Double Take
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Tue 4 May 2010 // 20:00
Wed 5 May 2010 // 20:00
(Tues 3rd, Wed 4th / 8pm / £4/3/2ttt)
(Johan Grimonprez / 2009 / Belgium/Germany/Netherlands / 80 minutes)
An ingenious hybrid, Double Take is part mock-documentary, part conceptual provocation, and altogether a thought-provoking, hugely entertaining piece that does for Alfred Hitchcock what Orson Welles did for himself in his myth-making F for Fake.
Using a zippy assemblage of TV and newsreel material, Grimonprez muses on Hitchcock's persona and humour, reading his films of the late 50s and early 60s against the climate of Bomb-era political anxiety. The film especially mulls on Hitchcock's preoccupation with doubles, a theme that recurs not just in his films but in the intros to the vintage TV series Alfred Hitchcock Presents. Interwoven with all this is a mass of newsreel material, dealing largely with US-USSR Cold War relations, and focusing on America's relationship with that other famous Hitchcock look-alike Nikita Krushchev. Grimonprez leaves viewers to draw their own conclusions about identity, filmmaking, power and paranoia, but the film's love of Hitchcock - artist, public face, TV clown - is unmistakeable and very infectious.
(Johan Grimonprez / 2009 / Belgium/Germany/Netherlands / 80 minutes)
An ingenious hybrid, Double Take is part mock-documentary, part conceptual provocation, and altogether a thought-provoking, hugely entertaining piece that does for Alfred Hitchcock what Orson Welles did for himself in his myth-making F for Fake.
Using a zippy assemblage of TV and newsreel material, Grimonprez muses on Hitchcock's persona and humour, reading his films of the late 50s and early 60s against the climate of Bomb-era political anxiety. The film especially mulls on Hitchcock's preoccupation with doubles, a theme that recurs not just in his films but in the intros to the vintage TV series Alfred Hitchcock Presents. Interwoven with all this is a mass of newsreel material, dealing largely with US-USSR Cold War relations, and focusing on America's relationship with that other famous Hitchcock look-alike Nikita Krushchev. Grimonprez leaves viewers to draw their own conclusions about identity, filmmaking, power and paranoia, but the film's love of Hitchcock - artist, public face, TV clown - is unmistakeable and very infectious.