Following a public screening of the first rough-cut version of his film Immersion in 2009 at the Goethe Institute in London, the German director Harun Farocki discussed his film project with the artist and critic Kodwo Eshun (co-founder of the Otolith Group).
Kodwo Eshun: At the end of the film we see the first session in what these therapists call VRET – virtual reality exposure therapy.
Harun Farocki: What you saw was a workshop, or training seminar. There’s a group in America that has invented virtual reality exposure therapy. The man with the ponytail at the beginning, he’s one of the leading figures. He’s a therapist, he works for the centre for experimental science in San Diego with other therapists who have been working with traumatised patients for a long time. One of them was the woman who played the therapist here, who always says, ‘You are doing a great job’, in a slightly mechanical, perhaps hypnotic way. They are all free-lancers: the others, those in camouflage uniforms, are all in life-time – twenty-year-long – employment with the American army. It was all filmed in an army base, Fort Louis, in the State of Washington, very close to Seattle. The therapists want to sell their virtual Iraq device to the army, for use for the therapy of traumatised patients. The idea is to treat patients with so-called exposure therapy, which means they have to go back and re-create the experience that caused their trauma. In this case they’ve speeded the process up a little; in reality, of course, not all aspects of the treatment are covered right from the first session. First, you find out what the trauma is about, and so on, and then the idea is (it’s a well-known strategy, but now it’s conducted with virtual images) that you can somehow re-create, more or less, the atmosphere in a more suggestive way. So they have built virtual Iraq, and I was told that they are also working on adding some mountains so that it can also be used it for Afghanistan! Of course, the mosques are the same, so some of the sounds can also be used; not only the explosions, but also the muezzin you heard at the beginning. There is also a virtual Vietnam, and a virtual World Trade Center. Perhaps one day we could re-tell the story of America using those images, but for the moment the scope of my project is limited. They [soldiers] see a virtual desert, or a virtual city, and learn how to patrol, how to avoid ambushes, and so on. So there’s an interesting coincidence. At first you use these images to be de-sensitised. The army has also huge military facilities; one is even in Germany, for NATO, but run by the Americans. There, large scale role-plays are carried out: they hire extras. If they have Arabic-looking features, they get ten euros more per day. So they use real people, and also real locations, but they also use studios in which soldiers learn, as if they were in a huge video game, how to react. So these are two aspects of how you make use of images [VR and role-play] and of a course, wonderful examples as they open up many questions.
KE: These therapists [in Immersion] need to find a market, they need to find a demand. So I think economically we can understand this, but I think what’s interesting for us is what happens when a filmmaker begins to magnify some of these processes. One thing that strikes us immediately is the fact that what you were interested in filming here was role-play; that you didn’t film an actual therapy session between therapist and soldier. You filmed a therapist playing a soldier, so that the kinds of image repetitions at play are doubled by the fact that roles are being performed before an audience, an audience that we don’t see but that we hear. Obviously this feeds into your interest in role-play, an interest that extends back to How to Live in the FRG (1990), to works like The Interview (1997), and others. I know the decision is in part pragmatic – in the sense of being able to film the role-play – but I also sense there’s an interest for you in exaggerated gestures and the kind of demonstrative capacity that role-play demands, where you have to find a kind of language of presentation that conveys and connotes to everybody. And I wonder if you could talk a bit about this question of role-play.
HF: Yes, I think there are even more layers here. If you analyse it, it’s not the soldier telling of something he has experienced, it’s the therapist, who has treated many patients; or his colleagues, who have treated patients in other cases. So he creates this scenario, and this scenario is the imagining of a patient; the therapists are the listeners, and they have to imagine. So that’s already the third or fourth layer on which they refer to this real war in Iraq. The astonishing thing – otherwise it wouldn’t work at all – is that nevertheless you sense something about this war. It has something to do with the filmmaking process; there are so many processes before you have something on screen, you can’t believe that there is still something visible, because after all these artificial attempts you made, how can something…
KE: How can something immediate emerge from all this mediation? How can you be touched by something so obviously artificial?
