Movies can be prohibitive. It’s funny, sort of, to think about that. Film seems inherently liberating. Especially now, with seemingly endless graphical capabilities, many filmmakers have left behind notions of what they can or cannot do. To a point. Lemme blanket all of this with a reassurance that in no way do I think that is a bad thing. I’m not coming down on movies at all. At all. I fucking love movies. Partly because what they do is tell a story.

Show something happening. But if you think about the things you can do with not only a camera, but effects, music, archival footage, animation, art, editing, it’s almost humorous how alike most films are. It’s like rolling a million sided die a million times and landing on something between 1-1000 every time. Still a multitude of differences, but overall only covering a small part of the whole. Every once and a while, I see a movie, if you still want to use that term, that is out of that comfort zone.

Koyaanisqatsi, which I put up as the Saturday Matinee this past weekend, is a movie like that. So is Johan Grimonprez’s Double Take. Now, this doesn’t mean that I necessarily think movies that do this are all better than others, or even very good (though these both are, in my estimation, great). But they’re interesting, if only for their ability to usurp your expectations (hopefully) without being manipulative, disingenuous, or unwatchable. The words that I would use to describe the initial interactions I had with Double Take would definitely by “fucking confused.”

I had seen it’s poster – a picture of Alfred Hitchcock standing in front of a police line-up wall, bearing the tagline “If you meet your double, you should kill him.” – around the time it experienced minimal release last year. My interest was piqued, as I assumed it was a Hitchcock documentary, and a very good one judging by all the accolades the poster let me know had been heaped upon it. But minimal investigation left me befuddled.

The more I read about it, the less I understood: it’s a video essay, about Hitchcock, but also communism and the red scare, and Hitchcock meeting his double, but it’s all archival footage, but they may have hired a Hitchcock impersonator too, and a guy who does his voice, and it’s about time travel. That’s basically what I gleaned. After spooning my brain matter back in through my ears, I decided to move on I guess, finding it easier just to forget about it than watch it and be embarrassed at my inability to understand it and risk my head exploding Scanners style in a packed (well, probably not packed) theater.

What a mistake. Luckily, I was reminded of it’s existence by My Pal The Crook last week, and quickly jumped at the chance to finally watch it. So remember that really fucking strange and muddled description I gave of it a couple sentences ago? Turns out that’s actually pretty accurate. Swag. Double Take is much easier to consume, and enjoy, if you just try not to necessarily think about what you’re watching. Just get lost in it’s wholly unique, hypnotic, thrilling, and mystifying rhythms.

At it’s most basic level, Double Take explores the parallel stories of The United States’ 1960’s tension with the USSR, and Hitchcock’s (fictional) encounter with his doppelganger on the set of The Birds. There’s a lot of actual footage of Hitchcock in the film, which I thought was just great. In my mind he had become sort of a mythical figure, and the footage of him was human, charming, but also impressive. At least I think it was him. See, they did hire an impersonator, who at various times plays Hitchcock, but also plays himself.

They also hired a Hitchcock voice impersonator (who is totally spot on) to narrate the film. I say narrate, but it’s actually just a reading of an original monologue written by Tom McCarthy in Hitchcock’s voice, based on the Jorge Luis Borges story “August 25th, 1983”. McCartthy (a novelist, whose book C was one of my favorites of last year) knocks it out of the fucking park with the monologue. I don’t want to go into detail, but it’s just great. Starting to kind of get a picture of how hallucinatory and awesome this movie is? I think any further attempt to explain it would do it disservice, so basically I would just say: see it. If only to step outside of the box for 90 minutes and look at movies with fresh eyes.

- Whole Milk