… Scan Freeze, arrêt sur image.

Paul Virilio, Guerre et Cinéma

Lights on

One of the Jewish prisoners forced to work in a so-called ‘special detail’ at Auschwitz told Claude Lanzmann in Shoah, a film that contained no historical or archival images, what happened when a new transport arrived at the station and the SS was notified:

Harun Farocki, reading from the caption of an image of this ramp, asks: First thought: why all these spotlights? Is a film being shot?

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Farocki's film, BILDER DER WELT UND INSCHRIFT DES KRIEGES (IMAGES OF THE WORLD AND THE INSCRIPTION OF WAR) focuses on found photographs and documentary or industrial images. It answers the question of ‘why the lights’ with an analysis of some of the film being shot: images, and the light that made them possible. IMAGES OF THEWORLD is a film of light and disaster, of exposure and its time, or more properly its timing and hence its speed. It is not a film of montage, of cutting and sequencing, nor one of zooms and pans and travellings. The title makes it clear: what is at stake are images, the stilled traces left over after light has etched itself on film, the remnants of the silver that turns to black in the grain of a photograph. And yet, IMAGES OF THE WORLD is not exactly a film about seeing, either. One does not simply see an image, it says; its light is always shadowed by something that does not belong to the perception or intuition of the visible (which is to say, finally, to the aesthetic). Of necessity there could never be enough seeing to saturate an image.