Inextinguishable Fire

How do you depict the horrors of napalm without making the viewer look away? Harun Farocki opens his essay film with an act that is as simple as it is shocking: he stubs out a lit cigarette on his own arm. While a cigarette burns at 400 degrees, napalm reaches temperatures of 3,000 degrees. With this gesture, Farocki sets the tone for a methodical investigation of the chemical industry and the fragmented responsibility behind this weapon of destruction.

In an austere setting, Farocki reconstructs the laboratories and offices of the company Dow Chemical. He shows how scientists, engineers, and workers each form part of a system of mass destruction, often without grasping the full impact of their work. This extreme segmentation deliberately abstracts the end product. One person sees a vacuum cleaner, another a machine gun.

Farocki argues that it is too late to extinguish napalm once it is burning: the struggle must take place where it is produced. Inextinguishable Fire is a hard-hitting reflection on the ethics of labor and the cold logic of industry.