Vertigo by Sophie Quantick

Vertigo

Vertigo ALFRED HITCHCOCK

CONTENTS Introuduction The Plot

Screen Play

And itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s relationship to Hitchcock Themes

9 25

Alfred Hitchcock

Reviews

Criticisms and Responses

The Director

Legacy

Introduction 4

Alfred Hitchcock is one of history’s most respected directors amongst both critics and the public. The rotund man nimbly walked the tightrope between the academic and the mainstream better than anyone — while so many others looked down and got the spins. He was both a showman and a visionary, making films that celebrate the nail-biting entertainment we love about the movies, yet ones that, upon closer inspection, reveal a deeper understanding of how cinesthetic techniques work wonders on the subconscious.

Ironically, his greatest achievement was initially hated on both sides of the spectrum, overlooked at the box office and shunned by the experts. Like Van Gogh’s paintings or Bach’s music, Vertigo was an art masterpiece not appreciated in its time. For decades, it was unavailable as one of the “Five Lost Hitchcocks,” as Hitchcock held the rights until his death in 1980. This absence left scholars little chance to reconsider, so when it finally resurfaced around 1984, it was a critic’s wet dream 30 years in the making. Now, after the dust has settled from all the masterworks — from Psycho to The Birds, Rear Window to Notorious, North By Northwest to Shadow of a Doubt — Hitchcock’s cream has finally risen to the top. When Universal released its “Hitchcock Masterpiece DVD Collection,” Vertigo was notably the only film to feature the word “Masterpiece” on the cover. When the American Film Institute updated its Top 100 list in 2007, Vertigo leaped 52 spots ahead to No. 9. And when Sight & Sound conducted its latest international critics poll in 2012, Vertigo finally ended Citizen Kane‘s 50-year reign as the greatest film of all time.

Madeleine: I don’t know. It’s an open grave, and I, I stand by the gravestone looking down into it. It’s my grave. Scottie: But how do you know? Madeleine: I know. Scottie: Is there a name on the gravestone? Madeleine: No. It’s new and clean and waiting.

The Plot

Alfred Hitchcock’s intensely personal, self-revealing picture, Vertigo, is the story of a man who is possessed by the image of a lost love and becomes increasingly compulsive in his desire to re-create that image. James Stewart plays John “Scottie” Ferguson, a San Francisco police officer. At the film’s opening, Scottie loses his footing while chasing a suspect over rooftops, falls, and hangs over the street below, suspended only by a sagging rain gutter. Looking down, he experiences a sense of vertigo brought on by his fear of heights. Trying to pull Scottie to safety, a fellow officer falls to his death, and the incident causes Scottie to quit the force. Scottie spends time with his friend and former fiancée, Midge Wood (Barbara Bel Geddes), a no-nonsense, bespectacled artist who designs brassiere advertisements.

A former classmate, shipping magnate Gavin Elster (Tom Helmore), asks the ex-policeman to play detective and shadow his wife, Madeleine (Kim Novak), who has begun behaving strangely and self-destructively. Gavin asks Scottie if he believes that “someone dead, someone out of the past, can take possession of a living being.” Though Scottie doesn’t believe it, he takes the job, tracking his client’s wife throughout San Francisco in a sequence that amounts to a nearly silent, technicolor tour of the city. First, he follows the cool, alluring, gray-suited Madeleine to a flower shop, peeking through the barely open door as she purchases a small bouquet. He trails her to a cemetery where she lays the flowers at the grave of Carlotta Valdes. He then tracks her to a museum where she sits entranced by a portrait of the same Carlotta Valdes. He notices that Madeleine and the painted Carlotta wear the same hairstyle—blonde hair pulled back tightly. He then follows Madeleine to a hotel where he learns that she goes (as “Miss Valdes”) every now and then just to sit. When he goes to find her, Madeleine has mysteriously vanished. Afterwards, Gavin tells Scottie that Madeleine is becoming possessed by the spirit of Carlotta Valdes, her great-grandmother. Delving further, Scottie learns that Carlotta went mad after her husband left her and took their child, then killed herself at age twenty-six—Madeleine’s age. While closely following Madeleine, with whom he is becoming increasingly fascinated, Scottie watches as she walks to the edge of the San Francisco Bay—with the Golden Gate Bridge looming huge in the background—and jumps into the water, trying to kill herself. Scottie fishes her out and takes the unconscious woman back to his apartment, where she awakens naked in his bed, her clothes hung to dry. Though romantic and sexual tension fill the air, Madeleine, who does not remember jumping into the bay, leaves while Scottie is distracted by a phone call. She returns to leave him a thank-you note for saving her.

“Do you believe that someone out of the past

—Someone dead — can enter and take possession of a living being?”

