“LA VERIFICA INCERTA is a montage of scraps from different films of various genres. When watching it for the first time, it becomes clear just how strict the rules of genre actually are. A Western can certainly include a bathing scene, but it‘s not allowed to look like it would in a holiday film, while it‘s fine for there to be a shootout in a holiday film provided it doesn’t look like one from a thriller or war film and so on.
LA VERIFICA INCERTA edits together its material in an elegant and polemic manner, with the shot/countershot technique being cheerfully dismantled in the process.
LA VERIFICA INCERTA is a precursor to the many other works which also re-edit films. It is worth investigating how something new is able to emerge from material compiled in such a way as well as how the materials themselves are still able to retain some sort of intrinsic value.“
Harun Farocki
Harun Farocki presents Baruchello and Grifi’s seminal found-footage film and, in a subsequent lecture, discusses the impact the work had on his own artistic practice, as well as on other films of the genre.
La verifica incerta, Italy 1965, 16mm, 31 minutes; directors: Gianfranco Baruchello, Alberto Grifi
followed by a lecture by Harun Farocki
The presentation is part of "Living Archive – Archive Work as a Contemporary Artistic and Curatorial Practice", a project of Arsenal – Institute for Film and Video Art, funded by the Federal Cultural Foundation and the Stiftung Deutsche Klassenlotterie Berlin.
Artist and filmmaker Harun Farocki was born in Neutitschein (today Nový Jičín, the Czech Republic) in 1944. He studied at the German Film and Television Academy (dffb) in Berlin from 1966 to 1968. Since then, he has directed over 100 different productions for television and cinema. Farocki was editor of and one of the authors for Filmkritik magazine from 1974 to 1984. Since 1996, his films and installations have been shown in a large number of group and solo exhibitions in museums and galleries. He has been a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna since 2006.
