The Editing Room

Jean-Luc Godard i editeringsrummet

In Scénario du Film Passion, Godard constructs a lyrical study of the cinematic and creative process by deconstructing the story of his 1982 film Passion. "I didn't want to write the script," he states, "I wanted to see it." Positioning himself in a video editing suite in front of a white film screen that evokes for him the "famous blank page of Mallarmé," Godard uses video as a sketchbook with which to reconceive the film. The result is a philosophical, often humorous rumination on the desire and labor that inform the conceptual and image making process of the cinema. Standing before the screen or directly addressing the camera, exploiting the immediacy of video to fluidly recompose and orchestrate images from the film, Godard constructs a potent social analysis that examines art and history, money and sex, romance and work and ultimately becomes a love letter to the cinema.

Harun Farocki: Interface (Schnittstelle) (1995)

This video was derived from an installation Farocki made for the Lille Museum of Modern Art, about his own work and working methods. Farocki sits behind his editing stations and describes and illustrates his ways of working, the difference between film and video, working with found footage vs. filming new material.

Farocki’s instrument is no longer the camera but the editing room. In one of his ironic insights he apostrophised himself as a “(sales) representative” for what has been pre-filmed. In his double-image video installation, Schnittstelle, he ends up representing himself. The idea of a double projection is not new (many artists and avant-garde filmmakers have been employing it for ages), you have to wonder why Farocki didn’t do something of the sort earlier. For he always wanted to commentate on the use of images by using images. And although yet again he makes an image of himself and his own workplace, this time too he keeps a distance from his object: himself. Yes, he shows how he becomes his own encyclopaedist and analyst. But it is not an honest attempt, at most a winking, roguish intermezzo. Farocki is by no means what Schnittstelle might suggest, an oddball fiddling alone in his studio, remote from the real world. If not earlier, the end credits with the crew involved in the production highlights this collaboration. The impression is that someone here is chatting a bit about his work – in actuality he is trying to coach us again in how to see. Reading between the lines, however, Farocki here articulates his failure. His biggest problem is that writing has reached its historical endpoint.