“HARUN FAROCKI: FORMS OF INTELLIGENCE BETWEEN TEXT AND IMAGE”

Harun Farocki is best known in contemporary art, film, and media studies as a celebrated international artist. His wide-ranging oeuvre spans from 1960s agit-prop cinema to 1970s and ’80s West German television to media installations created from the mid-1990s to 2014. Less well known, however, is that Farocki was a critic before he became a filmmaker. In this talk, Nora Alter took a close look at Farocki’s early writings and places them alongside his moving-image work to show how the two are interrelated and how they function as a diptychs prefiguring his multi-channel installations.

The American Academy in Berlin, March 25, 2021 | Lecture

“FELLOW SPOTLIGHT: NORA M. ALTER”

When Harun Farocki died, in 2014, he was one of Germany’s most celebrated contemporary artists. In her Academy project, “Harun Farocki: Forms of Intelligence” (forthcoming with Illinois UP), Alter explores the transformations of Farocki’s artistic practice against the backdrop of the ever-changing mediascape of the late twentieth century.

The American Academy in Berlin, Spring 2021 | Interview

“NORA M. ALTER AND HITO STEYERL IN CONVERSATION”

Hito Steyerl and Nora M. Alter discuss the social ramifications of political ideology, social unrest, uncertainty, and technological advance through Hito’s video works. Hito Steyerl’s 2020 film SocialSim draws upon infection and riot control visual simulations. Together with videos Strike, Dancing Mania, and Rebellion, Hito and Nora probe the stakes of language slippage and social bias in digitized AI language resources, digital currencies in global circulation, carbon footprints, platform capitalism, and affective soundscapes.

Whitney Museum of American Art, May 25, 2021 | Event

“AFTER NORA M. ALTER (GHOSTS)”

Language hovers over the image like a disembodied phantom.

Theodore A. Harris, 2020 | Artwork

“ON NOTGELD: TOWARD A THEORY OF EMERGENCY CURRENCY”

In Fragments of a Crisis Julian Irlinger investigates the relationship between aesthetics and ideology through artistic work in the Weimar Republic. His source material is emergency money (notgeld), which was issued during inflation (1918-1923) in parallel with the official currency. The graphics on the bills were designed by artists who are largely ignored in the history of art. With scanned excerpts of notgeld, Julian Irlinger develops a method of pointing that emphasises the dialectic of images. Notgeld becomes a form of artistic work which addresses the crisis it has produced and tries to approach a political subconscious. The theoretical text about emergency money by Nora M. Alter is part of the work.

For the German, click here.

Fragments of Crisis, Spector Books, 2019 | Feature Essay

“INDEPENDENT STUDY PROGRAM 50TH ANNIVERSARY SYMPOSIUM; (RE)CONSTRUCTING HISTORIES”

For this symposium that celebrates the 50th anniversary of The Independent Study Program, Nora Alter discusses film and capital.

Whitney Museum of American Art, October 19, 2018 | Lecture

“TABLE RONDE : PÉDAGOGIES FAROCKIENNES”

La table ronde s’intéresse aux figures de jeux et de reprises dans l’œuvre de Farocki et réunit Nora Alter (enseignante-chercheure, spécialiste du film d’essai, en particulier de Chris Marker et Harun Farocki, Temple University à Philadelphie), Constanze Ruhm (artiste et commissaire d’expositions, ancienne collègue de Farocki à l’Académie des Beaux-Arts de Vienne) et Dork Zabunyan. 
En partenariat avec le projet « Politiques de la distraction » du Labex Arts H2H et l’Université Paris 8. Christa Blümlinger modère la discussion.

Centre Pompidou, December 9, 2017 | Round Table Panel

“THESE HAUNTING STRAINS | CES ACCORDS LANCINANTS”

Just a few heart-breaking notes are enough to combine two films about two major tragedies of the 20th Century into a single cry of protest.

Il suffit de quelques notes déchirantes pour unir en une seule protestation deux films sur deux tragédies majeures du XXe siècle.

Histoires Courtes par Jean-François Dans & Anne Papillault, 2017 | Film

“WAVES OF MIGRATION: THE RECENT WORK OF JOHN AKOMFRAH”

In [John] Akomfrah’s new productions, the ocean functions as a reservoir of memory, a place where stories of the past, present, and future are suspended and preserved.

Artforum International, February 2016 | Feature essay

“BERTOLT BRECHT, SERGEI EISENSTEIN, LENI RIEFENSTAHL”

In 1931, three remarkable films were in production: Sergei Eisenstein’s ¡Que viva Mexico! (1932), Bertolt Brecht’s and Slatan Dudow’s Kuhle Wampe, oder Wem gehört die Welt? (Kuhle Wampe, or Who Owns the World?, 1932), and Leni Riefenstahl’s Das blaue Licht (The Blue Light, 1932). Although their subject matter, formal methods of presentation, and ideological motivations were radically different, all three films were produced as alternatives and, certainly in the case of Eisenstein and Brecht, as directly oppositional to the newly dominant style of American Hollywood cinema.

