HARUN FAROCKI DIED IN BERLIN in July 2014 at the height of an unmatched career in political filmmaking. The oeuvre of this graduate of the Deutsche Film und Fernsehakademie (German Film and Television Academy Berlin; dffb) is characterized by a technique of repurposing moving-image archives in a critical documentary mode crafted to reveal the hidden processes of preparation, acculturation, and training that pervasively constitute the present-day West and render its citizens unwittingly yet habitually complicit. In this chapter I focus on Farocki's works that piece together found footage drawn from such diverse sources as classic Hollywood feature film, prison CCTV tapes, and the film archives of workplaces and militaries. Farocki and his research teams aimed, in the use of this extremely disparate archive, to recuperate evidence of a set of invisible but powerful techniques–techniques of training, preparation, and surveillance–that have combined to produce the paradoxical age of high-security, matched only by high-instability, in which many of us currently participate. As the following pages show, it is precisely by focusing in on such techniques, plotting out in montage and narrative their reliance on structures of rehearsal and repetition, that Farocki could reveal their latent instabilities, those failed performances and system errors that in his critical-archival works are revealed as errors in the archive of a contemporary capitalism that can otherwise seem impenetrable to resistance.

The archival footage that Farocki and his teams repurposed to make these critical documentaries is accompanied in certain of his works by a voiceover, in which Farocki himself or actors read aloud a text written to inform viewers of the hidden histories of the workplaces and leisure environments in which they participate, with more or less awareness of their complicity in them. Yet many more of his works represent narrationless, though far from unstructured, moving-image montages. I suggest here that the narrative decisions behind these two modes of essay-film are shaped on the one hand by Farocki's active engagement with critical cultural theories, including the Marxist performance techniques developed by Bertolt Brecht from the late 1920s to the early 1950s, as well as the cultural analyses of Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, and Walter Benjamin, and the critical and psychoanalytic terminologies common to the discipline of Film Studies itself, as in the book of conversations that Farocki published with Kaja Silverman, Speaking about Godard.