The Illusory Object of Desire: Alfred Hitchcock’s ‘Vertigo’ (1958)
Film Analysis in 10 Slides
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#1 IN SIGHT & SOUND CRITICS POLL
Vertigo took over the number one spot, held by Citizen Kane (1941) over six decades, in the Greatest Films of All Time poll conducted among critics in 2012. Will it continue to top the poll which is due this year?
SYNOPSIS
The film is based on the French novel “D’entre Les Morts” (From Among The Dead), by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac. John “Scottie” Ferguson (James Stewart), a retired San Francisco police detective who suffers from acrophobia, is asked by his college acquaintance Gavin Elster (Tom Helmore) to follow his wife Madeleine (Kim Novak). Elster believes that Madeleine is possessed by the spirit of her great-grandmother Carlotta Valdes who committed suicide. He fears that she is going insane and contemplating suicide. The skeptical Scottie takes up the assignment after seeing the mysterious, beautiful blonde Madeleine.
STRUCTURE
Spoiler Alert
Vertigo has a two-part structure. In both parts, the protagonist gets obsessed with a woman and loses her.
Curiously, both the women are in fact the same person Judy (Kim Novak). In the first part, the audience sees Madeleine from the point of view of Scottie who falls for her. He is obsessed with her but unable to save her due to his acrophobia. After losing her, he gets obsessed with Judy (Kim Novak), a brunette who resembles Madeleine. The audience comes to know that it was Judy who acted as Madeleine in a bizarre murder plot of Gavin Elster but Scottie doesn’t know it. He is shown transforming Judy into Madeleine like a maniac, suggesting necrophilia. Judy goes through it as she is in love with him. Scottie’s attempt at unravelling the mystery results in getting cured of his acrophobia but at the cost of losing Judy.
POSTERS AND THE TITLE SEQUENCE
The film’s posters and the title sequence were among the best works of Saul Bass the American graphic designer and Academy award winning filmmaker. It was for the first time that computer animation was used in history in 1957. Saul Bass designed the opening sequence with revolving spirals foreboding the dizzying staircase that causes vertigo to the ascending Scottie. The spiral recurs in the posters too.
DOLLY ZOOM
Vertigo is considered the first film to use the zoom out and track in shot, created to convey Scottie’s acrophobia. This is an in-camera effect that distorts perspective to convey the sense of vertigo. It was done with miniatures laid on their sides. This shot, which came to be known as the Vertigo effect, was perhaps inspired by a shot in David Lean’s Hobson’s Choice (1954) when a drunk Charles Laughton falls through a trapdoor into the basement.
IMPOSSIBLE MEMORY, INSANE MEMORY
Chris Marker’s acclaimed documentary Sans Soleil (1983) has a sequence in San Francisco which is called a “pilgrimage” to all the film locations of Vertigo.
In the beginning of this sequence, the voice-over pays a tribute to Vertigo: “Only one film had been capable of portraying impossible memory, insane memory: Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo.” The Sequoia cut was still in Muir Woods where “Madeleine traced the short distance between two of those concentric lines that measured the age of the tree and said: Here I was born and here I died.”
THE USE OF COLOR
Green, the color of envy and also the color of the supernatural, recurs in the film. At Ernie’s, Madeleine stands out with a sash bordered in green contrasting with the background in burgundy and red. The background green color of the hotel’s neon signage silhouettes Judy in black profile. When Judy comes out of the bathroom, dressed up as Madeleine, the green neon falls on her, giving her an ethereal quality.
BERNARD HERMANN’S SCORE
Bernard Hermann is mainly known for his score in films of Hitchcock, particularly for Vertigo, considered as Hermann’s best work. The music for the film has references to Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde with which it shares the theme of obsessive love leading to death. The title music creates the effect of vertigo. The Spanish music is played when Madeleine goes to the museum and gazes at the portrait of Carlotta, evoking the Spanish past. The images of Scottie’s nightmare work so effectively thanks to Hermann’s music. When Madeleine is brought back by dressing up Judy there is the love theme that suggests various facets of obsessive love.
CLOSING THOUGHTS
James Stewart excels in a dark, complex role that goes against his image. It seems that Hitchcock wasn’t too happy with Kim Novak due to her baggage of preconceived notions. But she fits the role, exuding sensuality.
One of the themes in Vertigo is illusion which is inherently cinematic. Scottie is in love with Madeleine but there is no such woman. It is Judy playing the imaginary Madeleine. What distinguishes this haunting film is that having lost the woman who was an illusion, the protagonist wants to undo the loss of her by creating the illusion of her through another woman.
