Film description

A Rubik's cube of a film which would make Hitchcock himself feel dizzy. A documentary about Hitchcock which is not actually about Hitchcock but in which Hitchcock serves as a mirror - for the director and the entire period. A multi-layer game of duplicity: reflections, doubles, mirrored coincidences and prescient events. Cold war and war against terrorism, Hitchcock and his double, history and modernity, cinema and TV, the USA and the USSR, the attacks on WTC on 11 September 2001 and bird's raid on the Empire State Building in 1948 - these are only some of the couples which form the basis of the structure of this documentary about crossroads. Double Take's frame is Hitchcock's The Birds, called by Grimonprez an absolute masterpiece of culture of fear. In this frame, we see a story about Hitchcock's meeting with his own double, based on a short story by the British author Tom McCarthy and smoothly composed fragments of TV news of the 1960s showing Nixon's meeting with another double of the master director - Nikita Khrushchev. A collage of recycled waste of the visual culture of the 1960s, Double Take resembles a pathological discourse of a confused paranoiac. Careful, this is infectious!

Ewa Szabłowska