HF: Yes, exactly. In that sense, I think, it’s a good, and also a very specific, imagination of the war, about which we don’t know much. Perhaps fifty years ago there would have been a novel by a smart American; he’d have written a novel about the experience in Iraq, as with the Phillip Roth generation, the post-World War II generation of writers. Today, I think images have to capture some of this memory, and I think that the material here is an interesting comment on them. I imagine the association that came to everybody’s minds when they first saw these images was the video game. We all probably are not great video-gamers, otherwise we wouldn’t be here tonight – yet in some sense it is true. Although the process is a bit more complex. The VRET developers got the footage from the game industry. They then adapted it to their needs, but the main features derive from the video industry. What you have here are only two locations; one with some interiors in Baghdad, as well as some Baghdad streets and blocks that you can navigate through. Here you can see a statue of Saddam Hussein: that’s Saddam standing here in front of this little village. So you have a game controller at this M16 rifle, so you can navigate through the streets when you are on patrol. In the car, of course, you can also speed up or steer wherever you want. So it’s a kind of interactive game also. Of course, in this case you don’t fire; it’s not about firing, it’s about healing now. But the feeling of a gun somehow is important. The first step was that they got the main features, the structure of the images, of the software, from the game industry, but the game industry got it from the army beforehand. So a lot of money, I think, hundreds of millions were spent to develop this material. For these two locations, they spent twenty to thirty million dollars. So they are nearly already on a film production level with these games. So you see that it’s not much, so they have to get it back from them. For me it’s so interesting that, perhaps that is the modern strategy, that today you no longer make a film about as they did when they hired John Ford in World War II to, say, make a battle in the Pacific. Then we had a film which really showed what our war is about, which made it attractive, or which explained it, let’s say – propaganda. I think today propaganda doesn’t have to be specific in this way, it’s like advertising; you don’t have to advertise for a special brand, I think advertising for cigarettes or Gucci or whatever, also helps Mercedes and others. It’s not specific. In this sense, you introduce the war into the imaginary, and the location as well. I think that all these Vietnam films have helped to do it, that has become a
topos, Vietnam. The exposure to this danger, the fact that you don’t know who is firing on you, and that you are surprised, and all these things have become part of the common imaginary, it’s a genre like the western. That is probably smarter to confirm what you are doing than by having a special message. So the real economy is an aesthetic economy.
KE: Yes, Marizio Lazzarato talks about how advertising works by life-worlds. By creating a life-world that you feel before you experience it, but this feeling is already a kind of experience, and then there’s a kind of mismatch between the feeling and the experience and you hunger after to make your feeling actual. But your specific point about topos, about topoi, that specific kind of image trope, that we saw circulating around, let’s say the Vietnam era, I think, would you say that these kinds of images suggest or imply a new genre of images? A new kind of digital image? I sense that your interest in these images is not just for the images in themselves. There’s a sense that these images signal some kind of shift in the production of images, so a part of your project is to use your camera to reveal to us a new shift, a new mutation, in what the image can now do.
HF: Yes, I think that these kinds of images are nowadays the standard. This is probably due to all that is possible, that you can navigate within the image, this carnival effect, that you can turn your head and see whatever you want to within the limits of the programme, that you can walk through it, that it’s interactive, and so forth. I think that displaces these kinds of images into a field of so-called scientific superiority. So if you look at advertising, in the 1950s every ad was still painted, or drawn, and then all these photographic images came, and it was unthinkable to not have a photographic image, because one thought that is the real thing, and that really proves that it exists. I would say that this function is nowadays at play within the digital image, and not the photographic image. One aspect is the technical standard – just as writing with the typewriter is bad, but with the computer it’s modern – in the sense that to use such an image is to align yourself to the real technical world, this world which we are processing, and the aspect of symbolical ‘mastering’ is so strong in it. I don’t know if it’s possible to see it if you see a person talking about it – confronting a narration with an image – but my hope is that you see, or that it becomes somehow accessible, the idea that these images are not so far from an oil painting on canvas, which you can find here in some museums. When a war is made classic, by making art of it. It also says that this is not just an event, it is something which belongs to the continuity of all these sea battles which we have depicted in our museums. Today you no longer have painters for it but you need digital images for it.
