Double Take

The Cold War, Hitchcock, and the rise of television are ingeniously interconnected in this collage of space-race news footage, hilarious coffee ads, and excerpts from Hitchcock’s thrillers and trailers. Was the Cold War just one huge MacGuffin?

Personal paranoia mirrors the political intrigue in which Hitchcock and his elusive double obsess over the perfect murder, in a tale of odd couples and hilarious double deals. As television rises in popularity, and the Khrushchev and Nixon kitchen debate rattles on, gender politics take off and Hitchcock is rebranded as a TV personality.

Based on a script written by award-winning novelist Tom McCarthy and inspired by Jorge Luis Borges’s essay “August 25, 1983”, Double Take targets the global rise of the culture of fear as television hijacks cinema and the way we view historical events.

Subverting an array of TV footage, Grimonprez traces catastrophe culture’s relentless assault on the home, from the inception of televised images to our present-day zapping neurosis.