Double Take

Another look at Grimonprez's latest work. Still very good, very atmospheric, etc etc, even better in fact on a second viewing where one could have one's coordinates, so to speak, one could really think about and challenge that at first glance (and still, on second, perhaps deliberately labyrinthian structures).
An interesting aspect of this film is of how two 'doubles' supposed opposities but actual identicals or split images, speak through each other. Krushchev and Kennedy talk through each other's mouths, the adverts talk through both mouths and are talked through into others. Who is Hitchcock? Is the 1980 Hitchcock the mouthpiece of the 1962 Hitchcock, or vice versa?
This brings us on to ask through what lenses we view the film. As westerners, why do we watch the film through the prism we do? Whose eyes are being looked through, through whose mouth do we articulate the thoughts we have about this. Grimponprez confounds expectations on occasion, in part to show the parochialism of the filmmakers and the viewer's readings.
This also applies to the way Grimonprez uses montage. In some ways he is a prankster, setting it up so we laugh at something utterly traumatic, or mourn over a comedy. He tests the viewer; why are you laughing at this? Just because it is in the narrative montage he has created, who makes it funny? The viewer?
Grimonprez may have a slightly naive attitude about a pure 'earth', a pure underlying strata of events that an entirely postmodern sensibility would dimiss. The 'reality' of the bomb is in a sense a T.V. construction, which he realises only to the extent that it is mediated to us through the T.V.- he believes that there is a 'truer' palce out there, a noble gesture but one that he does not sustain.
Grimonprez is a deeply interesting thinker, as well as a very fun filmaker and a collector of curiousities. A fine work.