Niels Van Tomme: In your essay film Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y, 1997, you explored the subject of hijacking in order to hijack the media. You also used the writings of Don DeLillo to comment on the images you appropriated. Your new film, Double Take, 2009, is inspired by Jorge Luis Borges' short story "August 25, 1983," 1983. For someone who has been called "a child of the TV generation," that's a lot of literary influences. What role does literature play in your work?

Johan Grimonprez: In Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y, but also in DeLillo's novel Mao II, 1991, several characters talk simultaneously: the novelist in dialogue with a terrorist, one embodying the book, the other TV. The writer declares the death of the novel, because the terrorist is able to play the media much better. The bomb-maker replaces the novelist. That's the thesis of Mao II, but not necessarily of the film, because Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y suggests that the media hijack the terrorist in return. Ironically, the film is based on a book that declares the death of the novel, while it is a collaboration with its writer. Double Take operates somewhat similarly. I worked with novelist Tom McCarthy to adapt a short story by Borges. That's what takes you into the film. Whereas, in the short story, you have Borges meeting Borges, in the film, it's Hitchcock meeting Hitchcock. In essence, it's a metaphor for a lot of things, hence the title Double Take.

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Carl Pope often emphasizes that The Bad Air Smelled of Roses, begun in 2005, is a writing project. Thus far, some ninety letterpress broadsides make up his ongoing essay on Blackness. I am using these two words very deliberately, as both essay and Blackness refuse to remain still as signifying units; each finds its meaning in the forms that it inaugurates, reminding us that knowledge is a process as much as a body of information, a search that deeply implicates the tools we use.

And each of these two words also reminds us that certain cultures, like certain literary forms, are engaged in immanent processes of generation and regeneration. Responding to the obstacles and intensities that they encounter in the world, they adjust and morph, find new qualities and new modes of expression.

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