Nora Alter: Building a Film Brick by Brick — Harun Farocki's Montage

Abstract

In this presentation, Nora Alter will trace the late filmmaker/artist Harun Farocki's use of different types of montage in his media practice. From his single-channel films to his television broadcasts and later installation work, Farocki, as an editor, focused on the construction of audiovisual works out of images, sounds, and texts. Influenced by the theories of Dziga Vertov, Artavazd Peleshyan, and Jean-Luc Godard, Farocki developed his own method of montage — one based on intervals, repetitions, and juxtapositions. Farocki collected image sequences in a media archive that he used as building blocks for his film practice.  

Biography

Nora M. Alter is a scholar of comparative film and media arts. She has published numerous essays on cultural and visual studies, contemporary art, and sound studies. She is the author of Vietnam Protest Theatre: The Television War on Stage (1996), Sound Matters (2004), Chris Marker (2006), and The Essay Film After Fact and Fiction (2018). She has a forthcoming monograph in Harun Farocki. She is a former recipient of the DAAD Prize for Distinguished Scholarship in German and European Studies and has been awarded year-long research fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Howard Foundation, and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. In 2019, she received an Art Writers Grant from the Andy Warhol Foundation, and in 2021 she was the Daimler Fellow in Residence at the American Academy in Berlin.