DOKU.ARTS
Zeughauskino Berlin
10.09.–12.10.2014
Double Take
What happened between 1958 and 1963? Those were critical years of the Cold War in international politics, and a time of cultural change in American society. Those were the years when television began to reshape America. In addition, during that five year span Alfred Hitchcock made North by Northwest, Psycho and Birds. This essay film by Johan Grimonprez investigates the Cold War period from the perspective of the cultural atmosphere – political, cultural and technological rivalry, paranoia, thrill and confidence. Hitchcock and his films evidently represent this cultural atmosphere, riding the spirit of the age. The fundamental concept of the film is confrontation: a confrontation with our selves and with The Other. Double Take tells a fictionalfantastic story a Borgesian meeting of the Hitchcocks, the real and the double, the young and the old, the ego and the alter ego. But besides the two Hitchcocks, the film is full of other strange pairs and doubles: Khrushchev and Nixon, Nixon and Kennedy, Kennedy and Khrushchev, East and West, Soviet rockets and American televisions, Us and Them, US and US(SR). Double Take smartly challenges the classic binary oppositions of Western culture and tells stories of identity, culture, uniqueness and otherising. In his funny and provoking film, Grimonprez mixes pop culture and politics, found footage and television programmes – resulting with an analysis of the politics of culture and the culture of politics. Double Take is an original and unique vision with a strange warning: “If you meet your double, you should kill him.”
Johan Grimonprez
Johan Grimonprez, born in 1962, is a Belgian multimedia artist and curator. Following his studies at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Ghent and the School of Visual Arts in New York, in 1993 he participated in an open studies programme at the Whitney Museum and shortly thereafter attended the Jan van Eyck Academy in Maastricht. His works and curatorial projects are shown worldwide, including in the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, the Tate Modern in London, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. His films include Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y (1997) and Double Take (2009), which were nominated for numerous awards.