M HKA Ensembles

Film, 00:68:00.

Collection: Courtesy of zap-o-matik.

Grimomprez' film dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y analyses the history of airplane hijacking as portrayed in television media, through an imagined conversation between a novelist and a terrorist based on passages from Don DeLillo’s novels Mao II and White Noise. The film utilises various types of archival footage, including news reportage, found footage, home movies and fragments of science fiction films, along with disco music and a special soundtrack from the renowned composer David Shea. Its chronology depicts the change in the perception of skyjackers. Romanticised as revolutionaries in the 1960s, they become replaced by depersonalised anonymous
individuals by the 1990s. dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y’s narrators eventually clarify their thoughts, with the writer suggesting that the ability to create societal shock has been wrested from the writer and was now the domain of the terrorist. Grimonprez wishes to explore the politics of this transition, in the process highlighting society’s complicity through the desire for consuming disaster. Uncannily pre-empting the September 11 attacks in 2001, dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y was one of the acclaimed works presented at Documenta X, Kassel, in 1997.

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