—Beware! In playing the phantom, you become one is a mobile video-library consisting of films, documentaries, music-videos, commercials, soaps & sitcoms. What criteria are applied when preparing the video programme?
—The programme, which is drawn up by Herman Asselberghs and myself, is based both on a local plug-in and the possibilities offered by the context of the presentation. For instance, at the Georges Pompidou Centre the video selection included a section entitled 'Les Français chez eux' . Moreover, the video collection is not systematically used again. In Berlin the selection was organised around the metaphor of the flying house which we took from the film the Wizard of Oz. Hence the title of the video library: 'Dorothy Doesn't Live Here Anymore'. Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y was shown in relation to the most recent hijack blockbuster Air Force One, another sort of flying house. Besides these we also included a section on 70s disaster movies such as Airport, and even ads of airline companies. Thus there are both different kinds of programmes and different models of video libraries. The mechanism itself evolves. In Geneva the video library was presented in a hotel. In Berlin the venue was a house on the former east-west border. I also made part of my private collection of books available to the public there. In general I like places that extend the context of an art practice. Next September the video library will be presented in a state prison in Germany.

—A different appreciation of how the videos were organised, was possible with the Website during Documenta, as they can be moved within the system that you have set up, because the hypertext links enabled one to move from references and comments to the films themselves.
—Yes, these complement one another. The video library involves the same possibilities of association and overlapping as the Web, but in a low-tech version. VHS is a domestic, nostalgic support which is easy to access and goes very well with a cup of coffee! That is in fact the difference between the environment created in our library and the Internet: since, in terms of its user-friendliness and convivial atmosphere, when a viewer chooses to look at a particular tape, he is establishing his own programme, he becomes the curator.

—Can you explain the meaning of the title: Beware! In playing the phantom, you become one?
—If 'phantom' is interpreted as 'media', you get the idea that each person is constructing his own media once he starts collecting videos, since he establishes intertextual links between the films. The living-room at home can become a place of resistance, a place for adopting a critical distance vis-à-vis mainstream media, demonstrating the fact that the viewer is therefore never a passive consumer. In the case of Beware!, the resistance emerges within what is a medium in itself, which is also mobile and evolutionary. I think that's where it is possible to offer a critical awareness, when operating from within.

—Your film Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y is based on your experience with the video library. Is the film intended as a demonstration of a way of reappropriating and linking sources, on the basis of an arbitrary subject - hijacking - or did you come up with the subject initially, which then determined the form?
—In fact there are several entries to the project. The theme of hijacking planes can be read as a metaphor for the hijacking of images out of their context, as in the video library project. It is an iconoclastic pleasure accessible to the viewer as well as an aesthetic strategy on which the film is based. On the one hand, there are the images which I hijack in order to arouse a debate, on the other hand, there are the events which I situate in their historical context, specifying the places and dates, but in a similar way to CNN, for instance, which is already engaged in re-contextualition by transforming narration into soap opera or by inserting ads between news items. It is also situates the complicity between history and television in terms of a specific timeline: the evolution in the way hijackings have been represented on television. That's why I started the film with the first live televised hijacking. Then there are two levels of comments on the images: a fictional narration based on extracts from the novels Mao II and White Noise by Don DeLillo, where a discussion is taking place between a terrorist and a novelist, besides of course a more critical personal commentary.

—Is there a link between the way the video library is set up and the specific writing of the film, in the sense of editing and the use of archival or external sources?
—There is more than just archival footage, although it does represent most of the film. Some of the sequences are filmed with my camcorder, intimate scenes: rooms where I've lived, my travel experiences - an investment in autobiographical terms. The point of departure was actually a personal story, the idea of saying goodbye, which I confronted with a broader political picture. The theme of hijacking is only a metaphor to talk about something else and Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y is in fact linked to several axes, similar to the video library.
It is an analysis of plane hijacks and terrorism, but there is also the underlying theme of the home, of belonging. When Leila Khaled renames the plane she just hijacked as the independent state of Palestine, she is symbolically claiming a home for an entire people. This is also the recurrent image in the Wizard of Oz where the storm carries Dorothy's house over the rainbow, which I developed differently as a theme in the video library at büro Friedrich in Berlin . Both illustrate the transgression across a violent border into the land of utopia. The home, the meeting place of the family, is totally absorbed—or one could even say hijacked, by the tv-set, which has become a permanent member of the family. Catastrophe culutre has taken the home over the rainbow!. It is this intimate relationship which can be maintained with the TV that I wish to investigate. As far as I am concerned, I assimilated these images and they belong to me as though I had filmed them. This kind of schizophrenia is part of every viewer. Only a critical approach can get us out of this schizophrenia, which I wanted to demonstrate with the video library. We are always on the inside and on the outside, thus there is no distance in the way in which we look at the images. This is how memory functions.

