![]() ![]() The locations chosen are all connected with the past and with time: the Palace of the Legion of Honor Museum, the Portals of the Past, the ancient redwoods. Hitchcock's use of landscape and geography is most revealing. The romance which develops between this obsessive searcher and this half-phantom, half-woman magnificently exploits San Francisco and its environs as a backdrop. As noted before, however, Scottie is no longer a logical, detached observer, and because the viewer is given no more information than Scottie, neither is he. Her appearance, her strange visits to places which Carlotta frequented, and her speech all seem to confirm her belief that she is the reincarnated Carlotta. With the growth of Scottie's obsession comes an equal and concurrent increase in the credibility of Madeleine's claims. This feeling is enhanced even more by the lilting, musical background of master film composer Bernard Herrmann. In the scenes of Scottie tailing Madeleine by car through the streets of San Francisco, the vehicle seems to be floating above the pavement. ![]() Visually Hitchcock reinforces this loss of objectivity and descent into obsession by photographing Scottie's wanderings in soft-focus and at a gliding, dreamlike pace. As he follows her through museums, graveyards, and forest haunts he becomes obsessed with this phantom woman who apparently believes herself to be the reincarnation of a turn-of-the-century belle named Carlotta. Madeleine is a wanderer, and in trailing her, Scottie becomes one too. He takes on a job as a private detective for an old college friend named Gavin Elster (Tom Helmore) who is worried about the strange behavior of his wife, Madeleine (Kim Novak), whom Scottie has never met. Throughout the rest of the film Scottie remains psychologically and symbolically suspended from that rooftop. ![]() The psychological scars left by this incident and, probably more significantly, by the guilt of having been responsible for the death of a fellow officer who tried to rescue him, induce in Scottie a phobia-vertigo, or fear of high places, the phobia which initially caused his accident. Scottie is a San Francisco police detective who, during a rooftop chase, nearly plunges to his death. It takes the viewer so far into the mind of the main character (Scottie, played by Hitchcock veteran James Stewart) that the audience's own objectivity, at least initially, is lost and replaced by complete identification with Scottie's fantasies and obsessions. VERTIGO's complexity, however, does not end with this multilevel approach to its tale the film also succeeds in blurring the already fine line between objectivity and subjectivity. Finally, on an allegorical or figurative level, it is a retelling of the immemorial tale of a man who has lost his love to death and in hope of redeeming her descends into the underworld, the most famous of these stories being that of Orpheus and Eurydice in Greek Mythology. On a psychological level the film traces the twisted, circuitous routes of a psyche burdened down with guilt, desperately searching for an object on which to concentrate its repressed energy. On a literal level it is a mystery-suspense story of a man hoodwinked into acting as an accomplice in a murder, his discovery of the hoax, and the unraveling of the threads of the murder plot. With: James Stewart, Kim Novak, Barbara Bel Geddes.A lfred Hitchcock's VERTIGO is a film which functions on multiple levels simultaneously. Join filmmaker and programmer Adam Piron for a live reading and visual essay, followed by a screening of the film, that offers a reading of Vertigo from a uniquely Indigenous vantage point and interprets Hitchcock’s masterpiece as a statement on the ongoing costs of colonialism, specific to California, and the psychological violence that continues to ripple from its blast point.ģ5mm, color, 128 min. In its sundry dissections, much of the focus centers on its portrayal of obsession while few have dug deep into its foregrounding of California’s dark legacy of the Mission Era. Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, widely considered his crowning achievement, has long been canonized as cinema’s essential image of San Francisco. Director: Emily Chao.įormer San Francisco police officer (James Stewart) has developed acrophobia and must follow a woman (Kim Novak) who may be possessed by a ghost from the past. A rumination on place, colonialism, and the light. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |