Against What? Against Whom?

Against What? Against Whom? is a monograph on the German filmmaker and video artist Harun Farocki, with a complete filmography and essays by a long list of critics and scholars.

Antje Ehmann and Kodwo Eshun edited the volume, and Alex Sainsbury wrote the foreword. The filmography runs from Farocki's early Marxist educational films through his Direct Cinema works and film essays to recent installations that use found footage, and a checklist of installations follows. Farocki wrote a new text that combines a look back at his own films with a short history of West German filmmaking over the preceding forty years. Other contributors include James Benning, Nicole Brenez, Diedrich Diederichsen and Georges Didi-Huberman. Walther König published the 256-page paperback. It accompanies the exhibition of the same title at Raven Row in London in 2009–10, curated by Sainsbury, whose installation list on Farocki's site has nine works.

Farocki was born in 1944 in Nový Jičín (Neutitschein), then in the Sudetengau, and died in 2014. He entered the newly opened Berlin film academy (DFFB) in 1966 and, from that year, made more than a hundred productions for television or cinema. He edited the magazine Filmkritik in Munich from 1974 to 1984, and in 2007 showed Deep Play at documenta 12.