NYAB Event - Johan Grimonprez "Double Take"

Johan Grimonprez "Double Take"

Sean Kelly Gallery

This event has ended.

Grimonprez's second film essay, titled DOUBLE TAKE, questions how our view of reality is held hostage by mass media, advertising and Hollywood. Written by award winning British novelist Tom McCarthy, the film targets the global rise of fear-as-commodity, in a tale of odd couples and hilarious double deals. Paying tribute to the themes of doubling and mistaken identity, Grimonprez creates a unique interpretation of Alfred Hitchcock's illustrious cameo television and film appearances, through which Grimonprez examines the influence of this cinema-icon on a deeper, more socio-political level. The film covers the post World War II period, characterized by prosperity and innocent consumerism, as well as institutionalized fear, through the beginning of the 1960s featuring Sputnik, Nikita Khrushchev and Richard Nixon. The cold war era was characterized by the conquest of space, sexual politics, anxiety and paranoia disrupting the idyllic American suburban dream. In the words of Alfred Hitchcock, "Television brought murder into the American home, where it has always belonged." Not without humor, DOUBLE TAKE invites the viewer to question today's hegemony of the image, the truth and lies of reality and its influence on our society, politics and culture.
A compilation of short films, selected by Grimonprez and Charlotte Léouzon titled MAYBE THE SKY IS REALLY GREEN AND WE'RE JUST COLORBLIND accompanies the exhibition. Shown for the first time in New York, it is presented in the form of a YouTube-o-Theque library, which contains clips from online television, cell phone videos, blogs and YouTube. As a product of a sophisticated generation brought up on a diet of television, and homemade productions, Grimonprez mixes reality and fiction in a wholly innovative fashion, and presents contemporary history as a multi-perspectival context, readily open to manipulation.