Farocki’s Films as Research: Serious Games | Screening + Talk | 22 May | 20:00 | Amsterdam
This cinema screening of Harun Farucki’s video installation Serious Games I-IV (2009–2010) is presented in collaboration with IDFA and the Leiden Essay Film Festival (LEFF). Paired with Cyan Bae’s recent short film Welcome to Set (2025), the evening will reflect on the relevance of Farocki’s approach as a source of inspiration for contemporary research practices.
Event description
Alongside Chris Marker, Jean-Luc Godard and Trinh T. Minh-ha, Harun Farocki may be situated within the tradition of the essay film, in which filmmakers mobilise both documentary and fictional strategies to interrogate complex socio-political realities. He was an artist whose work critically examined social phenomena and the operative logics of images and image production. For Farocki, film functioned not merely as a medium of expression, but as a methodological tool of inquiry.
In Serious Games, Harun Farocki explores the connections between virtual reality and the military. At a Marine Corps base in Twenty-Nine Palms, California, before their deployment to a war zone, U.S. troops are trained using computer simulations in which the physical environment of Afghanistan has been recreated in detail on the basis of geographic data.
These simulated locations resemble the VR environments used in the psychological aftercare of soldiers returning with PTSD. To enhance the immersive effect, realistic sound effects are added, and the lighting is adjusted to match the time of day at which a traumatic event took place.
The effect is uncanny when Farocki films a military exercise in a recreated desert town built on the base. Only when a role player interacts with one of the soldiers does it become apparent that this is not a computer animation. Not only does the environment seem to be modeled on the aesthetics of a game, but the soldiers themselves also take on an unsettlingly virtual appearance.
LEFF programmer Thijs Witty will introduce the evening and moderate a conversation between filmmakers and researchers Cyan Bae and Francesco Ragazzi.
This evening is part of Systems for Agitation: A Harun Farocki Retrospective bringing together a selection of Farocki’s films and installations, alongside a series of collaborative events. From 17 April to 24 May.
Time & Place
22 May, 20:00
Het Documentaire Pavilijoen, Amsterdam
Bios
Thijs Witty is teacher, researcher and film programmer based in Amsterdam. He is an assistant professor at the Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society (LUCAS) , tutor at the MA Artistic Research at KABK and film programmer at the Leiden Essay Film Festival.
Cyan Bae is is a visual artist and researcher based in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. As a PhD candidate at the Institute of Political Science, Leiden University, their ongoing research investigates the socio-political implications of algorithmic emotion recognition and deception detection technologies through filmmaking as a research method, as part of the Security Vision research project.
Francesco Ragazzi is associate professor in international relations at the Institute of Political Science at Leiden University, and acting co-director at ReCNTR.
