The Trouble with Images. A Critique of Television

Refreshingly, Farocki lays his cards on the table at the very beginning of the film, "I want to demonstrate that most feature films are of the sort that make people lose their interest and appetite for the real world".

Farocki's demonstration is, again refreshingly, free from the posturing of a 'semiotician' lifting the veil surrounding the conceptual mysteries of some private media theory (the examples are frightening); he shows what he wants to show by posing very simple, sometimes seemingly banal questions: Why must a sequence of two minutes and seventeen seconds show 13 locations, and why should the narration contain 25 statements? Why do feature films have to be so 'dynamic', so 'alive', so 'full of variety' that, faced with so much 'vitality', the statement expires?

(Frank J. Heinemann, 1973)

Original title Der Ärger mit den Bildern. Eine Telekritik von Harun Farocki Director, scriptwriter Harun Farocki Editor Evelyn Reichert-Panitz Graphic artist Franziska Scherer Narrator Harun Farocki Production manager Wolfgang Kreck Production WDR, Cologne Producer Guenther R. Weinhold TV-producer Angelika Wittlich Format 16mm, b/w, col., 1:1,37 Length 48 min. First broadcast 16.05.1973, WDR 3