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New York Times (02/Jun/2010) - Recasting the Cold War As the Hitchcock Years

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Recasting the Cold War As the Hitchcock Years

In 1962, as he was shooting "The Birds," Alfred Hitchcock had an encounter on the Universal Studios lot with an older version of himself, mysteriously arrived from 1980 with some sobering news about life, death and cinema. This meeting (inspired by a short prose piece called "August 25, 1983," by Jorge Luis Borges) is one of the conceits of "Double Take," Johan Grimonprez's intriguing new film. Mark Perry, sounding uncannily like the man himself, narrates the fictitious younger Hitchcock's account of this peculiar event, while two look-alikes, including Ron Burrage, a longtime and well-known Hitchcock impersonator, act it out.

Although it is composed mainly of archival footage and touches on a great many actual events, "Double Take," as you may already have gathered, is not quite a documentary. It is, instead, a meditation on a series of loosely related themes drawn together, somewhat tenuously, by the familiar yet elusive sensibility that Hitchcock brought to Hollywood and then to American television. Mr. Grimonprez most often presents the real Hitchcock playing the version of himself familiar to fans of "Alfred Hitchcock Presents": the charmingly sinister, roly-poly Englishman introducing brief, small-screen tales of crime and comeuppance.

And also, with genial cynicism, setting up commercials, in particular for Folger's instant coffee. Mr. Grimonprez has great fun with these vignettes, in which distraught housewives try to please their grouchy husbands. In the Hitchcockian context, moments of banal consumer frustration ripple with implications of domestic horror. "Honey, your coffee is murder!"

At the same time, though, the juxtaposition of snippets from "The Birds" and "North by Northwest" with period newsreel and television images feels less haunting than obvious, and perhaps a little easy. It does not take much to evoke the atmosphere of cold war paranoia that thickened anew in the years between the Sputnik launching and the Cuban missile crisis, and the archive of collective memory from which Mr. Grimonprez gleans his video feels pretty picked over at this point. Connections between Hitchcock's films and, to list a few examples, Nikita S. Khrushchev, Richard M. Nixon, Fidel Castro and John F. Kennedy are made without any particular analytical insight. The birds and the bombs and the swell new color television consoles were all equally signs of the times.

But Mr. Grimonprez, who is a graduate of the Whitney Museum of American Art's Independent Study Program and teaches at the School of Visual Arts in New York, is saved from cliche by the happy collision of his own formal wit with that of his subject. Hitchcock was a master of mischief and misdirection, and no film so thoroughly infused with his spirit could be dull or predictable.

His presence in "Double Take" does not really make the history surveyed in the film resonate with more strangeness than it already possesses. Nixon lecturing Khrushchev on American achievements in color television during the "kitchen debate" in Moscow will always be unsurpassably weird without "The Birds" looming somewhere in the future. But Hitchcock in the 1950s and '60s did manage to distill something of the ambient weirdness of the times, and to make alongside it a counterfeit world of odd coincidences and disturbing reflections.

Mr. Grimonprez, clearly a frequent visitor to that world, has sent back a moving postcard inscribed with his own messages, some appropriately cryptic, others more along the familiar lines of "Wish you were here." So if, after seeing "Double Take," you find yourself drawn back to "Strangers on a Train" or "Vertigo" or even old episodes of "Alfred Hitchcock Presents" with new curiosity and appreciation, the filmmaker's work will not have been in vain.

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