Johan Grimonprez: „If you meet your double…“

On the occasion of “All Memory Is Theft,” the current retrospective of Johan Grimonprez at ZKM | Karlsruhe, we are presenting in collaboration with Kinemathek Karlsruhe Looking for Alfred and Double Take, two films by the Belgian film and media artist that deal with British director Alfred Hitchcock and the motif of the doppelganger.

The short film Looking for Alfred (2005 | 10 min) is a powerful tribute to the “Master of Suspense” and king of cameo appearances that stages a visually opulent game of confusion in which Hitchcock is pursued by a number of shadowy look-alikes. In an atmosphere of constant, unresolved suspense, in which repetitions, reflections, and duplications unfold in multiple ways, Grimonprez's cinematic twists and turns echo the trademark style of Hitchcock, while radiating a quiet and beguiling surrealism reminiscent of the Belgian surrealist painter, René Magritte, and his recurring motif of a man in a suit and a bowler hat. Looking for Alfred received the International Media Art Award at ZKM | Karlsruhe in 2005.

In contrast to Looking for Alfred, Grimonprez's essay film Double Take (2009 | 80 min), created four years later in collaboration with British writer Tom McCarthy, is largely based on historical film and television footage and combines documentary and fictional elements. Inspired by Jorge Luis Borges' short story 25 August 1983 (1983), in which the Argentine writer explores the theme of the doppelgänger in a story about a fleeting encounter with himself as a dying old man, Double Take weaves the fictional story of an encounter between Alfred Hitchcock and an older version of himself during a twelve-minute break in the shooting of his film The Birds in 1962. Interrupted by TV commercials, the rise of television in the home and the ensuing commodification of fear during the Cold War shape the backdrop of the narrative. The figure of the doppelgänger serves not only as a dramaturgical device, but also draws into focus the major ideological oppositions of the East-West conflict as well as the emerging media competition between cinema and television. “When you meet your double, you should kill him,” as the voice of Alfred Hitchcock warns in the opening sequences of Double Take, “otherwise he will kill you.”