Outside Germany, most will remember Harun Farocki as an important filmmaker and video artist. Speaking of Farocki in these terms is certainly not wrong. However, it means ignoring a substantial part of his production. Throughout the five decades of his career in cinema, television, and the visual arts, Farocki wrote continually. Besides realizing an impressive body of films and installations—including seminal works such as Inextinguishable Fire (1969) and Before Your Eyes—Vietnam (1982); media-reflexive films such as As You See (1986), Images of the World and the Inscription of War (1988), and Videograms of a Revolution (1992); as well as research-driven installation cycles such as Eye/Machine (2000–2002), Serious Games (2009–2010), and Parallel (2012–2014)—Farocki produced a remarkable quantity of newspaper articles, magazine and book texts, and scripts for radio broadcasts since 1964. For German subscribers of the influential journal Filmkritik in the 1970s, Farocki was an established writer. For many today, however, the significance of his writing from the 1960s and 1970s remains to be discovered, which is why Grey Room has decided to make several of his early texts available in English.

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