Books
Books
Harun Farocki: Forms of Intelligence
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS | 2024
Harun Farocki was one of the world’s most celebrated experimental filmmakers at the time of his death in 2014. In a career spanning over fifty years, the German artist produced more than one hundred works, including political cinema, nonfiction film and video, and art installations, which have been exhibited globally. After his early politically engaged films in Super 8 and 16 mm, Farocki spent many years making independent films and commissions for German public television. In the last phase of his career, he transitioned to creating digital and multichannel installations. He also collaborated with the director Christian Petzold on a dozen films. In addition to his prolific media-making career, Farocki was an incisive critic and editor.
This groundbreaking book is an incisive and comprehensive analysis of Farocki’s oeuvre, shedding new light on his media experimentation and writings across platforms and venues. Nora M. Alter examines how Farocki’s work investigates film and media images: their history, nature, manipulation, changing function, and strategic use. Focusing on interconnected ideas surrounding labor, critique, and war, she shows how his politically committed art is informed by pedagogical strategies that drive viewers to perceive how the media world they inhabit functions. Alter also argues that Farocki’s career provides a lens on the history of avant-garde and experimental filmmaking amid shifts in materials and exhibition platforms. Tracing the transformations of Farocki’s artistic practice and thought, this book offers new insight into the body of work of one of the most significant media makers of the late twentieth century.
“Harun Farocki: Forms of Intelligence offers a full and fascinating portrait of one of the most important postwar German filmmakers. Addressing the sheer diversity and quantity of Farocki's work is, frankly, an astounding feat—one that Alter, in this highly engaging volume, accomplishes with alacrity.” — Jaimey Fisher, University of California, Davis
“Nora Alter offers a superb tribute to Harun Farocki's immense impact as a filmmaker, media theorist, and digital artist. The author, who was part of Farocki's circle in Berlin, combines a compelling intellectual biography with an incisive analysis of his multifaceted work. This book is essential reading for anyone interested in Farocki's legacy.” — Anton Kaes, University of California, Berkeley
“Bravo for this first approach in English to provide a combined descriptive analysis and compelling guide to Harun Farocki’s intriguing work. Alter raises questions that make it possible to explore the “interconnected constellations of ideas” that characterize Farocki’s production, yet opens paths to stimulate unique ongoing probes into his rich and resonating oeuvre.” — Renée Green, MIT
“Nora M. Alter, the comprehensive and eminent chronicler of essay films, elegantly interweaves the artistic and intellectual work of Harun Farocki in an analytical portrait of the artist and his work from the early student films to the major installations and global multimedia projects of his late years. This book provides new insight into the fascinating world of Harun Farocki as image maker and theorist.” — Gertrud Koch, Freie Universität Berlin
“Nora Alter's book is an exemplary labor of love: a thoroughly absorbing engagement with Harun Farocki's films that illuminates his legacy and allows us to better understand where his work has left us—not just as film scholars or intellectuals, but as humans and citizens, trying to find a compass amid the precarious history of the twentieth and twenty-first century. Harun Farocki: Forms of Intelligence approaches Farocki's films with the very intelligence, care, sophistication, and open-mindedness his work continues to call for and deserves.” — Lutz Koepnick, Vanderbilt University
The Essay Film After Fact and Fiction
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS | 2018
Nora M. Alter reveals the essay film to be a hybrid genre that fuses the categories of feature, art, and documentary film. Like its literary predecessor, the essay film draws on a variety of forms and approaches; in the process, it fundamentally alters the shape of cinema. The Essay Film After Fact and Fiction locates the genre’s origins in early silent cinema and follows its transformation with the advent of sound, its legitimation in the postwar period, and its multifaceted development at the turn of the millennium. In addition to exploring the broader history of the essay film, Alter addresses the innovative ways contemporary artists such as Martha Rosler, Isaac Julien, Harun Farocki, John Akomfrah, and Hito Steyerl have taken up the essay film in their work.
