Blogorium Review: Double Take

One does not simply describe Johan Grimonprez's Double Take: one experiences it. Loosely - and I mean very loosely - I could say that Double Take is a meditation on doppelgangers, the Cold War, and the effect of television on American society in the 1950s and 60s, all wrapped up as an episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents (with commercials, all Folgers). That doesn't even come close to adequately representing Grimonprez's experimental collage of archival footage, recreations, documentary footage into an arresting, at times oblique narrative.

The "story" of Double Take is a juxtaposition of the true story of US / Soviet relations from the Nixon / Kruschev "Kitchen Debates" through the Naval embargo of Cuba (with a rush of footage during the credits bringing us up to Bush / Putin) juxtaposed with a scenario described by Alfred Hitchcock who, while making The Birds in 1962, is called away from the set and meets Alfred Hitchcock, this one from 1980 (not coincidentally - according to this film - the year he died). The Hitchcock story is loosely adapted from Jorge Luis Borges' essay "25 August, 1983" by writer Tom McCarthy, and while Hitchcock appears via clips from "bumpers" of his program Alfred Hitchcock Presents, the narration and re-enactments are provided by a voice double (Mark Perry) and body double (Ron Burrage) in order to relate the story of Hitchcock meeting his double and being forced to kill him.

The doppelganger / doubling imagery is tied not only to the hypothetical "two Hitchcocks," but also to Kennedy and Kruschev, to the nuclear arms race, the space race, and to cinema and television, set at odds against each other by the elder Hitchcock as he plays a game of mental chess with his younger counterpart. While the news footage is all original (including an interesting doubling of a plane crash into the Empire State Building, followed by the image of a man falling, with unspoken - or shown - corollaries from September 11th), the "Hitchcock" story is pieced together using clips (and music) from Psycho, The Birds, and trailers featuring the Master of Suspense, coupled with new footage designed to bridge the gaps.

Interestingly, Grimonprez immediately exposes the artifice of these recreations, by opening the film with Perry listening to (and mimicking) Hitchcock's explanation of the "MacGuffin" to Francois Truffaut. Burrage, the Hitchcock double introduced halfway into the story, then becomes the focus of a quasi-documentary about his history of impersonating Hitchcock over the years. More importantly, there's a small but critical anecdote about the impersonator meeting Hitchcock during the making of North by Northwest. Burrage has, it seems, recreated a number of Alfred Hitchcock scenes, appeared in Japanese commercials, and even joined The Birds star Tippi Hedren at a celebration of what would have been Hitchcock's 100th birthday.

To call Double Take a documentary, a collage, or an experimental narrative simply doesn't do the film justice. I don't quite know how to describe it properly, as there are too many possible directions to follow: the concept of identity, of doubling, has been a fascinating off-shoot of the "uncanny," and Grimonprez manages to tie together a series of doppelgangers (fictional and historical) together without necessarily coming to a conclusion about their significance to us. The concept (as you see on the poster) that if one meets their double, one must die, draws some interesting parallels between the fabricated Hitchcock story and the assassination of Kennedy and downfall of Kruschev, albeit in an oblique fashion. He only directly connects the two narratives once, when "Hitchcock" describes the double over footage of Kruschev and Kennedy meeting.

Or is television the point? If television is the "double" of film, which one is destroying the other? Hitchcock is, in many ways, the ideal candidate for the adapted Borges essay, as he famously worked in both mediums and addressed the conflict directly (many of the clips used from Alfred Hitchcock Presents deal either with identity in crisis or with the dichotomy of television and film) and Hitchcock's ambivalence about commercials feeds into the persistent use of Folgers ads to "break up" the story. Grimonprez makes no direct comments about the ads - or why Folgers is the only company represented - so one is left to draw their own conclusions.

While I have no qualms about recommending Double Take, I find myself in a bind as to whom I would recommend it to; the film is highly experimental in its construction, and it's likely to lose impatient viewers during the setup, which appears simply to be a collage of archival footage and Alfred Hitchcock Presents clips, and the recreations are less than convincing - although I suspect that's quite intentional - which might break potential suspension of disbelief.

Despite what I've consistently seen it classified as, Double Take is only partially a documentary, and while it might make an excellent companion piece to Why We Fight, this 79-minute experiment is as unconventional as it is engrossing. If you're feeling adventurous, or don't mind films that require more work on your part, Double Take is absolutely worth watching. While it can be confounding, it is so in all the best ways.