—It is true that some of the images in Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y are among the most spectacular we have ever seen on television. The crash of the Airbus during a demonstration flight is part of our visual repertory. In your film, you remind us that there is a number of ways of looking upstream and downstream of the facts: political and social circumstances, etc.
—Indeed, while these global political facts invade our home, in the individual experience we have of these events, we are not placed at a distance. These images form part of a common perspective but also belong to us individually. In this relationship between the individual and the image, we must also take account the changing aspect of television's appearance: the speeding up of the flow of images, the shift from film to the dramatic emergence of video in the 1980s and at the same moment the arrival of permanent news around the clock on CNN, for instance. Our relationship with history, and with reality, has consequently changed, notably because of this permanent present. Our relationship with death and its representation has also changed. To make an ironical allusion to the collapse of the distance between spectator and television, I quote in the film a survival of the Panama Boeing crash in Lockerbie, who said: "I was watching 'This is Your Life' when the plane crashed through the ceiling and knocked me headfirst into the television set".

—Everything that could be identified as an absurd, obscene, funny or dramatic image is placed at a distance both in the editing and in the superimposition of the music, in contrasts with the over-dramatisation we are used to on television.
—I hate the idea of being didactic. My film has already been compared with Société du spectacle by Guy Debord, which also balances the images with a voice-off, but a rather dry one. With Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y it was important precisely to explore the phenomena of identification and pleasure, to get the viewer to adopt a critical distance while at the same time involving him and incorporating his own voyeurism. Like the Japanese woman looking for her husband at the airport, who is followed by the camera for a very long time. It is a kind of voyeurism of voyeurism. I mean that the intimate body, as meant by Foucault, is completely controlled. Advertising has pervaded the body and made it completely transparent, exposed in every microscopic detail, and followed permanently by omnipresent monitoring devices, from the camera to the x-rays, and we conform to this inquisitive way of surveillance.
The desire we have for the ultimate disaster is one aspect of our relationship with death. In this relationship, the media have become more and more the key player, totally exacerbating the terrorist spectacle. In the final sequence the film displays TV's compolicity with death as a reporter pushes a microphone into the face of the hostage-taker in Leningrad, who has a bullet in his stomach, until he dies on the set. The man is not even capable of answering the question on the reason why he took the hostages. The final statement on terrorism: silence, nothing can be added. This image shocked people but the end of the sequence shows how the media is left only with itself. It's 'post-cynical'.

—The hijacking of the images enables them to be linked in the re-writing, that is virtually a fictionalisation, with the protagonists ranging from Castro to Clinton to heros, like Leila Khaled. Reality has become fiction already in the way the media handles it, and also in the way you handle it yourself.
—In fact the news has taken over the codes used by the fiction film industry, just as Hollywood has appropriated jumping images and trembling cameras to show an earthquake or military attack, to produce a realistic effect. The television and the cinema exchange aesthetic strategies. CNN and the other channels have also adopted the use of music to dramatise their subjects. The editing of televised news programmes is based on this fictionalisation. Conversely, dramatic events we experience in real life lose credibility because there is no violin or dramatic angle to highlight the event and soon only Hollywood will be able to wring tears from our eyes!

—The title Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y illustrates this invitation to rewrite and reinterpret history.
—Indeed, and by making it possible to do so live simply by dialling a telephone number, to mock with all the telephone services available now. In the present day we are involved in a game of viewing history in real terms. Maybe one day we'll be able to order a chapter of history and choose a different end! The example of Wag the Dog shows the opposite of what usually happens: fiction anticipates real events, in this case a president who invents a war to distract the attention of the media from his private life. Hollywood was faster than real life! The other aspect is that Sadam Hussein had Wag the Dog broadcast on the Iraqi national television channel. This brings the game of appropriating the media and the viewing of events even further.

