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

Vietnam veteran Raffaele Minichiello went down in history as the world’s first transatlantic airline hijacker when in 1969 he forced a TWA pilot at gunpoint to fly from California to Italy. This film essay, which became Johan Grimonprez’ international breakthrough, rewrites the history of plane hijackings in parallel with the rise of a catastrophe culture.

The disturbing mix of news footage, commercial breaks, science fiction clips, found footage and home videos played to sunny pop music, shows how Minichiello’s imitators became increasingly extreme, and their actions more deadly in response to state terrorism.

But more than being a film about terrorism, dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y is about the ever-increasing influence of mass media and how it has turned us into consumers of fear.

Playing on Don DeLillo’s riff from his novel Mao II “what terrorists gain, novelists lose”, the film stages a writer entering into a dialogue with a terrorist, arguing that the latter has displaced him in his ability to influence society. Grimonprez, in turn, argues that radio and TV have hijacked terrorism: they have transformed it into a spectacle.