Unpacking Johan Grimonprez’s Film, Double Take
Double Take (“But It Is 1962″)


“If you meet your double, you should kill him” is the quote that seems to weigh on me from the sections of this film work that can be found online. I have to find the entire feature — there is just something so insanely interesting about this to me. Director Johan Grimonprez, in Double Take, casts director Alfred Hitchcock as a paranoid history professor. And who should he meet in this story? None other than himself, Alfred Hitchcock.

Double Take (“If You Meet Your Double, You Should Kill Him”)

Taking place during the cold war period, the found(?) and often times only marginally related film footage provides the visual correspondent for a narrative that continually falls apart. The commentary, according to what I could suss out online, juxtaposes Hitchcock’s insightful but impolite observations with the era’s politicians and their attempts to deliver the “right” message to their respective publics.

According to the blurb on You Tube, “Double Take targets the global rise of fear-as-a-commodity, in a tale of odd couples and hilarious double deals. As television hijacks cinema, and the Khrushchev and Nixon kitchen debate rattles on, sexual politics quietly take off and Alfred himself emerges in a dandy new role on the TV, blackmailing housewives with brands they can’t refuse.”

Double Take (“The Nixon-Khrushchev Summit Meet”)

Novelist Tom McCarthy constructed the plot, which delves into the murky depths of paranoia and its murderous grip on Hitchcock and his double as things spiral downward. Throughout the film, Hitchcock and his double plot to kill each other, against the backdrop of the times. Again, according to YouTube, “Grimonprez traces catastrophe culture’s relentless assault on the home, from the inception of televised images to our present day zapping neurosis.”

Double Take (“The Humiliation of Old Age”)

Double Take (“We Have Scripted This Moment Together”)

Double Take (“I Didn’t Get That”)

Edited by Tyler Hubby (The Devil and Daniel Johnston, Welcome to Death Row) and Dieter Diependaele.
Post copyright 2009 Matty Byloos