Harun Farocki

Harun Farocki (9 January 1944 – 30 July 2014) was a German filmmaker, author, and lecturer in film.

Farocki was born as Harun El Usman Faroqhi in Neutitschein, which is now Nový Jičín in the Czech Republic. His father, Abdul Qudus Faroqui, had immigrated to Germany from India in the 1920s. His German mother had been evacuated from Berlin due to the Allied bombing of Germany. He simplified the spelling of his surname as a young man.[2] After World War II Farocki grew up in India and Indonesia before the family resettled in Hamburg in 1958.

Farocki, who was deeply influenced by Bertolt Brecht and Jean-Luc Godard, studied at the German Film and Television Academy Berlin (dffb) from 1966 to 1968. He began making films – from the very beginning, they were non-narrative essays on the politics of imagery – in the mid-1960s. From 1974 to 1984, when its publication ceased, he edited the magazine Filmkritik.

From 1993 to 1999, Farocki taught at the University of California, Berkeley. He later was a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. He died unexpectedly on 30 July 2014, aged 70.

He made over 90 films, the vast majority of them short experimental documentaries. Farocki's work was included in the 2004–05 Carnegie International at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. A first major UK retrospective of his films was held at Tate Modern in 2009. The 2011 exhibition "Harun Farocki: Images of War (at a Distance)" at the Museum of Modern Art was the first comprehensive solo exhibition of Farocki's work in a U.S. museum.

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