Harun Farocki was born in Novi Jicín in 1944 in what is today the Czech Republic. Farocki is considered to be one of the most important artists of contemporary film and documentary. He has made close to 90 films, including three feature films, essay films and documentaries; in the 1990s he began to work with video installations as well. His topics are mostly political, archival and theoretical issues of the contemporary society. His work was shown at Documenta 12 in Kassel and in numerous international retrospectives and has received many awards. Farocki's early films are marked by ideas of a cultural revolution as formulated by the increasingly radical Left of the time and are explicitly developed as effective means of political propaganda. His subsequent auctorial, essayistic, and documentary films call for a more active reception on behalf of the audience itself. Parallel to this, cinematic essays arise, which question the very use of film as a pictorial medium. Through both montage and a deliberate composition of either intentionally filmed or found materials, Farocki produces a subtext, which opens up the technical, socio-political, and cultural contexts of meaning in the production, distribution, and reception of images.