Written years ago and recently unearthed is a synopsis of a challenging work that infiltrated my thinking in the weirdness of its subject eerily presaging the surreality that befell the World Trade Center.
You hear at the start of "DIAL H*I*S*T*O*R*Y" how noble death can be, like an airplane in a graceful swan dive that bellyflops to the ground and KABOOM! And so begins your video rollercoaster ride disguised as a documentary about airline hijacking over an hour long by the artist Johan Grimonprez. Nonstop actual news footage replete with early videocam graininess of televised images recount the supposed origin and subsequent chronology of "skyjacking" to present day. But not in the usual smarmy PBS account of past events with that annoyingly know-it-all winky eye. No, that would be too Bill Moyers. What you see floods your memory of skewed patriotic feelings and media-influenced hatred of these terrorists who hate America and its Western (Eurocentric) ideals as Grimonprez retells this story as fictionalized, polticalized history through a narrated voice that implies his own. But is it strict agitprop or romanticized historical poetics? We witness people on the political fringe who need to call attention to their "causes". Yet somehow the politics of such a politically motivated act become humanized through his quirky use of throwaway commercials that acts to segue these segments which in turn editorialize his rather cynical leftist radical leanings about this topic. The video treads atop fragile eggshells in its "both sides of the story" approach combined with a healthy dose of realism, raw scenes of the aftermath of violent death. The innocent intentions of forcibly coercing a flight as means of political asylum quickly become a war of terrorism against Western hegemony. And you wonder if Grimonprez actually advocates the mounting evidence of death and destruction as justifiable martyrdom, acceptable tolls of causalities? Or as his use of excerpts from Don DeLillo’s fiction "White Noise" and "Mao II" might suggest otherwise a metaphor heralding the politics of modern life and its dangers of death.