✭ ✭ ✭ Read critic reviews
Belgium, Netherlands, Germany · 2009
2h 0m
Director Johan Grimonprez
Starring Ron Burrage, Mark Perry, Delfine Bafort
Genre Documentary
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An ingenious documentary/fiction hybrid that casts Alfred Hitchcock as a paranoid history professor unwittingly caught up in a double take on the cold war period. Using TV footage and 'The Birds' as a metaphor, DOUBLE TAKE traces catastrophe culture's relentless assault on the home, from moving images' inception to the present day.
Despite its many ominous implications, Grimonprez also infuses Double Take with sly wit, inserting scenes from the TV program showcasing Hitchcock's wry sense of humor and the exaggerated domesticity of commercials sponsored by Folgers Coffee.
The New York Times by A.O. Scott
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.
It’s a neurotic treatise that simply adds to our cultural dementia instead of illuminating it.
Like the Master of Suspense's best films, Double Take (which makes great use of Bernard Herrmann's haunting "Psycho" score) is an intellectual puzzle that also works as a thoroughly accessible entertainment.
Any 15-minute stretch of Double Take proves as enlightening as any other--more like a museum installation than a movie.
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