Johan Grimonprez

Biography

Johan Grimonprez was born in Roeselare, Belgium in 1962. He studied at the School of Visual Arts and attended the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program in New York.

Grimonprez achieved international acclaim with his film essay, Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y. With its premiere at Centre Pompidou and Documenta X in Kassel in 1997, it eerily foreshadowed the events of September 11th. The film tells the story of airplane hijackings since the 1970s and how these changed the course of news reporting. The movie consists of recycled images taken from news broadcasts, Hollywood movies, animated films and commercials. As a child of the first TV generation, the artist mixes reality and fiction in a new way and presents history as a multi-perspective dimension open to manipulation.

Grimonprez's Looking for Alfred, 2005, plays with the theme of the double through simulations and reversals. The point of departure is the film director Alfred Hitchcock and his legendary guest appearances in his own films. Innumerable Hitchcock doppelgangers act out a mysterious game of confusion in which Hitchcock meets Hitchcock. This puzzling game of confusion also pays tribute to the pictorial cosmos of the Surrealist painter René Magritte. Looking for Alfred won the International Media Award (ZKM, Germany) in 2005 as well as the European Media Award in 2006.

Grimonprez's productions have traveled the main festival circuit from Telluride, Los Angeles, Rio de Janeiro, to Tokyo and Berlin. Curatorial projects were hosted at major exhibitions and museums worldwide such as the Whitney Museum in New York, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich and the Tate Modern in London. Grimonprez's work is included in numerous collections such as the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, the Kanazawa Art Museum, Japan, the National Gallery, Berlin and the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Denmark. Grimonprez is currently a faculty member at the School of Visual Arts (New York).

Johan Grimonprez lives and works in Brussels and New York.

Filmography:

Double Take (documentary), 2009
Looking for Alfred (short), 2005
Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y (documentary), 2003

Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y

Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y (Orig.) / 2003 / Belgium, France / 68 min

DIAL H-I-S-T-O-R-Y, the 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 1960's and 1970's...

News

DOC ALLIANCE SELECTION OF THE MOST INTERESTING FILMS

We have prepared a retrospective of the films nominated for the Doc Alliance Selection Award (a distinctive choice of films from all DAFilms partner festivals).

You can stream 4 of them to May 26 FOR FREE: The Anabasis of May and Fusako Shigenobu, Masao Adachi and 27 Years without Images – director Eric Baudelaire reveals one of the best kept secrets of Japanese cinematography and society associated with the Japanese red army. The story of a forgotten visionary, a maverick, a wanderer: One Billion Happy People. Or a filmic search for the worldwide phenomenon of the micronation movement Empire Me - New Worlds Are Happening. Work Hard, Play Hard (free stream from May 21) about a world in which people are completely committed to making their job their purpose in life.

Canada through poetic and experimental lens

We offer a selection of the most interesting Canadian documentaries from the database of the National Film Board. Until the end of the week, you have the opportunity to watch poetic, experimental and animated documentary films made in Canada. We will introduce, for instance, works by the noteworthy avant-garde author of film collages, Arthur Lipsett, and films such as Pour la suite du monde, Le règne du jour, Les voitures d'eau by the Canadian documentarist Pierre Perrault.

COOKING HISTORY

A documentary film about army cooks and how the everyday needs of thousands of armed stomachs affect the victories and defeats of statesmen. About the field kitchen as a model of a world where food preparation becomes a fight strategy; a fight for great ideals standing on strong legs of the kitchen table. The film is based on eleven recipes of the cooks since the Second World War till the war in Tchechenia; from France through the Balkans to Russia.

FOR FREE STREAM TO MAY 12.