Three Thoughts on Terror

Feature documentary that explores the international arms trade, the only business that counts its profits in billions and losses in human lives.

Obsessed with de/reconstructing our corrupted visions of media, celebrity and appearance, Johan Grimonprez assembled a bewildering gaggle of Hitchcock lookalikes, staggering in girth and exacting in attitude, in a quest to find the most accurate specimen.

Kobarweng reconstructs the first encounter between a remote village set in the highlands of the island of New Guinea and the outside world. Mainly told through a native narrative, it reclaims the memory of a colonial past. Switching the roles of observer and observed, it is anthropology-and specifically the desire underlying anthropological representation, that is depicted as an object of curiosity destabilized by the villager's questions. Point of departure was Kaiang Tapior's question "Where is your helicopter?", a remark which puzzled the filmmaker during his visit to the village of Pepera.

Director Johan Grimonprez casts Alfred Hitchcock as a paranoid history professor, unwittingly caught up in a double take on the cold war period. Subverting a meticulous array of TV footage and using 'The Birds' as an essential metaphor, DOUBLE TAKE traces catastrophe culture's relentless assault on the home, from moving images' inception to the present day.

In 1515 Machiavelli stated that it is better for the Prince to be feared than loved. Some 500 years later, Michael Hardt, political philosopher and co-author of Empire, Multitude and Commonwealth, asks what it would mean to base a political system on love, rather than on fear. How can we transform a society that is increasingly defined by a permanent state of war and cultivated by an industry of fear? How can we realize the paradigm shift necessary to move away from a reality that depends on the exploitation of people and the cult of privatisation of public resources?

In Blue Orchids, Johan Grimonprez creates a double portrait of two experts situated on opposite ends of the same issue—the global arms trade. The stories of Chris Hedges, a former New York Times war correspondent, and Riccardo Privitera, arms and equipment dealer for the now-defunct Talisman Europe Ltd, provide an unusual and disturbing context for shocking revelations about the industry of war. While interviewing Privitera and Hedges for Grimonprez’s recently released feature Shadow World (2016), it became clear that the two men were describing the same anguish and trauma, but from paradoxical perspectives. One has dedicated his life to unmasking lies, while the other has built his life on them. Both their personal and political histories gradually reveal the depths of suffering and duplicity, showing that the arms trade is a symptom of a profound illness: greed.

In January 1999, at the height of the Lewinsky-Clinton affair, Herman Asselberghs and Dieter Lesage asked me if I would be in for a trip to Lost Nation. They explained this was part of a project they were setting up in Brussels: a place slash library slash installation about vanished nations such as Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, East and West Germany, USSR, and Zaire. But where was Lost Nation? Browsing through their library, Herman and Dieter stumbled onto Lost Nation, an American village located on Highway 136 in Eastern Iowa, with a community of 497 citizens. And so, this little road movie was the result. A trip to a nation where the average citizen spends about 5 years of his lifetime waiting in line, 2 years trying to reach people by telephone, 1 year searching for misplaced objects, 8 months opening junk-mail and 6 months sitting at traffic lights. A nation that attempted to impeach the wrong president.

Dozens of couples dance in a circle, a house topples down a slope, a cat manically revolves around itself. A few seconds beforehand, an admonishing voice points out that a centuries-old philosophical assumption is under close scrutiny. It is René Descartes’ first tenet, »I think, therefore I am,« that the British neurologist Raymond Tallis calls into question in the video by the artist Johan Grimonprez. Tallis takes the view that human consciousness is not an individual construction but exists above all in relation to a vis-à-vis.

An 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 1960s and '70s. By the 1990s, such characters were apparently no more, replaced on our TV screens by stories of anonymous bombs in suitcases. Director Johan Grimonprez investigates the politics behind this change, at the same time unwrapping our own complicity in the urge for ultimate disaster.

An anthropologist, who tries to decode corporate culture, gets obsessed with the story of a parachutist who died after his equipment malfunctioned. In the parachutist's finitude - caught in an ultimate meditative moment of plunging to an approaching death - the anthropologist sees a sudden and catastrophic voiding of the webs that hold and cradle us all.