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.
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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 . . .”
OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.