Prison Images [2000]

 If seeing, prying and witnessing were the running motifs in Harun Farocki’s filmography, then his analytic video montage Prison Images can well be his most emblematic work. Through this hour-long essay, he delved into a pointed examination of the carceral society through images of prisons from two parallel streams – viz. representation of prisons in cinema, interspersed with actual camera footage from American prisons. While he sourced sequences from multiple films for the former, two particularly stood out in their imagery – Jean Genet’s unnerving Un Chant d’Amour, where the prisoners adopt performative roles for the gratification of guards peeping into their cells, and Robert Bresson’s masterful A Man Escaped, where the protagonist meticulously stages an escape – as these two thematic tropes have recurred in countless films. These were juxtaposed with CCTV camera footage, and the message underpinning them was one of power, control, and the transformation of societies into surveillance states. In a mordant comparative analysis, Farocki posited that prisons, departmental stores and shopfloors are bound by their shared obsession with endless surveillance both as a means and an end. We therefore see how inmates are made to wear tracking devices so that their every movement can be monitored and inspected. In the essay’s most disturbing sequences, we see footage of how the authorities deliberately instigate prison fights – e.g. by placing antagonistic groups or inmates in closed spaces – and then stopping them through violent means. Through these, the Marxist director’s disdain for what prisons embody was unequivocally evoked. Hence, though not expressed in as many words, the underlying tenor was emphatically analogous to Joan Baez’s battle cry “raze the prisons to the ground” in her powerful protest song ‘Prison Trilogy’.

Director: Harun Farocki

Genre: Documentary/Essay Film

Language: German

Country: Germany