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Johan Grimonprez's film Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y is being screened several times a day. I first encountered this extraordinary work in a small, suffocating room at Documenta X last year, where it stood out as a headlong assault on the senses.

Now, in its British premiere, Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y still has a visceral impact. It starts in a deceptively lyrical way with a plane coming in to land from a cloudy sky. But Grimonprez, a young Belgian artist adept at mixing news footage, silent movies, cartoons, amateur video sequences and much else besides, cuts swiftly and brutally to horrifying shots of a jumbo jet erupting in flames on the runway. The rest of the film spares us nothing in its relentless exploration of hijacking in the air.

The film is interwoven with readings from Don DeLillo's White Noise and Mao II. They lend it a wry, ruminative quality, set apart from the often harrowing scenes re corded by news cameramen. The lifeless body of an executed pilot is dropped like refuse onto the airport tarmac. Three captive jets, marooned in a distant heat-haze, are blown up with sickening efficiency, one after another.

Grimonprez never lets us forget the voracious presence of photographers, reporters and the rest of the international media scrum. They jostle dazed hostages emerging at last from a protracted ordeal, and keep cameras running on a howling mother as she hugs her desperately wounded son. The creepiness of airport interiors is chillingly conveyed. So are the games played by politicians, especially the leaders of revolutionary causes espoused by so many hijackers themselves. Lenin lays on a shameless display of cat-stroking, Castro and Khrushchev fraternise on a snowbound shooting trip in the forest, and a colossal photograph of the avuncular Stalin floats above a Soviet parade.

After a while, everything becomes weirdly theatrical. Everyone seems embroiled in a murderous form of show-business. One bespectacled schoolboy released by guerrillas admits, grinning, that they were "real nice - I loved it, I had a good time". And a psychologist studying the ter rorist mentality analyses the erotic pleasure a young hijacker derives from prodding an air-hostess with his gun and shouting: "Honey, we're going all the way."

In the end, Grimonprez's film induces a feeling of nausea - partly caused by the incessant bloodshed, partly by the ruthless media clamour, and partly by the feeling that, as a voice on the soundtrack observes, "there's too much of everything - only the terrorist stands outside". Maybe Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y is itself guilty of overkill.

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