VW (VeneKlasen/Werner) continues its series of films of Harun Farocki tomorrow evening with Workers Leaving the Factory and An Image. On Wednesday evening Farocki's Images of the World and the Inscription of War will be screened. Program notes are below and further information can be found at vwberlin.com.

All screenings begin at 18.30. Films are presented in English or with English subtitles. To continue receiving announcements for VW Cinema please sign up at vwberlin.com.

TUESDAY 5 April
Workers Leaving the Factory (1995), video, 36 minutes
The first-ever commercial film, Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory (1895), is Farocki's point of departure for this fascinating exploration into the medium of cinematography itself. Farocki analyses the cinematic motif of the factory gates through film history with an incredible array of documentary and surveillance footage and scenes from fictional films.

An Image (1983), video, 25 minutes
"Four days spent in a studio working on a centerfold photo for Playboy magazine provided the subject matter for my film. The magazine itself deals with culture, cars, a certain lifestyle. Maybe all those trappings are only there to cover up the naked woman. Maybe it's like with a paper doll. The naked woman in the middle is a sun around which a system revolves: of culture, of business, of living! (It's impossible to either look or film into the sun.) One can well imagine that the people creating such a picture, the gravity of which is supposed to hold all that, perform their task with as much care, seriousness, and responsibility as if they were splitting uranium. An Image is part of a series I've been working on since 1979. The television station that commissioned it assumes in these cases that I'm making a film that is critical of its subject matter, and the owner or manager of the thing that's being filmed assumes that my film is an advertisement for them. I try to do neither. Nor do I want to do something in between, but beyond both." -Harun Farocki, Zelluloid, no. 27, Fall 1988

WEDNESDAY 6 April
Images of the World and the Inscription of War (1988), 16mm, 75 minutes
Notes on aerial photographs of the IG Farben industrial plant, taken by the Americans in WWII and examined four decades later, reveal what the Allies didn't want to see: the proximity of an industrial bombing target to the concentration camp at Auschwitz. This forms the central motif of Farocki's film which also explores cosmetic beautification, the history of metal pressing and the use of photography in mechanical drawing, positing that photographic accuracy must not be confused with objective reality. Considered by many to be Farocki's magnum opus.

For more details about the series please visit vwberlin.com.