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Vertigo
Alfred Hitchcock's special genius was his ability to integrate both devastating parables and some of the most incisive and penetrating meditations on film form and the structure of vision within the context of mainstream narrative cinema. As a film about the relationship between illusion and reality, obsessive looking, and the dangers of misapprehension or misperception, Vertigo (1958) is the ultimate example.
Hitchcock repeatedly encourages the viewer to look past both seeming absurdities and disturbing acts of persuasion, such as Gavin Elster's attempt to coax a reluctant Scott Ferguson into following his wife by putting her on display. "We'll be dining at Ernie's first, you can see here there," he says at the beginning of the clip below.
Through a deep understanding of viewer identification and point-of-view editing, Hitchcock traps the viewer in a sinuous camera movement that would be an optically impossible match with what follows. A viewer who does not notice this becomes complicit in the illicit movement of desire, a point Hitchcock reinforces through Ferguson's furtive glances away and the subtle amplification of red in the profile portrait shot of Madeleine that follows.
I Go Up, I Go Down
Vertigo is a film about mythology, about the mythology of art and the remaking of mythology into art (as in the museum sequence to the left).
Several myths are interrelated: Pygmalion and Galetea, Orpheus and Eurydice, Tristan and Isolde, and Demeter and Persephone. What links the last three is an exploration of descents and returns and of death and resurrection. Visually, this is manifest above all through color contrast. In the sequence at Ernie's above, the irresistible fascination of forbidden, adulterous passion is vividly communicated by the stark contrast between the complementary colors of red (the walls) and green (the dress). The two colors recur through the clothing Ferguson and Madeleine wear in the apartment scene below. Ferguson's mauve curtains magnify the effect as the viewer is once again encouraged to ignore transparent improprieties: Madeline verbally acknowledges the act of undressing that follows her descent into the bay and also her "marriage" to Elster ("I'm married, you know.").
Like Eurydice and Isolde, Ferguson's beloved is taken from him. When he finds her again, she, as with the second Isolde in the Celtic myth, has been visually transformed. She now appears as "Judy," whose clothing tend towards earth tones, and she brings with her (like Persephone) the return of spring. Her more overt and direct sensuality is epitomized by a recognizable chromatic variation, the lavender and jade that dominate her dingy apartment in the sequence below. Especially in an IB Technicolor film print, the effect is painterly, with an emphasis on the fluid blending of colors rather than sharp contours.
A Very Apt Pupil
By once again breaking with the conventional logic of point-of-view and giving us Judy's memories in flashback (left), Hitchcock complicates the viewer's sympathies and makes it possible to understand both points of view in shot-countershot exchanges. Indeed, in this final part of the film, the viewer is encouraged to look past blatant criminality (Judy was an accomplice in the murder plot of Gavin Elster) rather than impropriety.
If the identification patterns and insistent pursuit of the first part of the film evoke the experience of film viewing, the second part explores the fascination and danger of film making. This point is deepened when Ferguson's sustained efforts to resurrect the original image (Madeleine) culminate in the metamorphosis of space and a swoon into pure color accompanied by music that echoes the Liebestod theme of Richard Wagner'sTristan and Isolde.
At the end, Hitchcock goes even further, introducing a sustained mea culpa and an acknowledgment that his role in the film mirrors that of Gavin Uslter ("Did he train you, did he research you, did he tell you exactly what to do, what to say? You were a very apt pupil."). Ferguson, like Pygamlion, tries to take control of his creations, but the shock appearance of a nun in the belfy leads to a second loss of the beloved. Irrevocably shaken, Ferguson walks to the edge and stands suspended between life and death as well as heaven and earth. It is a perfect image of the human condition in a film about falling and The Fall.
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Film Music
