Film Explores Hitchcock's Role in Fear-Mongering

Photo courtesy of Universal and Zapomatik

Alfred Hitchcock appears frequently in Johan Grimonprez's lauded film Double Take.

​Alfred Hitchcock's television show and movie cameos frame the trajectory of the mass media's influence on collective fear in a highly praised documentary screening Thursday night in Irvine.

UC Irvine's Film and Video Center presents Johan Grimonprez's Double Take, which Artforum hailed as "one of the best films of 2009" and the New York Times called, "the most intellectually agile of this year's crop of essay films."

Hollywood films, TV ads, and cold-war news coverage are weaved together to present a tale in which television hijacks cinema, the Khrushchev and Nixon kitchen debate rattles on, and sexual politics quietly take off.

An artist and filmmaker, Grimonprez resides in Brussels and New York, where he is a visiting professor at the School of Visual Arts. He is best know for his award-winning documentary DIAL H-I-S-T-O-R-Y (1997), an exploration of media representations of airplane hijackings.

He has exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich; and Tate Modern, London. Former OC Weekling Cole Akers, who is now enrolled in the Ph.D. program in Visual Studies at UCI and the organizer of this screening, was working at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles a couple years ago when he met Grimonprez.

An audience Q&A with Grimonprez and light reception follows the 7:30 p.m. showing in the McCormick Screening Room, Humanities Gateway 1070, on the campus of UCI. Admission is $3 for UCI students, $4 for UCI faculty and staff, $5 for seniors and $6 for everyone else.

Make sure you have, as Hitch would say, a "good evening . . ."