JOHAN GRIMONPREZ
Dial H-i-s-t-o-r-y
Buckle up for DIAL H-I-S-T-O-R-Y, the acclaimed hijacking documentary that eerily foreshadowed 9/11. We meet the romantic skyjackers who fought their revolutions and won airtime on the passenger planes of the 1960’s and 1970Õs. By the 1990’s, such characters were apparently no more, replaced on our TV screens by stories of anonymous bombs in suitcases.
Director Johan Grimonprez investigates the politics behind this change, at the same time unwrapping our own complicity in the urge for ultimate disaster. Playing on Don DeLillo’s riff in his novel Mao II: “what terrorists gain, novelists lose” and “home is a failed idea”, he blends archival footage of hijackings with surreal and banal themes, including fast food, pet statistics, disco, and his quirky home movies. David Shea composed the superb soundtrack to this free fall through history, best described in the words of one hijacked Pepsi executive as “running the gamut of many emotions, from surprise to shock to fear, to joy, to laughter, and then again, fear.”
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HARUN FAROCKI
Videogramas de una revolución
Para “Videogramas de una revolución” Harun Farocki y su coautor Andrej Ujica recopilaron copias de vídeos de aficionados y programas de la televisión pública rumana después de que ésta fuera tomada por los manifestantes en diciembre de 1989. Imágenes y sonidos de la primera revolución en la historia en la que la televisión jugó un papel clave. La protagonista es la historia contemporánea en sí misma.
*Part_1
Inextinguishable Fire 1969
“When we show you pictures of napalm victims, you’ll shut your eyes. You’ll close your eyes to the pictures. Then you’ll close them to the memory. And then you’ll close your eyes to the facts.” These words are spoken at the beginning of an agitprop film that can be viewed as a unique and remarkable development. Farocki refrains from making any sort of emotional appeal. His point of departure is the following: “When napalm is burning, it is too late to extinguish it. You have to fight napalm where it is produced: in the factories.” Resolutely, Farocki names names: the manufacturer is Dow Chemical, based in Midland, Michigan in the United States. Against backdrops suggesting the laboratories and offices of this corporation, the film then proceeds to educate us with an austerity reminiscent of Jean Marie Straub. Farocki’s development unfolds: “(1) A major corporation is like a construction set. It can be used to put together the whole world. (2) Because of the growing division of labor, many people no longer recognize the role they play in producing mass destruction. (3) That which is manufactured in the end is the product of the workers, students, and engineers.” This last thesis is illustrated with an alarmingly clear image. The same actor, each time at a washroom sink, introduces himself as a worker, a student, an engineer. As an engineer, carrying a vacuum cleaner in one hand and a machine gun in the other, he says, “I am an engineer and I work for an electrical corporation. The workers think we produce vacuum cleaners. The students think we make machine guns. This vacuum cleaner can be a valuable weapon. This machine gun can be a useful household appliance. What we produce is the product of the workers, students, and engineers.” (Hans Stempel, Frankfurter Rundschau, June 14, 1969).
director, scriptwriter, editor: Harun
Farocki assistant director: Helke
Sander cinematographer: Gerd
Conradt sound: Ulrich Knaudt cast:
Harun Farocki, Hanspeter Krüger,
Eckart Kammer, Caroline Gremm,
Gerd Volker Bussäus, Ingrid
Oppermann production: Harun
Farocki, Berlin-West für WDR, Köln
length: 25 min. format: 16mm,
b/w, 1:1,37 first broadcast:
27.07.69, West 3
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ANGELA MELITOPOULUS
Passing Drama
„PassingDrama” is based on different recollections told by refugees. This videoessay is the woven sound picture of the migration of Angela Melitopoulos’family. Drama is the name of a small city in Northern Greece. The city is inhabited by refugees who are survivors of deportations from Asia Minor to Greece in 1923. In World War II their children escaped the Bulgarian occupation and became workeslave in Hitler’s Germany.
a videoessay directed by Angela Melitopoulos
66 min, PAL, Digibeta, 1999,
“Everything forgotten mixes with the forgotten of the world before.” (Franz Rosenzweig)
Interviews with those refugees connected to Melitopoulos father’s recite of his departure
from Greece to Vienna are tracing a diagonal path through Europe crossing four different national states. The homeland of these refugees was changing continuously. Their storytelling relates to the local condition of integration. To choose recites from people who have experienced an exodus nearly forgotten in European history meant to consider ways of making the process of forgetting a part in the process of notation (montage).
Telling a story, which has been transmitted, retold, re-memorised from one generation to the next meant to make a film on the subject of refugee narration itself. Fragments of recorded interviews formed the voice level in that the story appears as a texture made out of different densities of concret or superfluous „thought-flows”. In their narration the refugees connected their own words with generated word-constructions of others. The recalled words of others intensified through the melody of their voices. Voice melody as an indication for collective/generated memory became the parameter to choose text from the interviews. Aflux of voices layered one over the other, erasing or reinforcing each other, reaching the audible space or becoming mute, created the rhythm in the editing and the structure of the narration. The voices are like invisible threads in the woven structure of this video. They appear and dissappear like a thread on the front side of a carpet. Only by looking at the back-side of the carpet one can follow them. The images of the different locations of the migrated path are displayed in different image-speed in the video.
Thus location appears as a distinct time-zone in the narration. The further the location relates to the past the more the images are processed and edited. Real-time represents the here and now time-zoneof the narration. Half speed represents the second generation of the narration and stands for the documentary time-zone(the fathers recite). Images processed with dynamic motion control are representing the generated imaginary of placesor paths known through stories told by others (the third generation: the grand-parents) but not seen as a eye witness „Passing Drama” is edited as a hypertextual structure of images and sounds, a structure of memory and recollection visualised through the possibilities of non-linear editing.
„Passing Drama” narrates from the point of view of a minority, who’s past seems to be devoured by industrial machines in favour of a majority.
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URSULA BIEMANN
Sahara Chronicle_01
Video collection by Ursula Biemann 2006-2007, documenting the current sub-Saharan exodus towards Europe. The art project examines the politics of mobility and containment which lies at the heart of the current global geopolitics and takes a close look at the modalities and logistics of the migration system in the Sahara. Video_01 documents the desert truck terminal in Agadez, Niger.
Sahara Chronicle_06
Sahara Chronicle 06 documents the Iron Ore train near the terminal of Nouadhibou in the north of Mauritania.
Black Sea Files
A video by Ursula Biemann (synch 2-chanel, 43 min. 2005) on the Caspian oil geography and the gigantic new pipeline that pumps crude oil through the Caucasus (BTC). Oil workers, farmers, refugees and prostitutes who live along the pipeline come into profile and contribute to a wider human geography that displaces the singular and powerful signifying practices of oil corporations and oil politicians. Drawing on investigatory fieldwork as practiced by anthropologists, journalists and secret intelligence agents, the Black Sea Files comment on artistic methods in the field and the ways in which information and visual intelligence is detected, circulated or withheld. (first shown at Kunstwerke Berlin)
Europlex
EUROPLEX (Ursula Biemann / Angela Sanders, 20 min. 2003) tracks distinct cross-border activities through the Spanish Moroccan borderlands and seeks to make these obscure paths visible. On their repetitive circuits around the check-point to the Spanish enclave, the video follows in three borderlogs the smuggling women who strap multiple layers of clothes to their bodies, the daily commute of “domesticas” who turn into time travellers as they move back and forth between the Moroccan and European time zones and the Moroccan women working in the transnational zones in North Africa for the European market. All these trajectories move around and inbetween the imperative of the territorial borders, they form, however, a vital layer of the cultural and economic space between Europe and Africa.
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