A transcript of a lecture by Harun Farocki exploring the relationship between architecture and cinema.
This publication focuses on a lecture given by Harun Farocki in March 1994 at the "Cine City: Film and Perceptions of Urban Space, 1895–1995" conference at the Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities in Los Angeles. Here, Farocki wove an associative web of thoughts on the relationship between film, architecture, material worlds, political economy, dwelling, sexuality, space, and time. Although an interest in buildings, spatial relationships, and power relations, as well as the interpenetration of technical media and urban space, was central to Farocki's practice, this is one of the few explicit explorations of the relationship between architecture and cinema.
The (German and English) manuscripts of Farocki's lecture are supplemented by press material from the Getty Center's extensive film and lecture series. In their postface, the editors provide elements of interpretation and contextualization with regard to Farocki's previous and subsequent projects on spatiality and architecture.
Harun Farocki (1944-2014) was born in Neutitschein, in German-annexed Czechoslovakia. Since graduating from Berlin's Deutsche Film-und Fernsehakademie in 1966, he has directed more that 90 films that include feature films, documentaries and television programs. He has also collaborated with numerous filmmakers as scriptwriter, actor and producer. His films have been the subject of retrospectives at the Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona in 2004, and the Vienna Filmmuseum in 2006. He has participated in important international events such as the 2005 Carnegie International and Documenta XII (2007). He has held many teaching posts and between 1993 and 1999 taught at the University of California Berkeley. Since 2004 he has been Visiting professor at Vienna's Akademie für Bildende Künste. Harun Farocki was a media theorist and writer and was the editor of the influential German film journal Filmkritik from 1974 to 1984.
