magiadoreal

Harun Farocki , an avant-garde German filmmaker and video artist whose work examined the ways images are used to inform, instruct, persuade and propagandize, died on Wednesday near Berlin. He was 70. His death, from unspecified causes, was confirmed by the Greene Naftali Gallery in New York, which represents him. Mr. Farocki made more than 100 films, many of them short experimental documentaries that explored contemporary life, and what he saw as its myriad depredations — war, imprisonment, surveillance, capitalism — through the visual stimuli that attend them. Ruminative, but with an undercurrent of urgency born of his longstanding social engagement, Mr. Farocki’s films sought to illuminate the ways that the technology of image-making is used to shape public ideology. His work, shown on European television, has also been the subject of major exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Tate Modern in London and elsewhere. Writing about Mr....