Rules of the (Narrative) Game

On the one hand there was the Sattelzeit, a progressionist view of temporal unravelling, cumulative and linear in character, where history asserted itself onto the present through a continuous shift in social, economic, and political order; the working of the historical unconscious. The individual in the present is a passive recipient of such history, with no way to act upon it, the overt consciousness of which, according to Nietzsche, threatens to rob them of their vital impulse. But there remains yet another form of historical consciousness, both modern and radical, that aims to participate in the making of history in the present, informing or enforcing political alertness that implores us to demystify historical moments, isolate them, and through montage, ascribe a dynamic association with the present, “blasting open the continuum of history” in Walter Benjamin’s terms. It is this radical stimulus to draw upon the past to make sense of the immediate, that propelled Harun Farocki and Ingemo Engström to recount journalist and revolutionary Larisa Reisner’s years in Germany in the 1920s in Erzählen (About Narration, 1975), and Yvonne Rainer to evoke Russian Anarchism of the 1870s in the context of Red Army Faction in Journeys from Berlin/1971(1980). The protagonist of Russian anarchism, Mikhail Bakunin, was only eleven when the Decembrist uprising against the Tsars took place, Russia’s first revolution, a historically important event which would occupy Larisa Reisner in 1925, a year before her death and on the centenary of the uprising. She aimed to connect “the Decembrists’ doomed heroic battle against tsarist cruelty and injustice with the revolutionary struggles of her lifetime” (p. 57) as noted by Cathy Porter in her interview, one of the texts in About Narration, the book edited by Sezgin Boynik and Tom Holert that borrows its title from the Farocki/Engström film, co-published by Rab-Rab Press and Harun Farocki Institut. 

About Narration follows hot on the heels of Rab-Rab’s publication of Reisner’s Decembrist essays in English, translated by Porter. It aligns Farocki’s interest in the political projects of the interwar years aborted by the rise of National Socialism with Rab-Rab’s publishing ambition in the sphere of radical politics encapsulating theory, philosophy, and archival material.

The book starts with an illustrated transcription of all the dialogues in the film. It provides an alternate way of engagement, mapping out the dense literary and theoretical matrix from which the filmmakers draw upon, with references to the writings of Cesare Pavese, Frank Kafka, Boris Pasternak, Sergei Tretyakov, and Alfred Sohn-Rethel among others. Near the beginning, Farocki shows Hanns Zischler a book, Steel from Luxembourg, using which he outlines the interconnectedness of Capitalist production technology and Fascism. Zischler supplicates him to tell it as a story. This section, drawn from Sohn-Rethel’s hypothesis on the economic roots of Nazism, was further developed in the form of a radio play (Das große Verbindungsrohr – The Large Connecting Pipe, Farocki, 1975) and later into a film, Zwischen Zwei Kriegen (Between Two Wars, Farocki, 1978). The discipline that advanced industries demand and repressive governments deliver or the prevailing of capitalist rationality over the individual, is as relevant today as it was in the 1970s or in Weimar Germany. It creates the “one dimensional man” as defined by Herbert Marcuse who held sway over the West Berlin Marxists and their quasi-academic reading groups among whom Farocki socialized. In this brief but significant segment in the film, we are allowed a glimpse at Farocki’s two lasting preoccupations – industry and photography. 

