Flaherty Seminar - Opening Night

This is my first time at the Flaherty Film Seminar, a 5-day + 1 night epic , all-out documentary screening and discussion extravaganza.  Flaherty calls it a "film event" and claims it is the longest continuously running "film event," pre-dating all film festivals, in North America.  This year is the 60th anniversary of the Seminar, which was started by Robert Flaherty's widow Frances, convenes filmmakers, critics, curators, academics and other film enthusiasts.  This year's program is curated by Gabriela Monroy & Caspar Stracke.

The opening night screening featured a kind of rhyming scheme of video works, meditations on airplane hijackings, air travel and media representations of violence.  The opening film by Belgian artist Johan Grimonprez was Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y, a work from 1997, a mesmerizing cacophonous video montage of airplane hijackings, mainly from the 1970s which seeks to chart the origins and development of airline hijacking as political resistance from Cuba and the Soviet era to Palestinian terrorism through the Regan era, with a crucial turning point of the Entebbe PLO hijacking.  The work seems to me to want to carve a radical political tact which humanizes infamous PLO terrorists, including female PLO hijacker Leila Khaled and suggests a meditation on the ways in which strategies of political resistance and strategies of political control feed each other into ever more dehumanizing spirals of technology and the violence that technology enables.

Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y was followed by German video artist Hito Steyerl's 2010 digital video work In Free Fall.  Steyerl's work is directly in conversation with the earlier work by Grimonprez and the two pieces made for an interesting dialogue, in some ways easily classified as pre and post 9/11.  Steyerl's brings the video appropriation to another level of meta consciousness, using the framing device of watching a video within a video and contemplating the recycling of decommissioned airplanes which are also used for staging Hollywood film airline crashes and Hollywood scenes of airline hijackings.  An Israeli actor also acts as a kind of questioning and self-conscious narrator, as well as a Hollywood cinematographer who meditates on not just airline crashes but also economic crashes. The film ultimately asks us to consider if representations of (and cultural obsessions with)  crashes cause real world (economic) crashes.

In a way, both videos are also meditations on outdated technologies, Steyerl's work specifically focuses on the DVD and the repurposing of aluminum from old planes to new DVD manufacturing processes.  Grimonprez's work focuses on archival television news, pre-CNN, when terrorists appeared on television, gave press conferences and answered questions by the media and then post Regan when CNN and other news outlets forbid terrorists from appearing on the news and speaking directly to cameras.  Grimonprez brought up the idea of the recycling of ideologies and the junkyard of ideologies that both works suggest as well as a neurosis of repetition which the television news creates.  Also discussed, the piracy of meaning which both hijacking and the news media and political power enact.