One of the most talked-about films of the 1989 San Francisco International Film Festival, Images of the World continues Farocki's fascination with sight and image-making. "An impressive meditation on aerial photography, surveillance, and military research, this film reveals and examines the disturbing fact that Auschwitz was photographed by U.S. flyers on a bombing mission to Silesia. But the camp was not recognized by the British evaluators 'who were not under orders to look for the camps and therefore did not find them,' despite the fact that they are clearly visible in the photographs. Today, says Harun Farocki, 'Satellites orbit the earth and record constantly almost everything that happens on the planet. How can these pictures be analyzed? How shall these pictures be remembered? Remember, the victims noticed nothing.' The film ranges over the history of aerial photography and the shifts from artisanal to mechanized mass production. It links the totalitarian experiment of the Nazis with capitalism. We see wave machines, flight simulators, the development of mechanical forms for recognizing people and objects-all preliminaries for a Robocop-style of law enforcement. (As in the films of) Alexander Kluge, here documentary becomes a kind of fiction. Reality unfolds like a detective story." --Mark Nash, The Independent