Johan Grimonprez

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.

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A detailed investigation into the political and economic interests that, since the beginning of the 20th century, have pulled the strings of the arms trade, hidden in the shadows, feeding the shameful corruption of politicians and government officials and promoting a state of permanent war throughout the world, while they cynically asked for a lasting and universal peace.

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In 1980 an extraordinary demonstration hit the streets of the Brazilian city of Sorocaba. Under the military dictatorship, a court had outlawed kisses that undermined public morals. The ruling by Judge Manuel Moralles, which punished such kisses with jail terms, described them this way: “some kisses are libidinous and therefore obscene, like a kiss on the neck, on the private parts, etc., and like the cinematographic kiss in which the labial mucosa come together in an unsophismable expansion of sensuality.” The city responded by becoming one huge kissodrome. Never had people kissed so much. Prohibition sparked desire and many were those who out of simple curiosity wanted a taste of the unsophismable kiss.

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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?

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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.

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During the making of Double Take, professional Hitchcock doppelgänger Ron Burrage pointed director Johan Grimonprez to a story doing the rounds online: supposedly, the Master of Suspense didn’t have a belly button. This captured the imagination of Grimonprez, as it implied that Hitchcock had not actually been born at all—an interesting extra layer on the hall of mirrors he was constructing in Double Take.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Renegade TV was a regular feature on late night Channel 4 in the UK in the late 1990's. This special was made in conjunction with Dazed Magazine and featured a Mondo style compilation of news clips and stories from around the world.

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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.

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The result of a workshop for which Franciska Lambrechts supplied a varied company of individuals and some basic equipment: a super-8 camera with 3 B/W films. What we see is a creative montage wherein the workshop and the discussed topics itself are at the core.

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Johan Grimonprez transposes an extract from Meg Stuart’s compelling choreography ‘No Longer Ready-Made’ to the anonymous waiting room of a railway station. This colourless space along with nameless travellers provides the excellent setting for Stuart’s hectic and intense convulsions. A train ride along the nightly Brussels northern area supports the vitriolic New York City prose of David Wojnarowicz on the soundtrack.

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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.

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