FOCUS: RE-FOCUS – Johan Grimonprez
“…documentary does not create an opportunity for free thought, but instills self-censorship in the viewer, who must absorb its images within the structure of a totalizing narrative.”
(Critical Art Ensemble, "Against Documentary", in The Electronic Disturbance, ed. Critical Art Ensemble, New York: Autonomedia, 1994, p. 42.)
There seems to be no better figure to devote this year’s Focus to than Johan Grimonprez, a multimedia artist-filmmaker whose decades-spanning works have captured the cultural-political zeitgeist of their times – and in hindsight, have become prophetic audio-visual cinematic texts for the times we live in: an interconnected media-landscape of pop-politics and global power dynamics.
Nestled loosely and moving freely between the art world and film industry, fiction and non-fiction cinema, his works have continued to explore language (oral, written, audio-visual), archives, mass-media, geo-politics and the ideologies that inform the construction of dominant narratives.
Of particular core focus of his films has been the insidious reciprocal relationship between mass-media and politics, starting from his feature debut dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y. Its exploration of airplane hijackings and their growing transformation as mediatized spectacle reflected the 90s “culture jamming” ethos through a rich and complex archival-footage essay format, simultaneously presaging the 9/11 terrorist attacks that would take place four years later.
DOUBLE TAKE, his 2009 sophomore feature expanded on the intersectionality of pop-culture and politics by exploring the theme of the “double” – a fictionalized encounter of Alfred Hitchcock with his double, the Cold War polarity between USA and the Soviet Union, and our interpellation within a collective climate of fear.
Yet it is Grimonprez’ more recent films that hone in on the timely urgency of his artistic and cinematic practice – and One World Romania’s choice for our Focus (followed by Q&A sessions in the presence of Johan Grimonprez). As media-feed hierarchies collapse and hybridize, the aforementioned reciprocal relationship between politics and (corporate) culture becomes more and more transparent, revealing an intertwined global network of power, profit and manipulation. Grimonprez’ 2016 film SHADOW WORLD is a gripping assemblage of archival & documentary footage that draws out the hidden dynamics of the arms industry in defining international political and economic policies. Ten years later, his cinematic indictment of corporate greed and political power under the aegis of the military industrial complex feels all the more urgent to revisit – for after all, “war is terror with a bigger budget.”
Such intricate web of corruption, deceit and complicity at the hands of global super-powers is further explored in his 2024 Oscar-nominated, award-winning film SOUNDTRACK TO A COUP D’ÉTAT – a fascinating archival assemblage of the interconnected political climate and events in 1960 that led to the assassination of Congo’s independence leader and prime minister, Patrice Lumumba.
Under Grimonprez’ directorial tour-de-force – buoyed by meticulous research into the complex political threads at play and incredible editing of archival footage (intermingling past & present) – the adage that ‘history is written by the victors’ becomes not only abundantly clear, but the driving, ideological force of the grand-narratives that make up our civilization’s collective memory.
The double standards of the international rules-based order of SOUNDTRACK TO A COUP D’ÉTAT echo loudly into the present, as the ‘gloves-off’ approach of global politics is now in full effect (and with disastrous results).
Johan Grimonprez remains one of the most politically engaged filmmakers currently working across the media landscape, imbuing all of his works with critical thinking, challenging narratives without shying away from making us uncomfortable and doubtful about the world we live in, forcing us to question not just the socio-political systems that govern us, but our own perception, understanding and formatting by them.
If there has been one omission in describing the character of Grimonprez’ works is that it is a cinema where poetry, irony and humanism offer an indispensable companion to its deep-rooted political engagement. It is no wonder Grimonprez chooses to conclude his short film THREE THOUGHTS ON TERROR (itself an extension of the research from SHADOW WORLD) with the words of Vijay Prashad, quoting the Pakistani poet Faiz Ahmad Faiz:
“...what you see around you, leaves you with no obligation but to feel something. And if that feeling cannot be controlled, you have to do something about it. You can’t refuse this world.”
