Catching Up #45: Inextinguishable Fire (dir. Harun Farocki, 1969)
At film school you absorb a lot of ideas. One of them, which sat in the back of my head for years, was that Harun Farocki was an important political filmmaker who bridged experimental and documentary modes, and that I really ought to get around to his work one of these days. Farocki died two years ago, and still I hadn't gotten around to his work. This summer I spent a day at MoMA in New York and caught a glimpse of Inextinguishable Fire playing in their 60's exhibit, but I didn't take the 20 minutes to stop and watch it. My loss. The YouTube copies-of-copies look terrible. But Inextinguishable Fire comes through and speaks anyway.
The film opens with a now-legendary demonstration. A man sits at a desk and reads the statement of a Vietnamese man who was burned by napalm. Then, the reader explains that if he showed us images napalm victims, we would close our eyes to the pictures, then to the memory, then to the facts, and then to the entire context. So, he opts for a different way to communicate. Without a cut, he reaches out of frame for a lit cigarette, which he extinguishes on his arm. Cigarettes, he tells us, burn at 400 C, but napalm burns at 3000 C. And the new napalm, Napalm-B, has a chemical agent which makes it impossible to rub or wash off.
And so, the film begins to introduce us to a set of design problems. First, the idea that napalm wasn't just sitting around and repurposed for warfare, but rather, that it was consciously designed, by a large corporation given a set of warfare scenarios and asked to make a maximally efficient weapon. Second, the idea that the division of labor within this corporation (Dow, to be clear), allows each chemist to tell themselves that they were not responsible for the harm done by the napalm. Indeed, the bureaucratic design of warfare, of government, of consumerism, and of all of capitalism distributes responsibility in a way which maximizes the chances of the system’s self-preservation. Third, the notion of moral design: we see, played out in staged vignettes, actors portraying Dow executives saying things like, "You know I don't approve of war, but since we started the war in Vietnam, I'll do anything within my power to end it quickly." Or later, "I am not defending the war. But I'm convinced that our involvement in Vietnam has been justified. I'm also convinced that napalm is a good weapon to help save human lives." How often does morality serve less as a guide for action and more as an instrument for permitting ourselves to continue whatever actions are most convenient?
Finally, the film introduces itself as a designed object: a rhetorical instrument, meant to communicate in a way which will cause us to continue watching (rather than close our eyes), to continue thinking, and to continue questioning. To that end, it mixes direct-address demonstrations, essayistic captions and voice-over, staged scenes, documentary images, and even an open-ended parable (the film's final scene, a real knockout) in wholly novel and experimental kind of way. As such, even from a historical distance of a half-century, Inextinguishable Fire points the way forward for other political media trying to find a way to communicate in a way which will not sensationalize or exploit its subject, will not offend or alienate its audience, but will nevertheless communicate its political message while maintaining enough philosophical complexity to give thoughtful viewers more to chew on and consider after the film ends. It's almost as though the film is challenging us, even now, to follow its lead and make a similar film about torture or about racism or about lobbyists or about climate change or about Syria or about Trumpism or about media polarization/propaganda in general (for all of Farocki's films are about media at some level).
The strangest thing about all of this is that in graduate school I saw Jill Godmilow's film What Farocki Taught, a remake of Inextinguishable Fire, in a documentary course. We didn't watch the original. I don't remember enough of Godmilow's version to appraise whether the remake was just postmodern chicanery, or whether it fruitfully extended the lessons of the original into a contemporary context. But I can say that either way, given the state of political filmmaking nowadays, we still haven't quite learned what Farocki was trying to teach us.
