Archiving from Below Discussion Series: dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y
January 29 @ 6:30 pm - 8:30 pm GMT
For the first Afb session we will be watching and discussing Johan Grimonprez’s dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y, alongside archival videos from MayDay Room’s video archive Activist Media Project. We will explore how video, newsreels, television, and endless streams of moving images on social media of direct action can be archived in ways that create sites of production and can serve as a resource for engaging with critical fragments of history.
We also highly recommend going to see Grimonprez’s current film Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat
Blurb of dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y from Palestine Film Institute:
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. By the 1990s, such characters apparently are no more, replaced on our TV screens by stories of state-sponsored suitcase bombs.
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 the novel MAO II: ‘what terrorists gain, novelists lose’ and ‘home is a failed idea’, he blends archive hijackings with surreal and banal themes including fast food, pet statistics, disco and his quirky home movies. David Shea wrote the superb soundtrack to this roller coaster 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.”
Length: 1h8m