A thinking machine: Harun Farocki's cinema and video-essay practice

'Fictive' and 'non-fictive' characterization is based on a conventional distinction that has existed since the beginning of cinematographic production. However, through the evolution of film art, there have been some cases in which this distinction becomes functionless, such as the emergence of time-images in modern cinema, or new subjective experiences overcoming the crisis of representation in documentary. In its historical development, one of the contemporary forms of documentary cinema is called as video essay films. Even though this film practice can be referenced to the beginning of cinema, video related academic discussions about this subject is comparatively quite new. The reasons could be related to both the characterstics of changes in image technology and speed of current cultural transformations. Besides, due to some of its characteristics, such as non-representative use of images and post-structural subjectivity, video essay becomes vague in the boundary of documentary cinema defined by traditional concepts, and enforce those limits. Entitled as a video essayist, Harun Farocki is a movie maker who consistently constructed his genuine way of film making for many years. His films, having all features of video essays detected by actual studies, are the samples of 'meta-cinema' concept. Therefore, it is possible to take advantage of Farocki's cinema in order to crystallize vauge definitions related to this actual film form. In his film structures, tensions like life-film, image-representation, archive-memory can be observed very often and there might be an intersection between accepting this cinema as a collective thinking activity and conceptual production of Gilles Deleuze, who depicted his evidences in cinema culture. This is because Deleuze suggests visuality of thinking instead of thinking visuality, just as he seeks for the reality of cinema instead of cinema of reality. Therefore, this choice promises much more prolific perspective than the conventional concepts offer. In this sense, the nature of this study is ontologically related to the assumption that Farocki films are the acts of collective thinking, emerging from the imperative that they have to be cinematographic. In order to deduce the necessary principles to define video essay practice as a non-representative, self-reflexive mental procces, the study should construct its own way of problem solving method as immanent to its subject. Accordingly, the principles related to video essays via Farocki's cinema are obtained in this work by presenting its datas visually, in the very nature of the thinking act, and without reference to any normative discourse. Keywords: Harun Farocki, video essay, documentary, movement-image, time-image, actual, virtual, representation.