Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet at Work on a Film Based on Franz Kafka’s Amerika

This film is at once a self-portrait and an homage to Jean-Marie Straub, Farocki's role model and former teacher at the Film Academy.

About ‘Song of Ceylon’ by Basil Wright

Song of Ceylon was commissioned for the short-lived German TV-series Telekritik and broadcasted in 1975. In Telekritik documentary approaches were analysed and made available for a critique of contemporary TV, its aesthetics and modes of production. Other authors for the series include Hartmut Bitomsky, Rainer Gansera and Klaus Wildenhahn.In the 30-minute movie, Farocki shows and comments on excerpts from the film Song of Ceylon by Basil Wright (and a short segment of Eisenstein's Mexico-fragments). Farocki's voice-over describes part of the...

EXPRMNTL

Knokke, Belgium. A small mundane coastal town, home to the beau-monde. To compete with Venice and Cannes, the posh casino hosts the second ‘World Festival of Film and the Arts’ in 1949, organised in part by the Royal Cinematheque of Belgium. To celebrate cinema’s 50 year existence, they put together a side program showcasing the medium in all its shapes and forms: surrealist film, absolute film, dadaist films, abstract film,… The side program would soon become a festival in its own right: ‘EXPRMNTL’, dedicated to experimental cinema, and wou...

A German Youth

At the end of the 1960s the post-war generation began to revolt against their parents. This was a generation disillusioned by anti-communist capitalism and a state apparatus in which they believed they saw fascist tendencies. This generation included journalist Ulrike Meinhof, lawyer Horst Mahler, filmmaker Holger Meins as well as students Gudrun Ensslin and Andreas Baader.