The topics Flusser explores and the way he talks about images brings to mind Harun Farocki. Based on your interest here and also in people like Baurdrillard and Virilio I really think you'd like Farocki's films, or what you can access of them. One of the great modern film essayists whose work usually concerns technology and the use of technical images, as well as documentation of the lesser seen sides of industrial production, advertising, corporate culture and labor processes.
He's made a ton but the art film industrial complex makes them very inaccessible. Luckily some of his most important ones are watchable. He even made a short one in '85 with Flusser, asking him to comment on the contents of the front page of a German newspaper, but of course its nowhere to be found online:
https://mubi.com/en/us/films/catch-phrases-catch-images-a-conversation-with-vilem-flusser
The one I remember torrenting at some point and really enjoying is called
War at a Distance and has to do with the way the images we saw of the Gulf War and the weapons used for the first time were merged in one device (the "camera bomb"). He has other films meant for galleries that deal with this and similar themes ("the connection between production and destruction") more succinctly (such as
A Way and the earlier full-length
Images of the World below) but from what I remember that one was great, a long overview synthesizing these ideas and more watchable. Fuck Video Data Bank and all these galleries hoarding his stuff. They are criminals. I will find it somehow and upload it somewhere.
Here are the ones most readily available:
A Way (2005) (13min)
Gotta turn on CC for this one
Prison Images (2000) (60min)
Images from the films of Robert Bresson and Jean Genet as well as documentaries of the Nazi period exist in dialogue with discarded surveillance recordings from maximum-security prisons in the United States. (IMDB)
A film composed of images from prisons. Quotes from fiction films and documentaries as well as footage from surveillance cameras. A look at the new control technologies, at personal identification devices, electronic ankle bracelets, electronic tracking devices. The cinema has always been attracted to prisons. Today's prisons are full of video surveillance cameras. These images are unedited and monotonous; as neither time nor space is compressed, they are particularly well-suited to conveying the state of inactivity into which prisoners are placed as a punitive measure. The surveillance cameras show the norm and reckon with deviations from it. Clips from films by Genet and Bresson. Here the prison appears as a site of sexual infraction, a site where human beings must create themselves as people and as a workers. In Un Chant d'amour by Jean Genet, the guard looks in on inmates in their cells and sees them masturbating. The inmates are aware that they are being watched and thus become performers in a peep show. The protagonist in Bresson's Un Condamné à mort s'est échappé turns the objects of imprisonment into the tools of his escape. These topoi appear in many prison films. In newer prisons, in contrast, contemporary video surveillance technology aims at demystification. (Harun Farocki)
Images of the World and the Inscription of War (1988) (73min)
"Explores the processes of visual perception and how they affect our understanding of history and society. In a work reminiscent of the writings of Paul Virilio and Michel Foucault, it examines a range of phenomena including aerial reconnaissance photos of the Auschwitz concentration camp."
The vanishing point of is the conceptual image of the 'blind spot' of the evaluators of aerial footage of the IG Farben industrial plant taken by the Americans in 1944. Commentaries and notes on the photographs show that it was only decades later that the CIA noticed what the Allies hadn't wanted to see: that the Auschwitz concentration camp is depicted next to the industrial bombing target. (At one point during this later investigation, the image of an experimental wave pool – already visible at the beginning of the film – flashes across the screen, recognizably referring to the biding of the gaze: for one's gaze and thoughts are not free when machines, in league with science and the military, dictate what is to be investigated.
Farocki thereby puts his finger on the essence of media violence, a "terrorist aesthetic" (Paul Virilio) of optic stimulation, which today appears on control panels as well as on television, with its admitted goal of making the observer into either an accomplice or a potential victim, as in times of war.
(Christa Blümlinger)
A New Product (2012) (36min)
"Scenes from meetings within a company which advises corporations how to design their offices -- and the work done there. The film shows that words are not just tools, they have become an object of speculation." -- Harun Farocki
And a couple excerpts from ones I wish I could see all of...
A Day in the Life of a Consumer (44min) (1993) [excerpt]
Harun Farocki plunders 40 years of advertising films, which he orchestrates to constitute an ironic 24 hours in the life of typical consumers. Mixing different colours, periods, various "ideologies of well being" to hold up a mirror up to our times, values, worries, hopes.
This collage of "beautiful images", gleeful and chaotic, deconstructs not only the domestic reference points which punctuate our daily life, but also gives full rein to an off-beat humour in the tradition of Brechtian distanciation.
(Andrei Ujica)
Ok this one deserves its own post really, a bit from his
Creators of Shopping Worlds (2001) (72min). Absolutely fucking hilarious clip, I may have posted it before? German guy trying to sell the boss of a mall on a truly ludicrous design scheme
The designing of shopping malls is overseen by an army of planners, managers and scientists: there are consultants, re-launch analysts, a central association, mall magazines. 6000 guests and laboratories attended an annual convention in Las Vegas at which questions were investigated as where the gaze of a customer falls and how a "spontaneous" purchase can be induced.
Farocki shows how mall producers look at malls when they want to find out, for example, how passers-by move, where they stop and where they reach for an article. He adds these images to the everyday ones – and gives them a magical charge.
(Antje Ehmann)
