The Belgian born artist Johann Grimonprez occupied the fruitmarket gallery between the 22nd May to 11th July 2010, showing a retrospective of his films from Dial a H.I.S.T.O.R.Y, the film which brought him to prominence through it’s eerily prophetic allusions to 9/11, to Double Take his latest venture, a gripping narrative which explores binary opposites and their inevitable/necessary existence.
Grimonprez’s aesthetic, comprises a conglomeration of archive footage and film clips, interspersed with advertisements, resulting in a narrative, which engenders the equivalent of collage for time-based media.
Although all his films are interesting, it is Double Take which was the show-stopper for me.
His effortless combination of archive footage of the cold war years in which America and Russia are presented as an analogy of Hitchcock and his double and film clips from Hitchcock’s the Birds, question the substantiality of documentary as fact. Instead through the fictional film clips, Grimonprez undermines the supposedly factual news clips, illustrating the theatricality of television and reminding us that what we in fact accept to be truth is far from neutral.
Grimonprez preoccupation with doppelganger illustrated in the very title of the work (Double Take), uses the fictional narrative of Hitchcock meeting his double, to illustrate the threat that one feels from ‘the Other’, whether personally or politically. This is chillingly brought to the fore with the quote “if you meet your double, you should kill him, before he kills you” an idiom that wonderfully expresses the commodity of fear conjured up by the media and popular culture.
In a historical context, Grimonprez cleverly sums up the binary opposites of America and Russia, through their disparate powers, expressed through the triumph of commodity in the consumer culture of America demonstrated through the repeated coffee commercials and Russia's triumphs in science, most notably sputnik, the ‘space race’ and nuclear warheads, alluded to through clips from Hitchcock’s the birds, which suggest fear from above.
All in all through Grimonprez’s myriad of references he creates a rich and complex work, that not only questions the documentary medium itself, but through archival footage of the cold war, expresses the fact that existence does not consist of one unified reality but rather multiple realities, a point which is enforced by the suggestion that television, specifically news clips are a product of the nation in which they are aired. Grimonprez’s films are intellectually challenging, however the result is a work that is conceptually outstanding and encourages the viewer to question his own perception of the world.
As part of its educational programme, the Fruitmarket gallery organised a series of talks surrounding Grimonprez and his works which are available on the website and provide an invaluable resource for anyone interested in delving into his films.
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