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Transmission


Film Partner: Arsenal - Institute for Film and Video Art

TRANSMISSION by Harun Farocki studies the hand movements and gestures people make as they visit memorials, statues and monuments. For example, how visitors of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington touch the engraved letters and trace the names of those who gave their lives to war. The ways in which the incomprehensible becomes tangible.

Credits

Original Title: Übertragung
Language: English version, German version
Country of Origin: Deutschland
Year : 2007
Duration: 43 Min.
color
Director: Harun Farocki
Script: Harun Farocki
Camera: Carlos Echeverria, Harun Farocki, Ingo
Editing: Meggie Schneider
Sound: Jochen Jezussek
Production: Harun Farocki Filmproduktion, Christoph Schenker
research: Antje Ehmann, Christiane Hitzemann, Regina Krotil, Matthias Rajmann, Isabell Verret supported by: Schwyzer-Winker Stiftung, Förderagentur für Innovation KTI
Film Partner: Arsenal - Institute for Film and Video Art Since the Arsenal’s establishment in 1963 (known from that time until 2008 as Freunde der deutschen Kinemathek) films from the Forum Section of the Berlin Film Festival as well as through the Arsenal Kino’s decades of cinema exhibition have found their way into our collection... ...more


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About the Film

Conceived as a video installation for public spaces, TRANSMISSION by Berlin artist/director Harun Farocki explores memorials and stone monuments and the body vocabulary of the people as they visit them.

“... Farocki’s journey starts from the Vietnam Memorial in Washington, a wall of black granite engraved with the names of all the 58,249 Americans killed in the Vietnam War. Thousands of people visit it every day, touch the letters and trace the names of family and friends in an attempt to establish a link between their own lives and the past. Other objects of pilgrimage – including the foot of the statue of the Apostle in St Peter’s and the Bocca della Verità in Rome as well as the devil’s footprint in the Frauenkirche in Munich and the monument in the Buchenwald concentration camp – meet the same need for understanding and purification. Stone is the material in which the collective memory of a life or an event in the past is immortalized and becomes an object of worship. At the same time, the memory of thousands of visitors is preserved in the traces of wear it displays.” (Anita Beckers) Transmission

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