“For many years, Nora Alter has been our most brilliant advocate of the essay film as an open genre that floats between documentary, fiction, and the art film. The Essay Film After Fact and Fiction is the first comprehensive survey of this difficult and experimental genre in both its historical context and variable aesthetic manifestations. The depth and complexity of Alter’s account of the essay film’s critical force and aesthetic innovations will not soon be surpassed.” — D. N. Rodowick, University of Chicago
“This magisterial study marks a milestone in scholarship on the most intellectually expansive and unpredictable film genre of the last half-century. Global in scope, Alter’s book displays the essay film's astonishing richness of forms and functions from its beginnings in the 1920s to contemporary art installations. Both a reliable history and a sharp-eyed investigation, The Essay Film After Fact and Fiction is indispensable for anyone interested in the past and future of nonfiction cinema.” —Anton Kaes, University of California, Berkeley
“The Essay Film After Fact and Fiction is unfailingly lucid, balanced, and informed. Alter provides generous and illuminating analyses of specific films, filmmakers, and decisive shifts in the arts and media history. Her book is a definitive guide to the multiple modes of production and global contexts of a vital tradition that continues to enrich contemporary culture and nurture critical thought.” —Edward Dimendberg, University of California, Irvine
Essays on the Essay Film
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS | 2017
The essay—with its emphasis on the provisional and explorative rather than on definitive statements—has evolved from its literary beginnings and is now found in all mediums, including film. Today, the essay film is, arguably, one of the most widely acclaimed and critically discussed forms of filmmaking around the world, with practitioners such as Chris Marker, Hito Steyerl, Errol Morris, Trinh T. Minh-ha, and Rithy Panh. Characteristics of the essay film include the blending of fact and fiction, the mixing of art- and documentary-film styles, the foregrounding of subjective points of view, a concentration on public life, a tension between acoustic and visual discourses, and a dialogic encounter with audiences.
This anthology of fundamental statements on the essay film offers a range of crucial historical and philosophical perspectives. It provides early critical articulations of the essay film as it evolved through the 1950s and 1960s, key contemporary scholarly essays, and a selection of writings by essay filmmakers. It features texts on the foundations of the essay film by writers such as Hans Richter and André Bazin; contemporary positions by, among others, Phillip Lopate and Michael Renov; and original essays by filmmakers themselves, including Laura Mulvey and Isaac Julien.
“Creatively and capaciously, this rich volume gets at the essay film not only by including key critics and practitioners of the form but, importantly, by going beyond the genre itself to broader contributions to essay theorization from philosophy and belles lettres. An exciting, inventive volume with great delights at every turn.” — Dana Polan, New York University
“Alter and Corrigan's masterful new volume on the essay film is rigorous, comprehensive, and refreshingly surprising. Their invaluable collection probes theoretical reflections on the essay as a mode of expression and a way of thinking in light of the creative and political investments of filmmakers around the globe; it also chronicles the essay film's changing countenances, from its prehistory and early signs of life to novel permutations in the present. Featuring a very distinguished cast of players, this collection is a production of the highest order.” — Eric Rentschler, Harvard University
“Nora Alter and Tim Corrigan bring their seasoned literary experience to herd but never tame the unruly essay film. Its prestige soaring, this mode is tethered to a long history of experimental writing that will keep it from disappearing into the bog of blogs and YouTube mashups whose best examples it is already inspiring. The proof is in the Table of Contents: a brilliant litany of sensitive, reliable writers, who dare to take on the most daring forms of image-thought the cinema has produced.” — Dudley Andrew, Yale University
“Recent years have witnessed a rapid growth in interest in the history, concept and diverse manifestations of the essay film. In this essential collection, Nora Alter and Timothy Corrigan have brought together a superb selection of foundational texts with a range of key recent writings by leading scholars and essay filmmakers. The result is an enormously rich resource for anyone interested in the past, present, and future of this most vital of audiovisual forms.” — Michael Witt, University of Roehampton
Chris Marker
UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS | 2006
Having spearheaded the bourgeoning Nouvelle Vague scene in the late 1950s and developed a distinctive style involving still images, Chris Marker (born Christian François Bouche-Villeneuve) stands among the most influential filmmakers of the postwar era, yet remains enigmatic. His notorious reclusiveness has led to surprisingly few studies, and Nora M. Alter's Chris Marker presents the first English-language study of the unpredictable and reclusive director who remains politically and artistically influential.
