Double Take pursues Johan Grimonprez's line of thought, opting for an anthropologist's perspective regarding the infiltrations within our daily lives by media images saturated with news, information, advertising and archives. He draws a parallel between these images and the role of Hollywood, through the films of Hitchcock, in the socio-politico-cultural context of the 1960s (the space race, the Sputniks, satellites, East-West, Russia/United States relations, the start of the Cold War etc.). Johan Grimonprez is as much interested here in Hitchcock's television shows as in his famous film The Birds.

“While the post-World War II period was characterised by prosperity and consumerism, it was also characterised by the Cold War threat, which brought fear and paranoia into the home through television shows.” Johan Grimonprez creates a poetic interplay through his rapid, subtle editing of Alfred Hitchcock's favourite themes (fear, paranoia, danger, doubt, double identities etc.) and this already historic epoch.

This video is also an attempt to analyse changes in filmmaking, in the context of its inchoate relationship with the revolutionary arrival of its double: television.

Through editing and mixing, the artist interweaves different levels of meaning.  Different narrations are combined and confronted, creating a lively dialectical approach, based on a reappropriation of images and sounds from other sources but also from his everyday surroundings.

Double Take seems to tell us that everything is a copy of something else, that the images that surround us influence us in spite of ourselves, that they do not necessarily belong to the ontological register of veracity, but that the register of Untruth probably allows us to approach that of Truth.

Christine van Assche

translated by Yves Tixier and Anna Knight