Dial H for…?

"Grimonprez’s over-riding subject is how the media participates in the construction of reality. Through seeing extracts from original TV reports of hijacks and their aftermath, the viewer of dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y experiences the voyeurism of news reporting during a traumatic event, in which everything is given meaning according to a particular agenda…Grimonprez’s film places hijacking not at the margins but at the centre of how we might construct recent history with its contested ideologies and disputed territories…"

Since the recent Trade Towers bombing, this work has taken a darker meaning: its sense of play with excess, its sense of situating the specifics of hijacking with new technical possibilities for spectacular media events, and its contrasting of the feelings of participants in hijacks contrasted with the media imagery of these events suddenly seems to be from another era. Nonetheless, its strange sense of disorientation, humour and paranoia play with audience, evoking childhood memory only to confound expectation through montage effect. Most of all, it implicitly brings the question of the nation state into prominence. Through montage, the place of the stateless- Palestinians in this instance- is rendered comprehensible. Playthings of the Cold War. We might see hints of what may come when the fury and pain of the WTO incident dies down: a heavier form of apocalyptic romanticism situated in the realms of the people who do not count. In both senses of the word- a societies beyond the conventional nation state, and societies beneath the threshold of the financial world. In a world where the use of the word "Palestine" can in itself threaten diplomatic initiatives, the inability of marketised governments to even hear those outside the markets is becoming near-absolute. What use the internet for communication here?

Grimonprez’s work is a floating series of propositions assembled from montage: the unconscious and the repressed of the western financial imaginary, the mirror of the airline advertisement. New readings will continue to unfold. Perhaps one aspect will seem stranger than ever in the future: the small boy interviewed in a post-hijack press conference who cheerfully suggested that the process of being hijacked had been pretty good fun. An age of innocence?