Among the films I'm hoping to see at Sundance this year is the documentary Double Take, described by The Auteurs as this:
Part documentary, part conceptual art piece, Johan Grimonprez’ Double Take is a fascinating found-footage fabrication, an essay that envisions Alfred Hitchcock as an unwilling victim of the political and cultural shifts of the Cold War era, a time when television began to replace cinema, Nixon debated Khrushchev, and everybody was worried about the Bomb. Comprised of newsreel footage, period television programs, and clips of the master and his films, Double Take uses Hitchcock as a filter through which to study tense U.S.-Soviet relations, the rise of fear as a commodity, and the birth of media-driven paranoia. Using The Birds as a metaphor, and dwelling on Hitchcock’s obsession with doubles, Grimonprez traces the history of the catastrophe culture that invaded every American home in the 1950s, ushering in a fear of the “other” that remains to this day. As playful as it is political, Double Take is a masterwork that is better experienced than explained.
Via The Cinefamily: Folk troubador Bonnie 'Prince' Billy will be here in-person (January 7th, 8 p.m.) at the Cinefamily to present a hand-picked double feature of films that explore the wonder and the mystery of the fairer sex. Even diehard music fans out there might not be aware of Billy's intense love of cinema, and we welcome the opportunity to let the man give us two of his favorites.
The evening opens with Nicholas Ray's soapy noir A Woman's Secret (1949), starring the ravishing Maureen O'Hara as a singing teacher blamed for the shooting of her smarmy protégé (Gloria Grahame), "a trollop-minded chirp she has coached into the bigtime." (Variety) Scripted by Herman J. Mankiewicz (Citizen Kane), the film is a chance for Ray to take what could have been an average "woman's picture" and tweak it to suit his slightly perverse sensibilities. Next, Wim Wenders' Alice In The Cities (1974). This German New Wave gem finds a roving reporter who reluctantly takes on the guardianship of Alice, a little girl who needs to be delivered to her grandmother -- a woman whose name and address she doesn't remember, and whose house can only be identified by a single photo of an unmarked front door. Yella Röttlander's stellar performance as the young girl whose journey's end is always one more step away is framed terrifically by Robby Mueller's B&W cinematography, and a moody score by Irmin Schmidt and Michael Karoli (half of Krautrock legends Can).
* Related: Will Oldham talks shit about Wes Anderson to The Onion.
via Kottke: The Known Universe zooms out from Tibet to the limits of the observable universe. Dim the lights, full-screen it in HD, and you're in for a treat. Like Powers of Ten, except astronomically accurate. It's not a dramatization, it's a map; the positioning data was pulled from Hayden Planetarium's Digital Universe Atlas, which is available for free download.
