Johan Grimonprez @ The Fruitmarket Gallery

Brace yourself; Johan Grimonprez’s new film is a lot to take in. Like his previous one, dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y, which combined excerpts from television news programs, pop music videos and quotes from Don DeLillo novels, Double Take similarly employs a montage of film, television and documentary footage with an equally clever and visually engaging result. Inspired by a short story by Jorge Luis Borges, the plot revolves around Hitchcock meeting his doppelgänger on the set of his film The Birds. Unsettled by the encounter, Hitchcock espouses Borges’ idea that if you meet your double, you should kill him.

The whole film is spliced with Cold War era footage and coffee commercials, making for a Baudrillard-esque infusion of video clips akin to channel surfing or a kind of YouTube mashup, if you will. But the film’s 80 minutes add up to a lot more than that, and Grimonprez builds on the theme of the double and mistaken/lost identity so prevalent in Hitchcock’s movies, resonating with the Cold War’s emphasis on binary opposites (Russia and the USA, East and West Berlin, JFK and Nixon). The now famous speeches and debates from the era blend with excerpts from The Birds until it becomes difficult to tell the difference between what is real and what is imaginary; in the same way one might be uncertain which is the real Hitchcock and which the double.

Grimonprez also plays with the spectator’s relationship to familiar, mediated images. For instance, the common image of a cup of coffee transmutes into a poisoning attempt, the opening scene of an army aeroplane crashing into the Empire State Building in 1945 brings to mind a different set of horrors, and the Cold War propaganda images resonate with our own experience of the so called War on Terror.

Double Take is ultimately a film about film itself, about its sticky relationship with our collective psyche. And after you've watched it be sure to check out dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y in the neighbouring gallery. It’s all about aeroplane hijacking, pre-dating but oddly prescient of 9/11.