Marker's 1953 debut "filmic essay," The Statues Also Die (with Alain Resnais) exposed the European art market's complicity in the former Belgian Congo atrocities, and provided a bold model for other politically committed filmmakers. Thus began Marker's long struggle against global injustice, a trajectory that included his involvement with Night and Fog, La Jetée, Le Joli Mai, Far from Vietnam, Le fond du l'air est Rouge, and Prime Time in the Camps. Alter's careful study includes interviews with the director and investigates the core themes and motivations behind an often unpredictable and transnational career that defies easy classification.
“Nora Alter's short study of Marker's work does much to restore a sense of the complexity of his motivations and working methods . . . She is especially informative on the aesthetic and political involutions of post-war France. . . . For its filmography and the breadth of its coverage, her book is essential.” — Brian Dillon, Sight and Sound
“A valuable addition to Marker scholarship.” — Film International
Sound Matters: Essays on the Acoustics of Modern German Culture
BERGHAHN BOOKS | 2004
The sounds of music and the German language have played a significant role in the developing symbolism of the German nation. In light of the historical division of Germany into many disparate political entities and regional groups, German artists and intellectuals of the 19th and early 20th centuries conceived of musical and linguistic dispositions as the nation's most palpable common ground. According to this view, the peculiar sounds of German music and of the German language provided a direct conduit to national identity, to the deepest recesses of the German soul. So strong is this legacy of sound is still prevalent in modern German culture that philosopher Peter Sloterdijk, in a recent essay, did not even hesitate to describe post-wall Germany as an "acoustical body."
This volume gathers the work of scholars from the US, Germany, and the United Kingdom to explore the role of sound in modern and postmodern German cultural production. Working across established disciplines and methodological divides, the essays of Sound Matters investigate the ways in which texts, artists, and performers in all kinds of media have utilized sonic materials in order to enforce or complicate dominant notions of German cultural and national identity.
“This volume is a most welcome contribution to an area of inquiry the editors concede as been slow to flourish in German Cultures Studies…the polished and thought-provoking essays in this anthology will lead readers to begin hearing things differently in their own research and teaching.” — German Studies Review
Projecting History: German Nonfiction Cinema 1967-2000
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN PRESS | 2002
Between 1967 and 2000, film production in Germany underwent a number of significant transformations, including the birth and death of New German Cinema as well as the emergence of a new transnational cinematic practice. In Projecting History, Nora M. Alter explores the relationship between German cinematic practice and the student protests in both East and West Germany against the backdrop of the U.S. war in Vietnam in the sixties, the outbreak of terrorism in West Germany in the seventies, West Germany's rise as a significant global power in the eighties, and German reunification in the nineties.
Although a central tendency of New German Cinema in the 1970s was to reduce the nation's history to the product of individuals, the films addressed in Projecting History focus not on individual protagonists, but on complex socioeconomic structures. The films, by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Harun Farocki, Alexander Kluge, Ulrike Ottinger, Wim Wenders and others, address basic problems of German history, including its overall "peculiarity" within the European context, and, in particular, the specific ways in which the National Socialist legacy continues to haunt Germans.
Vietnam Protest Theatre: The Television War on Stage
INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS | 1996
The escalation of the war in Vietnam in the mid-1960s unleashed worldwide protest. Playwrights grappled with the complexities of post-imperialist politics and with the problems of creating effective political theatre in the television age. The ephemeral theatre these writers created, today little-known and rarely studied, provides an important window on a complex moment in culture and history.
“... a thoughtful and important treatment of the international tensions of the period as they were embodied in theatre practice. It is the only book of its kind on the subject, and a valuable source of production information.” — Theatre Journal
“... an excellent discussion of the aesthetics of theater.” — Choice
