EMPIRE OF EVIL

In EMPIRE OF EVIL Harald Hund poses the explosive (media-)political question of trust in visual documents that suggest authority and promise truth. And he does so using a concrete, current case: Iran and the Western view of it. At the same time, the film carries out a double bind of sorts; in psychological terms, it generates a mental disposition resting on diverging communicative signals and a reception environment marked by power dispositifs. At the same time, it offers continuous moments of self-exposure and to that extent, also the resolution of the previously produced conflict. Yet these moments must be discovered and "correctly" interpreted.

The first sequences already lay out the network of documentary evidence and fiction, pictorial evidence and oral report along which EMPIRE OF EVIL successively emerges as critical narration; recordings of airplane interiors, an aerial view of a craggy, cloud covered landscape, the information screen. In addition, there is talk of "secret recordings" and "atomic weapons program," and without naming names, it is apparent which country it is about, has to be about. Hund consistently interlaces documentary codes and signature elements of the investigative with aspects, which at the spoken level, the voice over (with American accent), become increasingly absurd, allowing ever more misgivings to arise about the images and their informational content. What is shown in the video recordings and the visual material scattered in between, exclusively from Western media, and what we see in this audiovisual journey of discovery constructed along a time axis, turn out to be two very different things.

Without dispute, the film can be given credit for not morally overplaying the relevance of this theme, the importance of which has grown immensely since the media images of embedded journalists in the Iraq War, and in light of the most recent, likewise heavily mediatized terror attacks in Europe. Instead, with media-inherent methods, it demonstrates the power and seduction of images, but also the documentary, per se, as a construction of an audiovisual reality. (Irene Müller)

Translation: Lisa Rosenblatt