Harun Farocki

Proposing an alternative history of the optical image, Picture Industry explores the materiality of images and the technologies that govern their reception.Spanning from the late 19th century to the present with images produced for scientific and artistic contexts, Picture Industry includes the work of more than 70 artists and practitioners. But this is not a typical exhibition catalog; it goes beyond the exhibition, presenting an anthology of texts that reveal the range of methodological approaches to the world of images. Picture Industry brings together essays by, among others, Giorgio Agamben, Cory Arcangel, Ariella Azoulay, Roland Barthes, Georges Bataille, Jean Baudrillard, Ericka Beckman, Walter Benjamin, Georges Didi-Huberman, Thomas A. Edison, Harun Farocki, Morgan Fisher, Vilem Flusser, Coco Fusco, Tristan Garcia, Octavio Getino and Fernando Solanas, Sigfried Giedion, Mark Godfrey, Kenneth Goldsmith, Dan Graham, Friedrich A. Kittler, Boris Mikhailov, Craig Owens, Erwin Panofsky, Seth Price, Siegfried Kracauer, Rosalind Krauss, Bruno Latour, Etienne-Jules Marey, Martha Rosler, Allan Sekula, Hito Steyerl, William Henry Fox Talbot, Gilles de la Tourette and Alan Turing.

A leading film theorist and a filmmaker discuss the lasting contributions of the most prominent living filmmaker, Jean Luc-Godard Probably the most prominent living filmmaker, and one of the foremost directors of the postwar era, Jean Luc-Godard has received astonishingly little critical attention in the United States. With Speaking about Godard, leading film theorist Kaja Silverman and filmmaker Harun Farocki have made one of the most significant contributions to film studies in recent memory: a lively set of conversations about Godard and his major films, from Contempt to Passion. Combining the insights of a feminist film theorist with those of an avant-garde filmmaker, these eight dialogues–each representing a different period of Godard's film production, and together spanning his entire career–get at the very heart of his formal and theoretical innovations, teasing out, with probity and grace, the ways in which image and text inform one another throughout Godard's oeuvre. Indeed, the dialogic format here serves as the perfect means of capturing the rhythm of Godard's ongoing conversation with his own medium, in addition to shedding light on how a critic and a director of films respectively interpret his work. As it takes us through Godard's films in real time, Speaking about Godard conveys the sense that we are at the movies with Silverman and Farocki, and that we, as both student and participant, are the ultimate beneficiaries of the performance of this critique. Accessible, informative, witty, and, most of all, entertaining, the conversations assembled here form a testament to the continuing power of Godard's work to spark intense debate, and reinvigorate the study of one of the great artists of our time.