Double Take

This inventive documentary collage uses Alfred Hitchcock and his double to examine American media and culture of the 1960s. Historical footage uses contemporary TV adverts and follows the course of the Cold War.

The film is "deadly serious in its scrutiny of politics, anxiety and the media, but it is also a witty entertainment" Jonathan Romney Sight and Sound

"Illuminating and often hilarious.....not to be missed" Philip French.

Trailer

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dvsGSrS-9_M

"A man in a train is asked by another passenger about the mysterious object in the luggage rack; he explains that it is a macguffin, used to hunt lions in the Adirondack Mountains. But there are no lions in the Adirondack Mountains, the other man objects. To which the first impeturbably replies: "Then there is no macguffin". In "Double Take", Alfred Hitchcock himslf is the macguffin - the protean, elusive mystery around which Johan Grimonprez's extraodinary montage revolves.

The films' strands are all underwritten by the theme of the double. In a mini-history of the relationship between Russia and America, Grimonprez follows these rivalrous twins from the early years of the space race, through the Cuban missile crisis to Reagan's star wars.....Another strand follows Hitchcock's career as television clown - both as a master of prime time and its mocker...In his own tantalising fragmented narrative, Grimnoprez includes a series of commercial breaks - vintage TV ads for Folgers instant coffee in which the American housewife is terrorised with the threat that her husband will leave her if she can't provide a decent java...

Meanwhile, history is a twin to Hitchcockian cinema; the Cold War was an extended suspense narrative, the Cuban missile crisis its nailbiting peak. Cinema is most eloquent about history when treating it indirectly as metaphor, as in the 1950s space-invasion movies... The film ends with an excerpt of Donald Rumsfeld's notoriously gnomic speech about "known knowns", "known unknowns" and unknown unknowns". A macguffin , presumably , is an unknown unknown: while no one in a story knows what exactly what it is , everyone operates under the assumption that it exists...The orderly who leads the real/fake Hitchcock to the padded cell tells him that sure, sure, everyone is Hitchcock"

Jonathan Romney Sight and Sound.