{"id":7931,"date":"2012-08-23T20:15:42","date_gmt":"2012-08-24T00:15:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/?p=7931"},"modified":"2014-10-22T15:56:03","modified_gmt":"2014-10-22T20:56:03","slug":"double-take-2009-johan-grimonprez","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/archives\/7931","title":{"rendered":"Double Take (2009, Johan Grimonprez)"},"content":{"rendered":"

“Time edits out as much as it records.”<\/p>\n

There’s a story in here about the inevitability of fate, but it takes a long time to get started, then crawls in brief segments towards the end of the film – a story about Hitchcock in 1962 getting summoned to a meeting while filming The Birds<\/em> and confronting himself in 1980, a few weeks before his death.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

But woe unto the viewer who reads that story as the movie’s plot summary, and waits for it to finish unfolding, because all the fun is in the constant interruptions: footage of a Hitchcock body double and a separate voice actor recording their parts for the main story and just goofing around at being Alfred, semi-informative sidetracks about Hitchcock’s films (The Birds<\/em>, especially), plenty of footage of the Great Man himself taken from trailers, cameos and A.H. Presents episode intros, and Craig Baldwinesque recontextualizations of cold-war stock footage and coffee commercials.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Hichcock: “Television is like the American toaster. You push the button and the same thing pops up every time.”<\/p>\n

Inspired by a Borges story and dedicated to body double Ron Burrage, who also played Hitchcock in a mid-90’s Robert Lepage movie. Bonus: always nice to find the source material that a favorite song had sampled – the Books song with the guy saying “there it is, there it is – it’s a man’s face” is from the first live TV broadcast across the Atlantic.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Grimonprez is one of Cinema Scope’s 50 Under 50<\/a>. B. Steinbruegge: “Double Take<\/em> gleefully plays with the subconscious, which is fooled by impressionistic scenes that mix deep significance with sensationalism and humor.”<\/p>\n

At Powell’s Books in Portland I came across a bunch of reasonably-priced copies of Grimonprez’s companion book Looking For Alfred<\/em>, but left it behind, figuring it too heavy to carry around in luggage, then forgot to grab it when we decided to ship our books home instead.<\/p>\n

M. Peranson in Cinema Scope:<\/p>\n

[Grimonprez] uses Hitchcock as a mirror, for both himself and for a period of history. For what was the Cold War if not one long, painful MacGuffin? . . . Grimonprez’s enthusiasm keeps trying to break through the frame: Double Take<\/em> zips and zaps like the most addictive of television shows. The film is anchored by a chronological recap of the US-USSR Cold War relationship, the time when catastrophic culture was at the point of formation.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“Time edits out as much as it records.” There’s a story in here about the inevitability of fate, but it takes a long time to get started, then crawls in brief segments towards the end of the film – a story about Hitchcock in 1962 getting summoned to a meeting while filming The Birds and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[369,255,1601,1600],"class_list":["post-7931","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-movie","tag-2000s","tag-alfred-hitchcock","tag-doppelganger","tag-johan-grimonprez"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7931","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7931"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7931\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9449,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7931\/revisions\/9449"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7931"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7931"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7931"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}