Tribute: Harun Farocki

Leben - BRD

How to Live in the FRG
Harun Farocki
BRD 1990
83 min
V'14

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. LEBEN – BRD 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. (...) 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. (D. Leder)

Credits
  • Harun Farocki
  • Ingo Kratisch
  • Klaus Klingler
  • Rosa Mercedes
  • Irina Hoppe
  • Gerhard Jensen-Nelson
Harun Farocki Filmproduktion
Harun Farocki Filmproduktion
Stiftung Deutsche Kinemathek
16 mm
col
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