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Sight and Sound (2010) - Reviews: Film of the Month: Being Alfred Hitchcock: "Double Take"

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Romney reviews Double Take starring Ron Burrage, Mark Perry and directed by Johan Grimonprez.

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Film of the month: Double Take

More than just a homage, Johan Grimonprez’s extraordinary montage uses Hitch’s mischievous TV appearances as the launch pad for a brilliant riff on Cold War politics and the idea of the double. By Jonathan Romney

As all Hitchcockians know, a macguffin is the object of desire in a narrative – the thing that everyone is chasing, but that really has no function except to make the story happen. Hitchcock defined the macguffin in a famous anecdote.

A man in a train is asked by another passenger about the mysterious object in the luggage rack; he explains that it is a macguffin, used to hunt lions in the Adirondack Mountains. But there are no lions in the Adirondacks, the other man objects. To which the first imperturbably replies, “Then that’s no macguffin.”

In Double Take, Alfred Hitchcock himself is the macguffin – the protean, elusive mystery around which Johan Grimonprez’s extraordinary montage revolves. Hitchcock’s narrative strategies, thematic obsessions and persona have long fascinated artists: Pierre Huyghe and Douglas Gordon are among those who have recently attempted entire or partial remakes – ‘doubles’ – of Hitchcock films. Now the Hitchcockian theme of doubling is the basis of this hybrid film by Belgian film-maker, artist and academic Grimonprez, who previously explored the topic in his 2004 short Looking for Alfred, about his search for Hitchcock lookalikes.

In Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y (1997), Grimonprez used archive footage to contemplate our era through a chronicle of airline hijacks. That film also involved doubles – it was informed by Don DeLillo’s idea of the terrorist and the novelist as twins, both engaged in (re)writing hist...