Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y
"Exceptional for its juice, its jazzy compelling fusion of social and aesthetic issues, and its stomach-churning power."
- The New York Times
"A sense of urgency and a wrenching emotional attack."
- The Times (London)
"Each cut turns a screw deeper until your mind hurts."
- San Francisco Bay Guardian
"An eccentric, roller coaster ride through history."
- Time Out
He puesto fragmentos de una entrevista con Johan Grimonprez. Podrán parecer inconexos pues escogí ciertas preguntas ya que en realidad la entrevista también va de la nueva película del director.
Alexander Provan: The first words we hear in Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y are, “Shouldn’t death be a swan dive, graceful, white-winged and smooth, leaving the surface undisturbed?” Yet for much of the film death is deferred, the eventual crash is delayed.
Johan Grimonprez: The advent of the airplane and cinema were concurrent— the technologies infiltrated the realm of dreams simultaneously. And with the appearance of television, the image of the airplane gave way to the image of the airplane disaster, and the drama of flight developed around this narrative of impending catastrophe, where the postponed disaster of a hijacking gives the drama room to evolve. That’s why there are so many images in the film that deal with floating, being between two states, between ascent and descent, hanging in the air. That is a crucial metaphor. For the Palestinian skyjackers, especially.
AP: It’s interesting that you mention angels. In the biblical tradition, avenging angels t take two forms: those who carry out God’s justice on earth (“The riches unjustly accumulated shall be vomited up; an angel shall drag him out of his house”) and those dark angels who are themselves born from Satan’s fall from Heaven. I think these contradictory images are part of what make the figure of the terrorist in Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y so seductive.
JG: Ah, the beautiful ones, they hurt you every time! Or so Prince claims. But I don’t think there’s aesthetic redemption here. Many of the skyjackers—especially Rima Tannous Eissa, who hijacked the Sabena plane in 1972, and Leila Khaled, who hijacked TWA Flight 840 in 1969—both of whom look like the women in a Godard film (the beautiful ones!)—take a very fierce pro-Palestinian position in interviews from that time. They say, You’re all seduced by the rhetoric of the media. Then they’ve produced this entire spectacle which is itself a terribly seductive media event.
AP: Johan, were you thinking about these differing conceptions of the generative forces of history during the production of Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y?
JG: Well, I was thinking about it on less of a holy and more of a profane level, in terms of the seduction of the commercial image. Maybe that’s why communism fell, because the spectacle began to be projected into society differently, with the seduction of the commercial competing with the seduction of the political. Heiner Müller, the great German dramatist, has said that the commercial was the most loaded political message East Germany inadvertently received from the West. In Double Take, we’ve literally inserted five breaks for Folgers coffee commercials. They keep you from getting bored, but bit by bit they’re inscribed into the narrative and subvert the plot.
AP: One of DeLillo’s lines from Mao II, “What terrorists gain, novelists lose,” is repeated throughout Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y. But the end of the film seems to suggest that the media is now the ultimate author of fictions that transform themselves into events as they’re broadcast.
JG: DeLillo’s narrator suggests that the terrorist is better equipped to play the media, and traffic in this sort of seductive imagery. So he concludes that his role as a writer may be obsolete. But Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y follows that trajectory even further, suggesting that the media controls the spectacle, and has hijacked the hijacker.
AP: But the way in which events were produced changed dramatically in the time period that you track in Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y, because of the ability to organize an event around the arrival of the video cameras.
JG: Yes, but the arrival of the commercial break had a different impact, which was further enabled by cable, video, and the remote control, so that we were able to zap, and even zap away from commercials; whereas zapping—or rather skipping nowadays, with digital media—has affected the way we mediate reality. Why were we talking about the death of the novel? Because of television. Why are we talking about the death of television? Because of the internet. Everything accelerates, and the novelist or filmmaker has to position himself within that accelerated world where everything is now measured in terms of download time. Now that doesn’t mean those ways of mediation will disappear, they just coexist, one affecting the other—just as in the 80s, CNN utilized Hollywood codes to stage the news, and vice versa.
¿Qué es espectacular?
Ya no hay por qué asombrarse de cómo cantan en Siberia los "Tuvan throat-singers" (última película que vi de Werner Herzog: Bells from the deep). No es nuevo que la palabra "impacto" es inmediatamente relacionada con violencia. Se cree que Impresionante es la sangre. Grimonprez reflexiona sobre el valor de lo que estamos viendo. Imágenes de violencia en todos lados, ya como parte intrínseca del todos los días. No sirve cambiar de canal, no sirve no ver T.V. igual estará en la primera plana del día siguiente en todos los díarios.
Creo que también Grimonprez se plantea un poco sobre la ética de la información. No hace falta de un genio para entender que no es correcto mostrar la imagen de alguien asesinado por cuchillo la noche anterior. Se nos ha olvidado, que la imaginación siempre es más fuerte que la realidad. Y de ahi que la poesía se nos quede rondando en la cabeza más que la descripción de un personaje, se trata de sugerir. Pero se ha creado un mito de la imagen, engrandecimiento de lo visual.
No estoy tratando de des meritar el poder de una fotografía, sino de cómo se ha planteado generar emociones a través de lo explícito.
Me retumba algo que discutimos en clase respecto a la película. ¿Qué hubiera pasado, si no se hubieran mostrado hasta el cansancio estas imágenes de secuestradores de avión? Por una parte, talvez no se hubiera difundido tanto, y por otra, que al acostumbrarnos a la violencia cada vez necesitamos más violencia. Se crea una anestesia. Un amigo me dijo un día "al asesino de John Lennon debieron haberlo desaparecido de la historia, en vez de hacerle un E True Hollywod Story". Claro, porque de esa manera no pasaría a la historia, sí como un hecho, pero no como un personaje. Si nunca hubiéramos visto el primer secuestro de avión en 20 canales de televisión, para qué lo hubieran hecho otra vez, sino recibían la atención del mundo. Las noticias se volvieron un altavoz, pero sin ética. Altavoz de ladrones y chantajistas.
El formato de pasar una imagen tras otra, no sólo nos recuerda a la televisión y el bombardeo de información por todas partes, sino también a que el tiempo es dinero. Y queremos ver más y más y más (aunque parezca que luego sea para olvidarlo todo). Formato adoptado por los invadidos de Hollywood (cuántas veces no escuchamos "que hueva ver una película donde no pase nada"). Pero finalmente la información y como nos llega es un constante collage de noticias de todas partes, y al final nunca entendimos de qué iba la noticia. He pensado varias veces, que ésto es a propósito, para que nunca podamos formular una opinión crítica y bien fundamentada de lo que ha pasado. Grimonprez nos muestra una historia, como nos han acostumbrado a verla.
http://www.skny.com/artists/johan-grimonprez/
http://www.othercinemadvd.com/dialhistory.html
http://www.tate.org.uk/collections/artist-rooms/johan-grimonprez.shtm
http://www.bidoun.com/18_grimonprez.php
http://www.artdes.monash.edu.au/globe/issue10/jgtxt.html
http://www.dvdinmypants.com/reviews/A-G/dial.php
No hay comentarios:
Publicar un comentario