of distinct images that relate to surveillance and perception, visibility and invisibility and what it might mean to look at and see a face.

Images taken from http://images.tate.org.uk/sites/default/files/styles/grid-normal-8-cols/public/images/brenez_05_0_1.jpg?itok=EwLPhRZb and http://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/film/harun-farocki-images-world-and-inscription-war