The analysis of the tripartite exchanges between politics, economics, and technology however is not the focal point in About Narration which instead concerns itself with explication of narrative forms, and “labour of authorship” (p. 7) as Farocki jotted down in a document titled “Film Essai ‘About Narration,’” reproduced in the book. This document is not really a film script, if anything, it’s a case in point of writing film scripts about film scripts, an axiom of Viktor Shklovsky from Bowstring: On the Dissimilarity of the Similar. In commercial cinema and television, the latter being the context of many of Farocki’s films in the 1970s, the norm was the abstraction of production-labour in favour of a polished end-product ready-made for mass consumption. Working against the grain, Farocki intended to incorporate aspects of the film’s research – its experimental form, the concatenation of ideas, their revisions and gradual development – into the film itself, a working methodology that owes its debt to German exile literature, most notably, Bertolt Brecht’s Journals, 1934 – 1955 and Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment. Then remains the question of authorship. Volker Pantenburg in the book discusses the specific Farockian use of the term where it transitions from denoting an individual to a group of people (friends, artists, a chance acquaintance, children) or even inanimate sources with whom ideas are developed while the film’s narrative becomes an articulation of such exchanges (p. 35). Before sharing authorship with Engström in About Narration, Farocki had collaborated with fellow filmmaker Hartmut Bitomsky on a number of Marxist pedagogic film-projects. Considered in the context of the debates around authorship in the 1960s sustained by Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault among others, Farocki loosens the stranglehold of the ideological author-figure on meaning.

In “Film Essay,” Farocki cites the interest of Russian Formalists in fairy tales to study narrative structure (p. 8). At various points in the film, a generic schematic of narrative illustrated in the form of a diagram is tested against a fairy tale (Cinderella), a fiction (King Kong), a historical account (of Communists defying Nazi paramilitary troops, narrated by the actor Lili Schönborn-Anspach playing a proletarian woman), and economic theory (of Capitalist production system). Sitting in front of a typewriter near the end of the film Farocki says, “When I examined the pattern of stories, I was looking for a new magic formula. But there is no magic; it is the experience of how to present something congealed into rules.” Stories don’t have formulas, but they operate dialectically. Contradictions, conflicts, resolutions, and transformations are as much concerns of literary structure as they are of politics.

But how does Larisa Reisner fit into this story of stories? If the German translations of Juri Lotman’s writings in the 1970s were key to Farocki’s interest in narratology and questioning of his own narrative habits as Holert notes in his essay “Working in / With a Distance” (p. 75); his first point of contact with Reisner’s writings is not abundantly clear. There are a few hints though. Engström’s essay titled “Double Sketch” reveals that it was Farocki who “finds” Larisa Reisner to be researched in the film (p. 25). Farocki’s interest in Reisner concurs with his broader interest in texts from the interwar years that bear testament to revolutionary possibilities, as Holert also confirms (p. 75). The Reisner thread in the film is assigned to Engström and her “labour of research” parallels that of Farocki’s on the nature of narrative, both threads retaining their respective autonomy. Film becomes a tool for carrying out cross-disciplinary research, simultaneously, authenticated in the last two shots in the film where Farocki and Engström chronicle their respective findings in separate monologues. However a more concrete connection between Farocki’s research into the production process of heavy industries and Larisa Reisner emerges from the pages of In Hindenburg’s Country written in 1925 where Reisner reports on the rise, fall, and recovery of the Krupp industry in Essen from the mid-19th century until after the treaty of Versailles, anticipating its role in Germany’s rearmament down the line once the Nazis came to power. Serving up a mix of dry observation, sardonic prose, and historical analysis, Reisner in her characteristic style commentates on the state-patronage that sustains the exploitation of the German workers in the coal mines, the engineering plants, and the power stations. A postcard that Farocki sent Engström on 1 October 1993 is reproduced in the book. It carried an image of the bridge over Landwehr Canal that featured in the film, Farocki’s accompanying text concludes with “The bridge is currently being restored. Krupp has put a second one underneath so that traffic can continue. Krupp is still present but where is Larisa Reisner?” (underline Farocki’s, p. 19). This connection, between Reisner’s reportage and research on industrial economics, is not directly addressed in the film. Instead, the film is a search for Reisner, who is portrayed in fragments through  biographical details of her life in Germany which never feature in Reisner’s own writings, novelist and poet Boris Pasternak’s remembrance of her, and an interview with politician Karl Retzlaw recounting his striking impression of Reisner when he first met her in 1920s in the company of Karl Radek.

