Subverting a meticulous array of TV footage, acclaimed director Johan Grimonprez traces catastrophe culture’s relentless assault on the home, from the inception of televised images to our present day zapping neurosis.
Alfred Hitchcock is cast as a paranoid history professor, unwittingly caught up in a double take on the cold war period. The master says all the wrong things at all the wrong times while politicians on both sides desperately clamor to say the right things, live on TV.
As television hijacks cinema, and the Khrushchev and Nixon kitchen debate rattles on, sexual politics quietly take off and Alfred himself emerges in a dandy new role on the TV, blackmailing housewives with brands they can’t refuse.
“Their ever so slightly mad cine-essay, based on a Borgès short story, and perhaps influenced by British film-maker Chris Petit, is a delirious bad trip, imagining that Alfred Hitchcock , working on the set of The Birds in 1962, is visited by his own double: the near-dead Hitchcock from 1980, who enigmatically hints at how cold war history may or may not turn out.” GUARDIAN
“This slippery fish of a docu-essay, packed to the gills with stimulating archive footage, is at once fun and deadly serious.” TIME OUT
