Televised image in/as history. Videograms of a Revolution and the visibility of the 1989 changes

Harun Farocki and Andrei Ujica's essay film Videogramme einer Revolution (1992) examines the way in which images, both officially televised and clandestinely recorded, become actors in the history of revolutionary changes of 1989. Strikingly, the role of television appears to be crucial in this context, since it presents itself as the site, the object and - occasionally - the actor in the struggle to expand and eventually overthrow the established 'regime of visibility'. Pictorial and filmic references, notably to the 1917 revolution, lead to a discussion of history increasingly made in images. The artistic response to this transformation consists in auto-reflexive and critical operations on a meta-level, in which images act upon other images, and the mechanisms of television as a 'spectacle factory' are questioned by using competing strategies of visualizing historical changes.