#grimonprez

¿Estáis listos para la televisión? Barcelona, MACBA–CGAC, 2010. 

Disponible también en catalán e inglés.

Johan Grimonprez - Double Take (2009)

No better way to mark the 50th anniversary of Psycho than with this bizarre and distinctly inspired mash-up by writer Tom McCarthy and film-maker Johan Grimonprez. Their ever so slightly mad cine-essay, based on a Borgès short story, and perhaps influenced by British film-maker Chris Petit, is a delirious bad trip, imagining that Alfred Hitchcock, working on the set of The Birds in 1962, is visited by his own double: the near-dead Hitchcock from 1980, who enigmatically hints at how cold war history may or may not turn out. (The older Hitchcock double is of course only slightly better informed on this subject than the younger.)

Grimonprez and McCarthy achieve their fiction with a drawling Hitchcockian voiceover narration with staged fragments on video, an interview with a professional Hitchcock lookalike, along with clips of Hitchcock movies, a swirling recurrence of Bernard Herrmann's Psycho score, and a quite brilliant reuse of Hitchcock's jokey and little-remembered appearances fronting his TV show, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, in which the Master's clowning-around and dressing-up assumes a potent and sinister character: fleeting images of a remembered dream.