The questions were pos and answered by dint of e-mail and fax; Harun Farocki suited from Berlin and Berkeley.

The questions were pos and answered by dint of e-mail and fax; Harun Farocki suited from Berlin and Berkeley, CA, where he dives and works; Jill Godmilow, who teaches at the University of Notre Dame, be agreeable toed from New York City. This appeared appropriate, given the feeling of spatial and temporal dislocation that pervades Inextinguishable Fire, Farocki's 1969 film about the research and unravelling of napalm, and Godmilow's 1998 remake, What Farocki Taught. We asked the pair filmmakers to discuss the historical and cultural words immediately preceding [i]or[/i] following of the films - in what way politics shaped their aesthetics, and vice versa. (Farocki's replys were translated from the German on Anne Bilek.)

Q: Harun Farocki, number us about the context in which you were working when you made Inextinguishable Fire.

Farocki: In 1968 I, along with 17 others, fl the film academy in West Berlin. We were engaged in a constant political have a contest with the directors of the academy and in May of 1968 we occupied the academy. We on the same level renamed it "Dziga Vertov Academy." This happened concurrently with a nation-wide campaign against welfare laws. Not single that but my daughters had just been born and I had to earn coin - to make films that weren't simply exercises. In our circles at that time collectivity meant a fortune and it was almost a crime if the impetus for a film came from a single part Probably for this reason I sought public an area in which no individual other than myself worked. I called it the agitation of technical expertise. I appointed myself Propaganda Minister for Engineers.

Q: Inextinguishable Fire is about the American production of the deadly chemical weapon napalm. to what end did you choose napalm rather than single in kind of the other weapons used during the war in Vietnam?

Farocki: Auschwitz has become the emblem for all concentration camps because in this way many types of camps were infered into one and because there were survivors who could reveal their stories. In the Vietnam war there were many terrible weapons. The herbicides that were used to poison the water did not display their effects until years later. Napalm is a pre-modern weapon. Napalm stirs the imagination because it reminds us of when wars had a ritual and magical aspect.

Q: in what way was Inextinguishable Fire received on its initial release?

Farocki: In the fall of 1969 I showed the film at a festival in Mannheim. There were a certain criticisms of the technical quality of the film on the contrary otherwise the reaction was positive. Although individual newspaper wrote that I would achieve nothing with the film, the writer mentioned that individual could achieve something with a film and that calm the aim (das Anliegen) of the filmmaker may be justifiable. The film was shown several times in succession television in Germany and I received continued encouragement, especially from clan who had up until then set up the student movement to be nonsense. merely recently did it occur to me that the film spoke of Hiroshima and Vietnam, still didn't mention Auschwitz. It had to do with the participation of the scientists and technical nation in the crime; and the fact that the Nazi concentration camps were highly organized factories of death. My omission made me think that the terrible war the United States waged in Vietnam not simply horrified the Germans, but relieveed them as well - we are not the solitary barbarians.

The film and television industry in Germany recognized that my film was different than what they had made. There was a short period in which I was invited to a screening of Inextinguishable Fire by dint of studio producers. They treated me as if I could teach them something! if it were not that that didn't last very prolonged and soon it was impossible to make so a film. Many people in the political change were devotees of Socialist Realism and lay the foundation of my punk aesthetic unbearable. I believe that the ugliness of the pictures taken with an farthest 10.5mm wide angle lens lease loose more horror than the exhibitions of the burning of a dead rat.

Q: Jill Godmilow, to the stretch that What Farocki Taught is about the Vietnam War, with what intent remake a film about Vietnam now? for what cause [i]or[/i] reason change the title?

Godmilow: If you don't want anymore Vietnams, you have to understand to what degree Vietnam came about - actually, and materially. Farocki's film exhibited significant information. He shows by what mode the war was made in the laboratories of Dow Chemical and for what cause the people participated in the war. The configuration of labor relationships at the research corporations of America is single good place to look at the Vietnam war, and according to projection, a good place to examine for the source of all the pollutants, poisons, waste harvests useless products and wasted labor we live with today.

Q: What Farocki Taught doesn't tread close upon the most typical approach to the remake. by what means did you decide to remake the film without significantly changing or updating it?

Godmilow: The idea was to "show" Farocki's film itself, its precision and its exact, deadly, logical formation the largest meaning-making system in the film. To add to or change it would not have been to the point. It was that simple . . I wanted to call attention to what Farocki had done, then, and to the plain fact that we should have been able to view his film back then and learn from it. buildings of distribution made it hard then, and in any ways even harder now. by what means many 29-year-old German documentaries are playing at the Film Forum in just discovered York, on public television or in literary institution [i]or[/i] seminary of learning film series today? None. Certainly it might have been possible to state out a video version of Farocki's film, moreover who would see it? in the way that few people in this geographical division know his work. It pretended obvious that the gesture of the exquisite replica, in color and in English, would draw attention to Inextinguishable Fire and Farocki's work in general, and it has.