Dir: Johan Grimonprez
Country: Belgium/Germany/Netherlands
Year: 2009
Duration: 80mins
Print Source: clement@umedia.fr
www.umedia.fr
Johan Grimonprez's Double Take looks at events around Alfred Hitchcock's 1962 classic The Birds. Hitchcock, famous for cameos in his own works and his pranks, is rumoured to have come second in a Hitchcock look-a-like contest. Obsessed with the double throughout his work, Hitch met his doppelganger (or was it his future self?) on the set of The Birds, and as Hitchcock or possibly a skilled impersonator states: "if you ever meet your doppelganger, you're supposed to kill him, or he's supposed to kill you." While Alfred Hitchcock's presence defines this wonderful movie, the film also examines the very nature of filmmaking and television, Cold War politics, coffee adverts and the early years of the space race.
A more than worthy successor to Grimonprez's Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y, Double Take shifts from documentary to essay to speculation, capturing the essential stylistic pleasures of Hitchcock's works: the MacGuffin, mistaken identity, and the chase. Absolutely essential viewing.