Today, a century after Reisner, and fifty years since the making of the film, the book prompts us to revisit the circumstances where an open-ended, experimental project such as this could be realized under the auspices of German public television. Farocki was among the first batch of students at the German Film and Television academy (DFFB) in Berlin in 1966 and was later expelled for participating in the occupation of the rectorate. West Berlin in 1968 was a volatile place where film needed to find its place within the projects of political change. But soon after, those who wanted to directly participate in political action and those seeking mediation in society through film went their separate ways. Starting out as a filmmaker in such times, Farocki’s earliest films in the late 1960s courted features of performance, new wave, situationist, and direct cinema and later inhabited the Marxist pedagogic space in the early 1970s. At the time, the left-leaning West German Television (Westdeutsches Fernsehen, WDF, part of Westdeutscher Rundfunk, WDR) started showing considerable interest in programming films and invested in educational programmes around them, things that would be considered outlandish for the older public broadcasters such as ARD (Arbeitsgemeinschaft der öffentlich-rechtlichen Rundfunkanstalten der Bundesrepublik Deutschland) and ZDF (Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen). About Narration was produced by one of the divisions of WDR, curiously called Literatur und Sprache (literature and language), that backed film projects departing from the established orthodoxy of literary adaptations (staged in an illusionistic dramatic-fictional form). These essay-films reflected upon the variegated ways in which a text could manifest in a film. In formal terms such an approach opens up a set of inexhaustible possibilities like presenting the cover of the book or its pages. In About Narration, Engström holds a copy of Spartacus by Karl Retzlaw in a shot that precedes his interview, at another point in the film she is seen reading On Literature by Walter Benjamin, both images reproduced in the book, referencing auxiliary materials to the primary text such as letters, filming locations with some relation to a book’s narrative or its author’s biography, a reflection on the filmmakers relationship to the author either delivered to the camera, via voiceover, or staged as a scene, analysing the challenges of adaptation posed by a book’s text, setting up scenes from the book’s narrative but also allowing the involved actors to deliberate on the characters, incorporating dialogues and conversations with people who forge some oblique relationship to the book’s text, and in the process, facilitating a constant oscillation between elements of fiction and documentary. At the same time, Farocki wrote for the German film magazine Filmkritik, where much of this intellectual labour was carried out, “it proved to be a platform from which the past and future of work could be conceived” (Pantenburg, p.40).

About Narration film still

Granting screen space to the off-screen aspects of filmmaking is evident not only in About Narration, but also films made by those involved in the project such as Amerika vor Augen oder Kafka in 43 Min. 30 Sec.(America in Your Eyes or Kafka in 43 minutes 30 seconds, Hanns Zischler, 1978), or Ingemo Engström and Gerhard Theuring’s astounding Fluchtweg nach Marseille (Escape Route to Marseilles, 1977) that takes Anna Seghers’ Transit as its point of departure. With the influx of private players into the sphere of television broadcast and the currency of ratings gaining significance, such radical ventures would slowly dwindle in the 1980s, though not without throwing up an occasional gem such as Renate Sami’s (production manager in About Narration) and Petra Seeger’s Cesare Pavese. Turin – Santo Stefano Belbo in 1985, a film co-produced by WDR. 

In the words of Boynik, the publication of “About Narration” collects and configures materials that should enable access to the space of an intellectual, political, and filmic practice driven by a need to understand what it means to tell a story and to conceive of history as a question of narration.” (p.4). Accessing this space can also enable political work in the present, in the case of Reisner, as Porter states, we can draw strength from her writings and pushback against reactionary forces (p. 65). Past and present can still “crystallize into a constellation that is not temporally continuous but dialectical” (Engström, p. 21). Sohn-Rethel outlined the role of German heavy industries in the rise of Fascism in the 1930s. In a recent article titled “How Postwar Germany Fell in Love With Israel,” author Felix Helberg noted the deep ties between West German industrial giants and the militarization of the state of Israel since 1952.¹ Important lesson of history: it always helps to look at the receipts of profit.

Sezgin Boynik and Tom Holert, eds., About Narration (1975): Materials, Comments, Interventions (Helsinki and Berlin: Rab-Rab Press and Harun Farocki Institut, 2025).