Session 1 | First Take

(chair: Robrecht Vanderbeeken, KASK)

10:00     Welcome (video)

commercial break 1

10:15      Introduction | Johan Grimonprez (video)

10:45      Screening of Double Take (Johan Grimonprez, 2009)

12:00      The Making of Double Take | Johan Grimonprez and Tom McCarthy (video)

12:30   Lunch Break

Session 2 | Double-O

(chair: Pieter Vermeulen, KASK)

14:00   Magic, Murder, and the Weather | Edwin Carels (KASK) (video)

This presentation investigates the strategy behind Grimonprez’ analogue use of history and fantasy, fiction and documentary, biography and politics, ideology and technology. What strategy is concealed within Double Take’s phantasmagoria?

14:30    Discussion (video)

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14:45   The Tourist Who Knew Too Much: Alfred Hitchcock’s Monuments | Steven Jacobs (KASK & Antwerp University) (video)

Prominent tourist sites such as the British Museum, the Royal Albert Hall, the Statue of Liberty, the Jefferson Memorial, the Golden Gate Bridge, the United Nations Headquarters, and Mount Rushmore are forever connected to some famous Hitchcock films. In line with classical cinema conventions, these monuments identify not only themselves but also act as convenient shorthand for the entire cities or countries that encompass them. In so doing, Hitchcock’s cinema shows a striking resemblance with what John Urry has called the “tourist gaze” – a kind of look that transforms the city into a series of static postcards. An ardent tourist himself, Hitchcock frequently used these picture-postcard or sightseeing clichés in static establishing shots or hectic montage-sequences. However, in some of his most memorable scenes showing famous monuments, the phenomenon of tourism itself is ridiculed and postcard views are used to lull the audiences into false security.

In Hitchcock’s films, famous buildings and sites are more than mere backdrops, they are emotionally charged with a dramatic intensity as well. Whereas the tourist gaze keeps the dangers of modernity outside of the image, Hitchcock presents the most familiar places and buildings as sites of terror. A visible and public place par excellence, the monument becomes a mirror for individual fears and hidden traumas. In addition, Hitchcock made the most of the emblematical power of monuments, which are symbolic by definition and often connected to ideological values. In particular, Hitchcock included monuments of American democracy, such as the Statue of Liberty, Mount Rushmore, and the government buildings in Washington in spy thrillers such as Saboteur, North by Northwest, and Topaz respectively. Last but not least, since monuments are connected and subjected to sightseeing, they are ultimate motifs of Hitchcockian cinema, which functions as a meditation on the gaze. Sightseeing, for instance, becomes a perfect motif to investigate the cinematic tension between objective and subjective viewpoints.

15:15     Discussion (video)

15:30   Coffee Break

Session 3 | Double Back

(chair: Robrecht Vanderbeeken, KASK)

16:00   Borges and Hitchcock’s Double Desire | Dany Nobus (Brunel University, London) (video)

From Shadow of A Doubt to Strangers on a Train, from Rebecca to Vertigo, and including The Wrong Man, Spellbound and North by Northwest, Hitchcock’s films contain a kaleidoscopic array of doubles, replicas, duplicates, look-alikes, copies and substitutes. Drawing on his imaginative ‘double reading’ of Borges’ ‘August 25, 1983’, Johan Grimonprez’s Double Take extends and explores the impact of Hitchcock’s ‘double desire’ (to be interpreted here as a desire for doubles rather than a dual, twofold desire) in the socio-cultural and political realm, thus raising fundamental questions about the significance of explosive interpersonal rivalries for the emergence and maintenance of identity, selfhood and individuality. “They say that if you meet your double, you should kill him or that he will kill you”. But what if killing your double also invariably entails an act of suicide, as Edgar Allan Poe suggested at the end of ‘William Wilson’? There is no escape from death, then, and the only dilemma that remains is who will kill first, who will beat the other in becoming the murderer rather than the victim. Freud’s concept of the ‘narcissism of small differences’ and Lacan’s notion of the ‘mirror stage’ allow us to unpack the psychological mechanisms underpinning these issues. Folgers coffee allows us to solve all the associated problems.

16.30    Discussion (video)

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16:45   The Real Double | Jodi Dean (Hobart & William Smith Colleges, NY) (video)

Johan Grimonprez’s Double Take explores multiple forms of doubleness against the backdrop of the twentieth century’s defining double: US/USSR, or the Cold War. Here the violent confrontation, ‘if you meet your double, you should kill him,’ is less a murder than a mushroom cloud. Insofar as that confrontation was ultimately avoided, the missed encounter of the Cuban missile crisis, itself the heart of Grimonprez’s film, how should we understand the double? As an imaginary competitor, a symbolic judge or, perhaps, a real that we can never meet but only always avoid?

17:15   Discussion (video)

17:30   Screening of Hitchcock Trailers | Alfred Hitchcock Presents

18:00   End

Contributors

Edwin Carels is a curator and a critic. He programmes for the International Film Festival of Rotterdam. At KASK, Carels lectures on experimental strategies in film. He is in the process of writing a doctoral thesis on ‘expanded animation,’ in which he relates the pioneers of animation with contemporary art.

Jodi Dean is Professor of Political Science at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in Geneva, New York and Erasmus Professor of the Humanities in the Faculty of Philosophy at Erasmus University, Rotterdam, the Netherlands. Her books include Aliens in America, Publicity’s Secret, and Zizek’s Politics. Her most recent book is Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies (Duke University Press, 2009).

Dany Nobus teaches at Brunel University (London). He has published widely on the history, theory, and practice of Lacanian psychoanalysis. His current research focuses on the theoretical and socio-cultural representations of non-normative sexual behaviors, and the effect of changing representations of fatherhood in Western society on parenting strategies and socialization practices.

Johan Grimonprez is an internationally acclaimed artist and filmmaker. His works include Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y (1997), Looking for Alfred (2004), and Double Take (2009). His curatorial projects were host at museums worldwide, including the Whitney Museum (New York) and the Hammer Museum (Los Angeles). His work resides at major museum collections such as the Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris) and Tate Modern (London). Acquisitioned by NBC Universal, ARTE TV (Germany/France), and Channel 4 (UK), his productions travelled the main festival circuits and garnered a Spirit Award (2007) and the ZKM International Media Award (2005). He has published with Hatje/Cantz (Germany) and spends his time between Brussels and New York, where he lectures at the School of Visual Arts.

Steven Jacobs is an art historian specialized in the representation of architecture, cities, and landscapes in film and photography. In 2007, he published The Wrong House: The Architecture of Alfred Hitchcock (010 Publishers, Rotterdam). He is in the process of writing a book on the relations between Film and Visual Arts to be published by Edinburgh University Press. He teaches film history at KASK Gent, Sint-Lukas Brussels, and the University of Antwerp.

Tom McCarthy is a writer and artist. His novels include Remainder (2007) and Men in Space (2007). His non-fiction book Tintin and the Secret of Literature, an exploration of the themes of Hergé’s comic books, was published in 2006. In addition, he is the founder of the International Necronautical Society (INS), a semi-fictitious avant-garde network of writers, philosophers, and artists whose work has been exhibited at venues including the Palais de Tokyo Paris, ICA London, and Moderna Museet Stockholm.