During the summer of 1983, a small crew and a model spend four days in a studio in Munich to create the cover photograph for Playboy Magazine. In this investigative documentary, Harun Farocki follows the production process, revealing how each crew member, prop and backdrop plays a part in the making of the commercial fantasy ultimately sold to consumers. Rather than focusing on the naked woman at the centre of the scene, Farocki redirects the audience’s attention to the mechanics of production and the business behind the image. The result is a deconstruction of the making of commercial images: a clinical portrait of the labor behind the creation of an apparently spontaneous fantasy.
“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
“An Image (83) by Farocki is elegant, articulate, and perfect as it is, witnessing a Playboy magazine photo shoot from set construction through awkward nude blocking to the perfectionism of banal image making. It’s a complete circuit in 25 minutes, thoroughly capturing an activity and culture without belaboring or reducing for the sake of an external expectation of time."
Eric Hynes / Film Comment
“People speaking are often off-screen, the indifferent or outraged reactions of their listeners gaining greater prominence. All of this is a conscious strategy to counter the tendency of commercial cinema and television which Farocki believes – following Adorno and Horkheimer's critique of the culture industry – presents the viewers with such an overwhelming flood of images that any reflection on their part becomes impossible.”
Christopher Pavsek / Rouge