—The metaphor of hijacking is a comment on the writing and de-programming of images in order to recontextualize its meaning. The terrorists are trying in their own way to change the direction of events. It is rather self-reflecting compared with the editing.
—Yes, the film mirrors this strategy. This also reflects the ideology of zapping, which can be an extreme form of poetry, going much further than collage. The Gulf War was a huge source of inspiration for me: it was a real show, with images of death being served up with ketchup. Only the laugh tracks and the applause are missing.. How can images of death be interspersed with advertisements? CNN has turned news into a commodity. In my film, there is the image of a man pushed from an Iranair plane on the runway at Larnaca, Cyprus, and then the screen goes black, with the words: INSERT COMMERCIAL HERE. That was a sequence I took as it stood. It is a breakdown in meaning, like something Brecht might have produced. In my view, it reflects the combination of two traditions: on the one hand the fictionalisation and the dramatisation of history as found in Eisenstein, and on the other hand that of the presence of the camera in the image, as in Dziga Vertov, which reveals the ideology of the medium.

—Is there a link between the figure of the terrorist and that of the artist? The terrorist represents a kind of ultimate commitment to defending an idea, and a comment in the film says "what terrorists gain, novelists lose".
—I do not wish to disregard the meaning of terrorism in political terms. I am quoting Don DeLillo who compares the position of the terrorist in public life to that of the writer, which no longer has the same value as in the last century. DeLillo is insinuating that the terrorist has replaced the role of the writer in society, which is right, particularly since terrorists know how to manipulate the media. But there is another conversation concerning the ideological disruptions of the 60s and 70s, and the heritage of utopic, revolutionary projects which imploded in the 80s. The sentence you quoted is also a kind of provocation, but I have always wanted to do this in a contextualised way, not abstractly, relating it to historic images. Terrorism in Palestine today and that of the extreme right-wing groups in the United States certainly do not have the same meaning.

—But at certain moments you do take a stance, in the editing or in the commentary, such as political differences of course, but also social and cultural differences which make the west clash head-on with minorities elsewhere.
—Yes, but the word terrorist has become devoid of meaning in its relationship with the media. The acceptance of the word has been appropriated by the global power game in a worldwide masquerading show. Reagan turned this game to his own advantage. A game with obscene side-effects in terms of the enormous amount of information on the death of one American on a TWA flight in 1987 in Beirout, and, in opposition, the silence on the Reagan administration's policy in Central America, where 10.000s of people died. This spectacularisation of events is used to disguise the hypocrisy and the big shit underneath. Political power has largely taken over the spectacle of terrorism. The main terrorist groups have been increasingly infiltrated, like that of Abu Nidal by the Israeli Mossad, so that the obscene game can go on under their names.

—It is a game in two directions, since the terrorists use this method of action in particular to capture media attention and become visible.
—At the start yes, because terrorism had names and faces: Ulrike Meinhof, Leila Khaled, Kozo Okamoto or Mouna Abdel Maid... They made primetime in the mass media, then we moved on from plane hijackings to anonymous bombs in suitcases, which were not claimed by anyone. So the big political powers appropriated these attacks to propagate their causes. Therefore it becomes more and more of a media game in which anyone can be involved. The image of the terrorist is replaced by a flow of crowds. Like with Don DeLillo where the writer is lost as a subject vis-à-vis the mass media. He wonders about the necessity of writing and the fate of the individual at a time when history has been swallowed by a disaster culture. For instance, look at the honeymooners on holiday in the Comoros who by chance filmed a hijacked boeing crashing into the sea. They were immediately invited to appear on CNN. Nowadays with the recent camcorder revolution viewers can send in their own little catastrophes and form part of the media. The heroes are no longer the terrorists, but the viewers, or even the image itself. The relationship with history is cancelled out, in favour of the image. Virilio wrote that each new technology invents its own disaster, for instance the invention of the plane led to the invention of the plane crash. With the emergence of TV, another relationship to death and disaster has been invented. Thus in the case of the Gulf War, the distance between event and camera, mounted on top of the missiles, seemed ever so close, as close as death can be—whereas the spectacle replaced the critical distance and obscured the fact that the war was launched to sell the technology of surgical war, to boost the american dollar in the first place. Apart from television's complicitious claim to reality today, what the media are selling is history itself!

(Interview with Pierre Bal-Blanc and Mathieu Marguerin, Blocnotes No.15, summer 1998)

(translation: Mary Shovelin)