The author assembles a genre picture of the contemporary FRG with shots of scenes where life is rehearsed, ability/durability is tested. Wherever one looks, people appear as actors playing themselves; they take on roles. A play in the theater of life made up of training courses, fitness tests for things and people. Be it in birth preparation classes for expectant parents or in practice runs for sales talks, on the military training ground or during role-plays for educational purposes. Everywhere the incessant effort to be prepared for the emergency of “reality” can be felt.
How to Live in the German Federal Republic assembles out of a wealth of details a picture of a society in which childbearing and dying, crying and taking care of people, crossing streets and killing are taught and learned in state or private institutions, indeed have to be learned. The real mechanical ballet is not danced by machines but by people, who move to a music that feeds on bombastic phrases from the realms of social work, bureaucracy and therapy. All together, the collected scenes appear to support the view that a mentality of insurance and providing for the future prevails in the FRG, a country in which happiness as well as misery are supposed to be disciplined by means of social techniques and freed from any measure of unpredictability. And yet How to Live in the German Federal Republic goes beyond such an interpretation. The participants in the games, tests, and therapy sessions are not degraded into pieces of evidence for some theory or other. They retain, to varying degrees, something of their dignity. This is a result of Farocki’s working method:he has edited the scenes in such a way that even the most nonsensical occurrences as it were explain themselves. —farocki-film.de
Harun Farocki was born in Novi Jicín in 1944 in what is today the Czech Republic. He studied at the German Cinematic and Television Academy (DFFB) in Berlin, from which he was expelled in 1968 for political reasons. In addition to writing theoretical texts, he has scripted numerous films and television productions. His work was shown at Documenta 12 in Kassel and in numerous international retrospectives and has received many awards.
Farocki’s early films are marked by ideas of a cultural revolution as formulated by the increasingly radical Left of the time and are explicitly developed as effective means of political propaganda. In this way, “Inextinguishable Fire” (1968/69) seizes upon the Vietnam War as one of the quintessential themes of the student movement. While his politically-motivated educational films subject the audience to an analytical and consciousness-raising agenda, the subsequent auctorial, essayistic, and documentary films call for a more active reception on… read more
The only difference between what the Westerns call the communist lifestyle and their own lives is that the communist lifestyle is imposed on people by force and those who try to break the rules will be imprisoned, and the Western dictating lifestyle is willingly adapted by citizens and those who break it will be left out. This film is one of the greatest films I have ever seen in my life.
An overview of Farocki’s first American exhibition, at the MoMA, and a simultaneous retrospective in New York.