KE: So you’re saying these images for you are operating as something like a contemporary history painting. A painting of contemporaneity now operates through this, and those who have the power of technical standardisation, they can control, or they have the capability to operate what we think of now, as History.
HF: Yes, or even the reverse. The public believes that such an image is true, as a real snapshot from the location, because the entire infrastructure is included in the image. It’s not just an image, with one person taking a picture, there’s this huge infrastructure. It’s a little bit like what you have in a war, that there’s not just one soldier walking there. In World War II, behind every soldier were 270 people behind the front, and I think today it’s 1,500 or so in the case of the Americans. So this infrastructure is somehow palpable.
KE: Every pixel shows its industrial force. Every pixel celebrates its industrial might. Its something like the kind of carnival of attractions that Tom Gunning talked about, the way in which the image displays itself, and shows off to us, and reveals its power, and its industrial superiority, and that if you can attach yourself to that, that you too are on the winning side of History. Because of course History is written by those who have the means of reproduction. So of course you would have Virtual Reality Exposure Therapy for soldiers, rather than for Iraqi civilians. The soldiers who carry out the ‘shock and awe’ are the people who are repaired, in order that they can go out and do more shocking and more awesome damage.
HF: And also this PTSD – post-traumatic stress disorder. The word isn’t known in Iraq – it’s something like colour TV, or digital cameras, or whatever. In World War II, which was also a traumatic event, it was not known, this word. It has to do with an already very elaborate culture, of course.
KE: So you only showed, as you said, it’s first stage, just some initial episodes from your shooting, but it’s clear that the project as such is to study a way in which the image comes with the claim to both inflict harm and then to repair that harm. The dialectic of the contemporary image, and the way in which the image holds out a promise of curing the havoc that it creates. All of this is summed up in the notion of de-sensitisation, and in the notion of immersion. And I guess an initial instinct of any person, any kind of cultural worker, is to be entirely suspicious of this, is to think of it almost as a kind of advertising claim; the ministry can’t possibly think this, the military can’t possibly think that the image that creates harm is also the image that will cure that harm. They can’t really think that. But when you talked to them, did you find that this kind of double nature was something that they were quite happy with, and quite familiar with?
HF: We avoided every philosophical and meta-debate, and tried just to get permission to shoot something! I don’t know what these guys think about it, it could make things more difficult with access, and so on. It’s already difficult enough to get permission, it’s a long process. But as Chris Marker says in la sixième face du pentagone [1968] – if the Pentagon is inaccessible from five sides, you must use the sixth.
You asked something earlier, perhaps we can go back to it, I have not yet addressed it at all. I always loved that role-play has this second layer; you don’t make a documentary where people are really having a conflict, which is mostly not the case, and then a stage, and it’s badly played, and so on. But here you have the consolation in which bad playing can be great. I think, and I hope that you agree, that many people for some minutes believe that it must be a real experience, what he’s going through and conveying here. This wonderful abstraction that you have when the woman has a rifle, and she stands in a classroom, a quite sleazy classroom, and says, ‘It was so terrible’, and she has to raise her voice because the sound in her earphone is too high. In a kind of Brechtian way that reminded me of one of his early plays – Man Equals Man [1926] – when the soldiers go to India and you don’t really see India – it’s just an imagination. For me this is what’s so strong – this kind of condensing which you get in a role-play, as you get in a film as well.
KE: The idea of role-play opens out the wider question of, on the one hand repetition, and on the other re-enactment – the differences between those two modalities, and the kind of entanglement between them both. And re-enactment is something that has, as I said, been operative in your work from How to Live in the FRG
onwards. But here, re-enactment has, we can call it almost a predatory, and directly commercial aspect. And so I was thinking about how to consider the changes in re-enactment since How to Live in the FRG
in the early 1990s, and now the early part of the twenty-first century. And now, what happened in between, which is the art world becoming totally fascinated by re-enactment. I think it’s a lot to do with temporality, a lot to do with the particular time-zone that a re-enactment adopts. On one hand, it’s clearly looking back, it’s clearly re-working something that’s past, but it’s also looking ahead to something that couldn’t emerge then, and has to be projected now. So there’s this kind of Janus face, this kind of double face to re-enactment. My interest is in how you capture that, and what that has to do with the way in which you frame the image as two images, so that you have a comparative eye, and a kind of editor’s eye, and part of your practice is to invite an editor’s gaze from the viewer, so that the viewer is placed in this role of comparing images, comparing these different modalities of re-enactment, which are simultaneously harking back to something and simultaneously gesturing forward to something. I guess it’s a roundabout way of asking you about form, a roundabout way of asking you why you framed the work in the way you have, and some of your thoughts about that.
