Harun Farocki

Harun Farocki: Forms of Intelligence offers a full and fascinating portrait of one of the most important postwar German filmmakers. Addressing the sheer diversity and quantity of Farocki's work is, frankly, an astounding feat—one that Alter, in this highly engaging volume, accomplishes with alacrity. -- Jaimey Fisher, author of German Ways of War: The Affective Geographies and Generic Transformations of German War Films
Bravo for this first approach in English to provide a combined descriptive analysis and compelling guide to Harun Farocki’s intriguing work. Alter raises questions that make it possible to explore the “interconnected constellations of ideas” that characterize Farocki’s production, yet opens paths to stimulate unique ongoing probes into his rich and resonating oeuvre. -- Renée Green, artist, filmmaker, and author of Other Planes of There: Selected Writings
Nora Alter offers a superb tribute to Harun Farocki's immense impact as a filmmaker, media theorist, and digital artist. The author, who was part of Farocki's circle in Berlin, combines a compelling intellectual biography with an incisive analysis of his multifaceted work. This book is essential reading for anyone interested in Farocki's legacy. -- Anton Kaes, author of Shell Shock Cinema: Weimar Culture and the Wounds of War
Nora M. Alter, the comprehensive and eminent chronicler of essay films, elegantly interweaves the artistic and intellectual work of Harun Farocki in an analytical portrait of the artist and his work from the early student films to the major installations and global multimedia projects of his late years. This book provides new insight into the fascinating world of Harun Farocki as image maker and theorist. -- Gertrud Koch, professor emerita of film studies, Freie Universität Berlin
Nora Alter's book is an exemplary labor of love: a thoroughly absorbing engagement with Harun Farocki's films that illuminates his legacy and allows us to better understand where his work has left us—not just as film scholars or intellectuals, but as humans and citizens, trying to find a compass amid the precarious history of the twentieth and twenty-first century. Harun Farocki: Forms of Intelligence approaches Farocki's films with the very intelligence, care, sophistication, and open-mindedness his work continues to call for and deserves. -- Lutz Koepnick, author of Resonant Matter: Sound, Art, and the Promise of Hospitality
In Harun Farocki: Forms of Intelligence, Nora Alter rises admirably to the challenges and complexities posed by the endeavors of an oppositional archivist/archaeologist, an unrelenting deconstructor/reconstructor, and an inimitable contrarian. Drawing on the artist's elaborate personal archives and benefitting from decades of interactions with Farocki and his closest collaborators, Alter offers original perspectives on a rich legacy dedicated to the vast meaning potentials of images within late-modern technocratic culture. -- Eric Rentschler, Arthur Kingsley Porter Professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures, Harvard University