December 31, 2006
Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y
Zapped!
"I love this old footage." In Sam Green's DVD commentary for his film The Weather Underground, a documentary about the revolutionary organization known mostly for its bombings, Sam Green explains that he really loves "old footage." Over the course of the commentary, Green gushes over everything from grainy night riots during the Sixties Days of Rage, to his own Super-8 footage of present day Baltimore — which, he's happy to tell us, looks just like it was shot in the Sixties. He likes old (looking) footage so much, and tells us so many times with obvious glee, it almost recalls the cameraman in Haskell Wexler's Medium Cool, whose own exclamation comes during a telecast on the assassination of Martin Luther King: "God, I love to shoot film!"
Like the cameraman in Cool, Green comes across as having more affinity for the medium than its message. While The Weather Underground is an engaging — and good looking — movie, it resorts to a rather typical "Remember When?" script of the Sixties that leaves the messy politics of history behind — and by history, I mean the sort of history we live each day, the sort that includes our present and future as well as our past. Uncovering archival footage can be important, sure, but Green's film doesn't ask how the Weather group is relevant to today; it narrows the discussion so that whatever questions it does prompt are limited to the morality of violence, and not — in my opinion — more pressing questions about movement building, total commitment, life-long struggle, and the racism, sexism and classism that can thoroughly fuck it all up.
At another point in his DVD commentary, Green cites Johan Grimonperez's Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y as a primary influence on his filmmaking. Content-wise, the connection is clear: like Sam Green, Grimonperez has revolutionary violence on his mind, and loads of "old footage" to show for it. Dial H is a collage — I'm tempted to write "barrage" — of news bits and found footage documenting a brief period in the 1970s where it was not all that uncommon for a revolutionary group (or individual) to take over a plane, take hostages, issue demands, and even quite possibly have those demands met. Think Al Pacino demanding an airplane to Algeria in Dog Day Afternoon.
Yet style-wise, much of Grimonperez's intentions seem lost on Green. The Weather Underground never questions its own questionable thesis about the history of The Sixties, while Dial H is nothing but questions — namely those about the making and unmaking of history in a world saturated by news media. Grimonperez's concern seems to be that violence denigrates the art of history, making it is as easy as dialing the telephone. If nothing else, violence guarantees you'll make the nightly news, which will inscribe your act for the ages. What's worse, by trivializing history, the de facto pact between television and terror wrests away power from the artists. Quoting Don DeLillo's novel Mao II, the narration laments, "What terrorists gain, novelists lose. The degree to which they influence mass consciousness is the extent of our decline as shapers of sensibility and thought. The danger they represent equals our own failure to be dangerous."
The passage from DeLillo suggests that novelists aren't all they could be — that art could be as challenging as violence, if only artists had the daring. Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y certainly doesn't lack for daring. Remarkable (old) footage of Seventies hijackings are left to speak for themselves, leaving bloody questions — and bodies — hanging in transit on the tarmac, accept for terse, often glib headline-like captions listing a date and the name of the revolutionary group responsible. This all leaves us, the audience, asking "What th?" like Superman in the old comics (or "WTF?" in my generation's Net speak). Before we can even think twice, Grimonperez interjects silly details, like what the hijacker's demands were for lunch.
In an interview, Grimonperez calls this exhausting technique "zapping," which he says "buys into the supermarket ideology, but at the same time it can embody a critical distance as well. It stems in fact from video-deck terminology: zapping, i.e. fast forwarding the videotape past the commercial." The problem with this artistic strategy is that it doesn't suggest a way out of the dilemma. The film itself seems to admit this in its parting sequence: a series of shots of planes crashing to the tune of the 70s disco hit "The Hustle." It's darkly humorous, but almost dumb in its bluntness — I wanted to exclaim, "We get it, we get it." Too much irony starches the thing, like a uniform — the editing itself, meant to provoke the viewer, is so forceful, so artsy, it gives its audience as much tough love as its hijackers.
Dial H does not want to compromise with its form, and in the process it becomes both circular and insular — like a lot of modern art. Indeed, the film often comes across as a stuffy video installation from any given modern art museum. Even Grimonperez's "Biography," found on-line, is less a life-story than a list you mind find in a professional artist's portfolio: "1986 BA in Media Art, Art Academy Gent, Belgien; 1987 Papua New Guinea (Indonesia); 1992 MFA video and media, School of Visual Arts, New York (USA); working with videotapes and installations since 1990; 1992 MFA Video & Mixed Media, School of Visual Arts, New York; 1993 scholarship of Independent Study Program at Whitney Museum New York; lives in Brussels." Which makes sense, given Grimonperez is a professional artist.
At the end of Sam Green's The Weather Underground, footage shows snow falling — not planes — meaning to suggest that an era is over: the narrative ends in sadness. Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y, as far as I could tell upon first viewing, has no narrative — indeed, Weather coasts by on the sort of storytelling Dial H is out to kill. In his commentary, Green admits that The Weather Underground is not a film about politics — which drives the film into the ground as hard as a falling plane. Choosing the Weather Underground as a subject is in itself a very political decision, and to tell their story without explaining their stated politics reduces the history of the 20th century into a series of mood swings. Dial H doesn't particularly address the details of revolutionary politics — but even so, at its best it lives up to the challenge of being every bit as daring as daring with media as a revolutionary can be with an AK-47. There's a great deal in the film I haven't even touched on. Too bad the form Grimonperez has chosen is such a marginal one. It's the sort of film people might write graduate theses on. That's a compliment to its ideas, a criticism of its craft.