HF: Yes, so first of all I think that here, the use of these two screens is really very simple. You see what he sees, or what she sees, and I had mounted display, in future cases you will see HMD [head-mounted display]. So that’s quite simple. Then of course you can make dramatic use of it. The moment when he really speaks of Jones I switch it off, and when he says, ‘Ok, I must continue’, then the image comes back. So there are little ruses, but in general it’s just about showing what they’re looking at, and to see how and why it is used. In other cases, the use of it in my other works, which are not present here so perhaps we should not talk too much about them, there are also different approaches. Different approaches where one can use it as some form of montage between two present images, but in this case, I think of course in its affect it doesn’t limit itself to it. But you create a very obvious off-space with these two images, because the audience is always in the ‘off’. Also there’s an interesting tension for me in that on one screen he’s talking only to people we never see.
You asked about re-enactment. If we take this idea seriously we aren’t talking about a remake; it’s not that you have the image and then you do a re-enactment. Today’s artists can’t believe that a kind of realism, or naturalism, can be mimesis. And therefore something other has to be imitated or re-created. If you instigate a process of re-enacting, of having the original and the copy, as with a remake of a Hitchcock film or so, then you have lifted this mimesis to a different level, to a more intellectual sphere, and that is perhaps an interesting approach to this practice, but that could not justify it. You had asked, what has changed, in the last twenty years? First of all, in the West, when I made
How to Live in the FRG, and I showed it in Latin or Catholic countries, even in France, where family values are still strong, people didn’t know what I was talking about, because they didn’t have these forms of experience, which of course in America are quite prevalent.
KE: These practices of simulation and rehearsal.
HF: Of practice therapies, cheap or community college therapies and so forth. So that has changed, and became a common language. The middle-class professional must today be able to participate in a role-play. Today it’s like having a driver’s license. So that has changed, but the interesting aspect is that usually a role-play is not so much for the audience as for the participants, the audience or therapist to comment. In this case it was pure theatre, because they didn’t have to experience anything; they just played it for the others, but still there was something real about how she as a therapist showed how she would behave. So it’s very tricky because they only referred to a real role-play. And the weird thing is that later they even have a second act, where they were talking about, ‘How did you experience what you just had when you were looking at these images?’ when I said, ‘No, continue, vomit into the bucket there’, and so on. And he said, ‘Well I felt…’ So he gave the answers which the ideal patient would give, and that’s also an invocation of course, a magical aspect, and this session was already called ‘working with difficult patients’, who are not difficult at all, but his resistance was only to say, ‘Could we stop…?’The fact is that many drop out and don’t continue. Many go in the first instance because it’s more attractive to say, ‘I’m going to a video game centre’, than to say, ‘I’m going to a shrink’, because it’s not good for your reputation. Although Hitchcock would be astonished. But somehow a shrink is too middle-class! That’s what they say; but on the other hand many people drop out. There’s a huge state-funded programme to monitor success, effectiveness, drop-out rates, and so forth – $900 million; it’s not chicken feed, even though it wouldn’t save a car company, but $900 million is invested into this research programme.
KE: So that makes a difference between the second Gulf War and between the first Gulf War of 1991. That’s a key difference between the generations of new industries of vision, new kinds of machine vision, broadly speaking. When between 2001 and 2003 in your trilogy Eye/Machine
you looked at images you called ‘operational images’, the images that came out of the first Gulf War, and now, when you look at the images that emerge from this war, if you make a comparison across those years, I wonder, how would you characterise that difference? I guess one immediate way is that the operational images of the first Gulf War seem to promise to take the human out of the loop; they promised the automisation or weaponisation of the image, whereas here in these immersive images, the human is back in, you have this mixture of the talking cure, the image as cure.
