About Narration

Interdisciplinary studies put into practice is a plane on which HaF's interests and mine coincide. Ideas of fictional research projects in films emerge very early on, or of film as research device, allowing people from different disciplines to come together and discover something, to pursue a line of thought, or just be adventurous.

These ideas correspond to a tendency we both have of accumulating knowledge from different sciences, for example so as to bring exact sciences like medicine together with subjects which aren't directly aimed at application, such as religious studies or anthropology.

In 1975 HaF is still at Berlin's Free University, searching for the crossing of the lines. I myself am on the trail through my films. What are envisaged are spontaneous, undogmatic combinations. It should be possible to include anything as in the Nature Theater of Oklahoma.

Theoretically disparate things should join with the research in a reality concerned with living and surviving – Winnicott's "primitive agony". Besides this and contained within it there is the perceptional world of our little daughters, his (Anna and Lara) and mine (Muriel). "Childhood? It is here, we have never left it. Erzählen is a sketch of this situation.

(Ingemo Engström)

Original title Erzählen Director, scriptwriter Harun Farocki, Ingemo Engström, based on texts by Walter Benjamin, Gebrüder Grimm, Franz Kafka, Jurij M. Lotman, Boris Pasternak, Cesare Pavese, Alfred Sohn-Rethel, Sergej Tretjakov, Franz Carl Weiskopf Cinematographer Axel Block Assistant cinematographer Chris Strewe Editor Erika Kisters, Birgit Schuldt Sound Karl-Heinz Rösch Production manager Renate Sami Cast Avinho Barbeitov, Ingemo Engström, Harun Farocki, Hanspeter Krüger, Willem Menne, Karl Retzlaw, Otto Sander, Hanns Zischler Production WDR, Cologne Producer Harun Farocki Format 16mm, b/w, 1:1,37 Length 58 min. First broadcast 27.06.1969 West 3