Erzählen

“Essay, a term from written literature: unity of science and art; unity of social and individual knowledge,” Harun Farocki wrote in a first draft of the project Erzählen. The film follows two people (played by Engström and Farocki) investigating their respective subjects: one is tracing the involvement of the German heavy industry in the rise of Nazi-Germany, the other is interested in the fate of Larissa Reissner, a young Soviet writer and revolutionary. Both of them struggle with the question of how to organize their research and find a narrative structure. Their paths cross, and the film turns into an essayistic interrogation of structuralist narratology.