The Cambridge History of Modernism, Cambridge UP, January 2016 | Essay

“TWO OR THREE THINGS I KNOW ABOUT HARUN FAROCKI”

I last saw my friend Harun Farocki a few days before the opening of his exhibition at the Hamburger Bahnhof in late January 2014. Astonishingly, this was his first major one-person show in Berlin, a city that he called home and that had shaped his intellectual and artistic sensibility for over half a century…As Berlin changed over the years, so, too, did Farocki and his filmmaking practice.

October 151, March 2015 | Article

“LANDSCAPES OF ICE, WIND, AND SNOW: ALEXANDER KLUGE’S AESTHETIC OF COLDNESS”

In this  article co-written by Nora Alter, Lutz Koepnick, and Richard Langston, the authors examine Kluge’s recent work on the theme of natural coldness to argue that his media-specific techniques in these works evince an aesthetic intent on honing the human capacity for feeling unaffected by barbarism.

Grey Room, Fall 2013 | Article

“IN A FAR-OFF COUNTRY: CHRIS MARKER (1921–2012)”

… as [Chris] Marker became more involved with filmmaking, the quantity of his writing decreased; he traded his pen for a camera and began to produce cinematic essays.

Artforum International, January 2013 | Feature Essay

“COMPOSING IN FRAGMENTS: MUSIC IN THE ESSAY FILMS OF RESNAIS AND GODARD”

My aim is not to argue against the seminal role that either linguistic texts or the study of visual compositions play in the understanding of the audio-visual essay; rather I want to explore other ways of thinking non-fiction cinema. For it seems to me that the attentiveness to the textual or pictorial components of audio-visual work all too often comes at the expense of examining systems of representation and signification that are not based on purely linguistic or visual constructions.

SubStance, 2012 | Article

“ACOUSTIC SHAPINGS: SOUND, FILM AND SCULPTURE”

By solely focusing on the visual component of a film, the medium had been wronged. Nora Alter analyses artist films in order to reveal how music and sound play a crucial role in the interpretation and understanding of films, especially those involving sculpture.

Kunstlicht, 2012 | Article

“SCREENING OUT SOUND: ARNHEIM AND CINEMA’S SILENCE”

Media theorist Rudolf Arnheim is perhaps best known for Film als Kunst (Film as Art), his pioneering text first published in Germany in 1932… In contrast to the works of critics such as Siegfried Kracauer or Walter Benjamin, who approached their discussion of the new mass medium from a sociological and/or historical point of view, Arnheim’s essay was anchored in an aesthetic formalism.

Reconsidering Rudolph Arnheim, ed. Scott Higgins, Routledge 2011 | Book Chapter

“STAGING THE POLITICAL: REPETITION, DIFFERENCE AND DANIEL BUREN’S CABANES ECLATÉES”

In this co-authored essay by Nora Alter and Alex Alberro, they explore how, for Daniel Buren, writing constitutes more than a mere explanation of his work a posteriori, which would minimize the interplay between the two coexisting forms—the literary and the visual.

Grey Room, July 2010 | Article

“OTTINGER’S BENJAMIN: COUNTDOWN’S ALTERNATIVE TAKE ON REUNIFICATION”

One barely perceptible element that I would like to make more visible is Ottinger’s elaborate way of both explicitly and implicitly referring to Walter Benjamin’s essays on Berlin and Germany in Countdown, turning them into an audiovisual text. I want to underscore the significance of Benjamin’s writings as subtext and intertextual dialogue for transforming Countdown from passive “documentary” into the latter’s more volatile etymological root: docere, to warn of impending disaster.

The Germanic Review, March 2010 | Article

“TRANSLATING THE ESSAY INTO FILM AND INSTALLATION”

Is it possible to translate the philosophical essay into a two- and later three-dimensional audio- visual form known as the ‘essay film’ ?

Journal of Visual Culture, April 2007 | Article

“MOURNING, SOUND AND VISION: JEAN-LUC GODARD’S JLG/JLG”

But my aim in singling out this part of the film is not to insist on its symptomatic layering. Instead I want to emphasize first the salience in both the audial and visual tracks of a pervasive funereal quality; second, the indexicality of a path that leads elsewhere and a sound that comes from somewhere else; and third, the manner in which this sequence epitomizes the overall project of JLG/JLG. I will not try to gloss these matters here; instead, I will move directly to the context of the film, and more specifically, its particular relationship to Godard's overall body of work.

Camera Obscura, Winter 2001 | Article

“MARCEL OPHÜLS’ ‘NOVEMBER DAYS’: GERMAN REUNIFICATION AS ‘MUSICAL COMEDY’”

Appropriately neither mass-mediaphobic nor mediaphilic, Ophüls took the somewhat unusual track…of selecting as his medium an essay film he himself has dubbed musical comedy.

Film Quarterly, Winter 1998 | Article