Belgium / France,
1997, 68 min
Shown in 1998
CREDITS
- dir
-
Johan Grimonprez
- prod
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Rony Vissers, Corinne Castel
- scr
-
Johan Grimonprez
- cam
-
Johan Grimonprez
- editor
-
Johan Grimonprez
- source
-
Incident, P.O. Box 1424, B-1000 Brussels 1, Belgium. FAX: 32-2-223-5985
- gga award
-
Golden Spire, New Visions: Video
-
COMMENTS
Screened with Big Day Off and Signing Off. Johan Grimonprez in person.
OTHER
If reality has been supplanted by the image, then violent acts can be seen as the retrieval of a lost authenticity. Johan Grimonprez’s gut-wrenching Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y shows us one spasmodic attempt at reality recovery, the airline hijacking, and it throws in a mini-history of the revolutionary impulse as well. Assembled Frankenstein-fashion from exhumed newsreel footage of hijacking scenes, terrorist attacks and their gruesome aftermaths (and with a little “Do the Hustle” for good measure), Grimonprez’s pseudo-documentary follows the flight path of skyjacking, concentrating on the glorious double decade of the 1960s and ’70s when violent assaults were as predictable as lost luggage. The cavalcade of crises is familiar: Tel Aviv, Athens, Tokyo—each a distant image of some lethal act. The reductive details are often frightening in their simplicity: on one flight hijackers demand birthday cake and champagne for a flight attendant; on another the pilot orders sandwiches for his famished terrorists lest the slaughter begin. Grimonprez culls the writings of novelist Don DeLillo for the intermittent flight announcements; one compelling quote declares that artists have disappeared from the radar screen, having lost the air to terrorists who still have a grip on reality.
—Steve Seid
FACTOID #27
A surrealist stop-motion animator, the Czech Jan Svankmajer, was the first recipient of the Golden Gate Persistence of Vision Award in 1997. The POV Award honors the lifetime achievement of a filmmaker who works outside of feature-length narrative filmmaking.
