Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y

Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y is a post-modern documentary, an eclectic tale, a fable of the twentieth century, an experiment in thought and a visual and sound collage all at once. It is the kind of film that invites one to reflect on relationships between politics, technology, rhetoric, entertainment, media, literature and history. This video was one of the spearheads of the Dokumenta, led by Cathérine David.

The history of the last thirty years, told through terrorist attacks, especially plane hijacks. This is the simple yet effective recipe for this entertaining compilation. The maker has had to wade through a lot of archives to find this variety of pictures. From TV news to cartoons, from commercials for modern living to instruction films to combat aerial terrorism and from interviews with hijackers and victims to the occasionally absurd comments of politicians. Nixon, Castro, Mao, Reagan and Sadat: in this film they look like puppets in a theatre they did not choose for themselves.

Intellectual weight is added by the voice-overs of the American writer Don DeLillo, who links terrorism and the act of writing in his work and refers to the media’s strange marriage with everything that smells of calamity. The soundscape of the film is provided by the New York avant-gardist David Shea.