Animism

Marcel Broodthaers (1924–76) was a Belgian poet, filmmaker, and visual artist.

Harun Farocki (1944–2014) was born in German-annexed Czechoslovakia. From 1966 to 1968, he attended the Deutsche Film-und Fernsehakademie Berlin (DFFB). In addition to teaching posts in Berlin, Düsseldorf, Hamburg, Manila, Munich, and Stuttgart, he was a visiting professor at the University of California, Berkeley. Farocki made close to 120 short and feature-length films for television and cinema, mostly documentaries and essay films that analyzed social realities, with a precise use of moving images and focus on the political and sociological context involved in the creation of imagery. He also worked in collaboration with other filmmakers as a scriptwriter, actor, and producer. In 1976, he staged Heiner Müller’s plays The Battle and Tractor together with Hanns Zischler in Basel, Switzerland. Between 1974 to 1984, he was editor and contributing author of the magazine Filmkritik (München). His work has been shown in many exhibitions in galleries and museums worldwide. From 2000 to 2004 Farocki taught in Berlin at his former school DFFB and at the University of the Arts. In 2004 Farocki first became a visiting professor and then in 2006 a full professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. As a teacher Harun Farocki had a significant cinematic and intellectual influence on the development of the acclaimed Berlin School film movement.

Tom Holert is a researcher, writer, and curator. He is the co-founder of the Harun Farocki Institut in Berlin. He’s currently organising the research and exhibition project Education Shock. Learning, Politics, and Architecture in the 1960s and 1970s, at Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin (forthcoming September 2020).

Tom Holert is an art historian, curator, and cultural critic based in Berlin who works on learning curves and knowledge vessels at the crossroads of politics, economy, contemporary art, design, and architecture. He is also a cofounder of the Harun Farocki Institut, Berlin.

Ken Jacobs is a key figure in the history of American avant-garde cinema. In the mid-1950s, Jacobs studied painting under Hans Hofmann, one of the founders of Abstract Expressionism, and, at the same time, he began making films, eventually becoming a major voice of American Underground Film and a member of the New American Cinema. Jacobs’ films explore the mechanics of the moving image and the act of viewing itself. He investigates the cinematic experience in its entirety, from production to projection. Whether undertaking archaeological journeys to the dawn of cinema, scrutinizing the interstices of new digital technologies, or exploring new opportunities for film performance with his Nervous Magic Lantern, Jacobs’ work continues drawing power from the mysteries of human vision to reveal the mechanics of illusion of screen images and their spectral implications and socio-political connotations. Along with over fifty film and video works, he has created an array of shadow plays, three-dimensional films, installations, and magic lantern and film performances that have transformed how we look at and think about moving-image art. The Museum of The Moving Image hosted a full retrospective of Jacobs’ work in 1989, The New York Museum Of Modern Art held a partial retrospective in 1996, as did The American House in Paris in 1994 and the Arsenal Theater in Berlin in 1986. He has also performed in Japan, at the Louvre in Paris, the Getty Center in Los Angeles, among many other institutions. Jacobs’ honors include the Maya Deren Award of The American Film Institute, the Guggenheim Award, and a special Rockefeller Foundation grant. His works are part of the permanent collections at MoMA and the Whitney, and have been celebrated in Europe and the US.

Chris Marker (1921-2012) was a cinematic essayist and audio-visual poet. After World War II, he worked as a writer, publishing his first book, Le coeur net, in 1949. In the 1950s, he turned to documentary filmmaking; among his many significant works from this period are Letter from Siberia, Cuba Si!, La Jetée, and Le Joli Mai. In the 1960s and 1970s, Marker was involved with SLON, a filmmaking collective dedicated to activist productions. He began making films under his own name again in 1977 with A Grin Without A Cat. During the ’80s and ’90s, Marker’s work included several films about fellow filmmakers, including One Day in the Life of Andrei Arsenevich (1999), an homage to his friend Andrei Tarkovsky. He also explored video and computer-generated imagery with a continued emphasis on the intersection between personal and political themes in films such as The Case of the Grinning Cat. An original voice in world cinema for over fifty years, Marker passed away on his 91st birthday, on July 29, 2012.

Spyros Papapetros is Associate Professor of History and Theory in the School of Architecture and the Program in Media and Modernity at Princeton University.

Spyros Papapetros is Associate Professor of History and Theory in the School of Architecture and the Program in Media and Modernity at Princeton University. He is author of On the Animation of the Inorganic: Art, Architecture, and the Extension of Life (Chicago University Press, 2012).