‘Einen Film Drehen’

This article analyses the ‘Gestus’ of turning in films by Harun Farocki and Christian Petzold, in light of a central claim of Andrew Webber's esteemed theoretical work on film: that film has the power to uncover unconscious processes through which subjects come into being and are made operational for political regimes. Farocki's Leben–BRD (1990) presents a user guide to life in West Germany at the moment of unification, looping through training scenarios — from midwifery to military practice — to show that Western subjects are not born but rendered operational for political systems. My reading reveals a dialectic of manipulation and spontaneity in the film's footage of babies turning and being turned, and of factory machinery rotating and rolling, apparently independent of human intervention. I then examine bodily and mechanical turning in Petzold's Barbara (2012), co‐written with Farocki, where gestures reminiscent of German Romanticism and Expressionism are coded as resistant to the performative effects of surveillance on subjectivity. The analysis draws on Webber's critical writings, Farocki's posthumous notes, and comments by Marx and Benjamin on technologies of turning that both expanded and replaced human capacities. The article thus revisits key historical turns — industrialisation, art history, the ‘Wende’, the digital revolution — while affirming the continuing power of filmmaking and film theory to decode the hidden operations of technological modernity

Critical theory · Dialectic · Filmmaking · German · Gesture · Performative utterance · Politics · Rendering (computer graphics) · Subjectivity · Unconscious mind · Cinema and Media Studies · German Colonialism and Identity Studies · German History and Society