HF: I’m not a sociologist of military technology but it seems to me that this project was already started with the first Gulf War in the 1990s. To have these so-called smart weapons, a kind of automisation which did not really work out, because nobody was prepared to invest the means you really need for that. It’s a bit more expensive than just trauma research, and ironically one could say that there was never ever a single smart weapon used. I don’t know in court if I would ever succeed but I swear there was never such a weapon. It’s only a project and this project was launched and many people believed in it in the 1990s because they wanted to sell it. That’s also a good idea; first you create the idea that something already exists and then you ask for finances to make it, because logic tells you it should exist. This project was more or less called off, but this other idea, the problem is that Saddam in a sense, because he had the biggest army and the most weaponry in the entire region, there you can really have this war at a distance, you have some ships and you somehow hit the infrastructure of the country and so on… But where is the next enemy? It’s so difficult to find one where you can. So for these other projects which are more police-like, where you can say, so you can kill him and not her and so on, then things become really difficult and this doesn’t work as a traditional warfare and would need far more complicated intelligent weapons.
KE: But you made a really interesting point. You’re not a military sociologist or historian, you’re a filmmaker, and sometimes it seems like all along you’ve been interested in war, but not just in war. All along you’ve been interested in thinking about the relationship between the image and violence, and sometimes it seems as though your whole career has a thread running through it and that thread is of finding ways to make the relationship between the image and violence visible, sensible. Visible and audible. It’s something that’s consistent, you’ve been, you could almost say, obsessed with this question, a question that is answerable in so many ways. How to make the connection between images and violence audible and visible. How to organise that so that we begin to see something which is often quite abstract. Something we’re involved with but excluded from, something we see at the level of television but which informs us of nothing, and affects us all the time. Would you say that if we start to look back across the breadth of your work that it’s one of the threads that’s been forming your work in many different ways?
HF: When you say so I must admit it’s true; it’s somehow a terrible idea. Why this preoccupation with images and violence? Of course, somehow this offers itself to be the subject of research. So in a Max Weberian term, ‘ideal type’, somehow these images are very close to an ideal type. I think they are asking reality to be as calculable as these systems are. Of course there can be some contingencies and so on, but you know already, the ambush must be behind the bridge, and this calculability is somehow, when you deal with images and you are astonished that also in the last war sometimes they didn’t show the real thing but rather the simulation or 3D, less realistic, cheaper – they showed it with computer animation. This has become part of the news now. Then of course I became interested in what these images mean. So the main aspect is of course that images and science, or images and real meaning, or social meaning, were totally diverted towards distraction and entertainment. Certainly, when computers started to process images suddenly images had a technical meaning again, and came to a different level. So that’s one aspect, which made it so interesting for me, because the status of the image was changing. The other aspect of course we have not yet talked about, we always talked about the fact that somehow it’s a symbolic act; one feels guilty about the victims and everybody knows that these so-called veterans, after some years nobody cares about them, they can’t find jobs and end up in a trailer park or whatever, if they’re white, otherwise it’s worse… So the symbolical generosity,
we care about you, that is a social programme, and then you have given them this icon that you are caring about them, not forgetting what they’ve done by re-enacting this war.
KE: So then what’s interesting is the role that you as a filmmaker in this symbolic restitution of the soldiers and of those that were victims of the war; where are you in all these different ways of looking at the image and violence? The symbolic and restitutive way, as well as tracking the shifts in the image from the image as representation to one as calculating algorithm? My sense is that as a filmmaker, your interest precedes this shift from, say, signification to calculation, that you have an interest that goes back to the 1960s and perhaps before. It’s not that I’m interested so much in origins, as the particular relation you open up which is thankfully a very un-English, deeply un-English relation. It’s a distanced involvement, it’s a kind of cool low affect, low emotional threshold, which allows one to observe things which are quite difficult to put into images, quite difficult to create a montage of, and my sense is that this low emotional affect is something like a signature that again is a thread. So if it’s possible for you to talk about the kind of affective relation you want to create with these images…
HF: I think you’ve said it already. Perhaps I’ll try to elaborate that it’s not only mimesis, but of course also affect; you can’t create it by having an actor explaining something true. If you have doubts about this approach, then of course by opposing the banding of many stratas of such a signification then some of the rays are refracted in a way that they shed a different light. I’ve become very metaphorical now. I think that approach is that you see how they are creating a fact here, which is somehow not only a parody but also an epitome of the war.
