Designed around the mediation of testimony, this program borrows the idea of juxtaposing a testimony with its retelling from Jean Eustache's Une sale histoire. In Eustache's work we are invited to watch a recorded document-a storyteller recounting a “dirty story”-and its remake, without any indication which of the two is the original and which is the reenactment. In Hostage: The Bachar Tapes, Walid Raad mimics the run-down quality of the kidnappers' recordings from the “Western Hostage Crisis” of the 1980s and early nineties in producing recordings of an imagined hostage presumably held in custody with the Americans in Lebanon. Raad's work reflects on the invention and communication of stories of abduction. The original videotape of Joseph Cicippio, abducted and held in Lebanon by a pro-Iranian group between 1986 and 1991, is shown here both to give an idea of what such tapes looked like, and to reveal hidden meaning in widely distributed testimonies, which are often taken literally and consumed as actuality by the media. These revelations are possible when documents are juxtaposed with critical remakes like Raad's.

Hostage: The Bachar Tapes (Walid Raad, Lebanon/U.S., 2000, 17 mins, Color, Beta SP, From Video Data Bank). Joseph Cicippio, videotape produced during his abduction (1989, 2 mins, Color, DVCam). Une sale histoire (Une sale histoire racontée par Jean-Noël Picq) (Jean Eustache, France, 1977, 50 mins, Color, 35mm, From French Ministry of Foreign Affairs, permission Les Films du Losange).