KE: You make a film around every 12 to 18 months, and you make installations as well. How do you keep going? Where do you draw the enthusiasm to continue your quest that is both personal and at the same time something that is much bigger than you, clearly a demand you continue to make on images, a demand you continue to fulfill. How do you keep going in the face of so many demands?
HF: It becomes a custom, just like making music. Some live musicians always need to perform, and the only meaningful performance is to have found something and to show it to others. Therefore I have to continue, because this drug doesn’t last forever.
KE: I think part of it is that you’ve found a way to operate that is fast and cheap; you work with a minimal crew.
HF: Yes, that’s important, that it’s a small niche. It’s terrible if you make features and you have to apply and wait seven years before the film is produced. For my temperament that would be terrible, a little bit rather than oil on canvas you make drawings, and then you can work in a relatively autonomous way. That’s of course an important approach.
KE: For this film I believe the crew was just three people. Ingo Kratisch, the cinematographer you’ve worked with for many years, and your sound person, who is also your researcher, Mathias.
HF: Yes, he’s also my researcher. It’s very important in this field of course. Research is so crucial because it’s such a big problem to find out what’s happening where and to fly over at the right time, and get permissions and so on. He’s a very creative researcher and he can work nicely independently, so he shapes his research and has an idea of how to pull the string with companies – things I’d never know how to do.
KE: That’s critical, as your images are a kind of ongoing research. Your films and your installations are a kind of knowledge production, and that’s where a lot of us value the work, the fact that it’s an ongoing production of a certain kind of knowledge into what a certain kind of image is becoming, so that one can track the production and mutation of images through your films, which facilitate the reflexive analysis of images. Nobody takes out an advert in the newspaper saying, ‘Greeting comrades, the image has now changed its status’. Images now become calculable. Nobody has ever announced it, so it happens without anybody knowing, but one day you find yourself obliged to talk in a language that recognises it.
HF: It is the same as with Vilhem Flusser, who published his books of philosophy in the 1980s, theories that later proved to become true. Then of course the sensitivity existed to address these issues.
KE: Well, that’s an interesting point, because Flusser’s media analysis of what images are becoming suggests partly that your work is in dialogue with certain theoretical formulations and investigations. Were there particular theoretical ideas you were reading at the time of the production of this work, or is this work not really based around theory? Because there’s a sense that this work is in itself a theorisation, in a sense it doesn’t need to refer to theory.
HF: I didn’t find theoretical texts in this field until now, so it’s based on the research we did for this warfare research in general, with Eye/Machine and so forth. In the case of Immersion, the research was only the background of the subject, and to consider how one could figure out a meaning from their intentions?
[Audience member]: The question is about resistance, but also about the real in relation to the image. How can we create a space of resistance?… because I have an aversion to this, despite the fact that I find it extremely interesting to see it, and have it accessible, I wonder for you, what is the question? Is this enough for you? Or how far do you want to go in relation to this?
HF: I think it’s a little bit like in economics. You are happy nowadays to understand how finances work but you don’t dare to propose how one should run the world. One doesn’t want to reform it; one doesn’t have an idea what a different model could be. I understand that one looks for some agency, but I’m very far from agency in this case. I’m just looking at which things are happening and under which contradictions. In the case of the army military complex I’m not even sure; probably the military in general is in a bigger crisis than the banks at the moment. We are not based so much on them as we are on banks, so it’s not so bad for us that they are in a crisis, so I’m not totally negative about it. I’m quite content to find out about things, and my agency is to comment on them; if it’s possible to provoke the ideas that we have alluded to tonight, then I’m perfectly happy with that, that is agency for me.