Later, as the two drive around the area together, it appears that Scottie’s feelings for Madeleine may be requited—the sequence culminating in a kiss against a background of wild surf. After Scottie has a falling-out with Midge as a result of a particularly bad joke on her part, Madeleine turns up at Scottie’s apartment and describes a dream she had. Scottie recognizes the dream’s setting as the restored Mexican mission town San Juan Batista, where Carlotta jumped to her death. The two go to San Juan Batista, and they share another kiss in the stable. Nonetheless, Scottie cannot prevent Madeleine from running towards the church to climb to the bell tower. She pulls free from him and runs up the church stairs. Scottie tries to follow but is slowed by his vertigo. Before he can climb any further, he hears a scream and sees Madeleine’s body falling past the window, landing with a thud below. Unable to accept her death or his inability to save her, Scottie flees. A subsequent inquest lays to rest any charges of foul play, establishing that the emotionally disturbed Madeleine killed herself in the belief that she was

Carlotta Valdes—but also making it clear that Scottie’s vertigo allowed her to do so. Gavin accepts the loss of his wife with dignity. Scottie, however, falls apart and is committed to an asylum.

After a long period of treatment, he reenters the world, haunting the places where he used to see Madeleine—her house, the museum, Ernie’s restaurant—occasionally mistaking blonde, gray-suited women for his dead love. While roaming the hilly San Francisco streets, he spots Judy (also

played by Novak), a brunette who bears a striking resemblance to Madeleine, although her rather coarse manner is nothing like that of the enigmatic blonde. He approaches her, and, although she initially resists, she agrees to go out to dinner with him after hearing something of his sad story. An intervening scene showing Judy alone in her room establishes, through flashback, that she is indeed the woman Scottie knew as Madeleine. Preparing to flee before he can see her again, she begins to write him a letter admitting that she was Gavin’s lover and was involved in the murder of his wife—the real Madeleine Elster. She agreed to let Gavin dress her and make her up as his wife, to play her role under Scottie’s observation, and then to lead him to the bell tower where Gavin, knowing Scottie’s vertigo would prevent him from climbing all the way to the top, would push his wife’s already-dead body out of the bell tower. The plan worked, but what Judy didn’t plan was that she would fall in love with Scottie, who was just supposed to be a pawn in Gavin’s game to establish his wife’s “suicidal” state. She destroys the note, however, because she cannot bear never to see him again.

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Later, as Scottie and Judy have dinner at Ernie’s, Scottie stares intensely at this reincarnation of Madeleine, the dead woman’s image completely possessing him. He is in love—but not with the real, brunette Judy, only with the ideal she recalls. He buys Judy a gray suit and shoes identical to those Madeleine wore. She feebly protests but loves Scottie too much to resist him, naively hoping to win him on her own. It’s all the more painful, therefore, as Scottie grows ever more intent on remaking her in Madeleine’s image, psychologically stripping her of her true identity in a ruthless attempt to turn her into the dead woman. She agrees to dye her hair blonde, returning from the hairdresser with her hair at shoulder length, as if making one last attempt to hold on to part of her real self. Scottie insists that she put it up, however, and Judy, willing to do anything just to keep him, comes out of the bathroom looking exactly as Scottie remembers. They kiss, and, as the camera revolves around them, their surroundings blend into the stable at San Juan Batista and then back again. Later, as Judy gets ready for dinner, having seemingly accepted her fate

as the living memory of Scottie’s past love, she puts on a necklace. Scottie recognizes it as an heirloom of Carlotta’s that belonged to “Madeleine,” realizes that Madeleine and Judy are indeed one and the same, and takes

her to San Juan Batista to relive her “death.” Dragging her into the bell tower, forcing her to admit that it was all a plot, Scottie maniacally interrogates Judy about her relationship with Gavin. Overcoming his vertigo, Scottie drags Judy all the way to the top of the tower, only to discover that he does love her after all, despite everything. The commotion draws the attention of a nun, whose looming shadow frightens the distraught Judy. As Judy recoils in fear, she falls off the edge of the tower to her death. A shocked, destroyed Scottie, having again lost his beloved, perches at the edge and looks down at her dead body—his vertigo gone.

Screen Play and its relationship to Hitchcock

Vertigo is as emotionally complex a tale of love and mystery as you’ll find, with much of the credit belonging to Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac, who wrote the source novel in 1954. Hitchcock had tried buying the rights to their previous novel, Celle qui n’était plus, which was instead adapted by France’s Henri-Georges Clouzot into the classic Les Diaboliques (1955). When the authors heard about Hitch’s interest, they set out to write a novel just for him, and that’s what eventually became Vertigo. It remains their best adaptation, which is saying a lot, considering Boileau and Narcejac themselves adapted Jean Redon’s novel Les yeux sans visage into the horror classic Eyes Without a Face (1960). With a fresh story in hand, Hitchcock created the script outline and plucked screenwriters Alec Coppel (TV’s Alfred Hitchcock Presents) and Samuel Taylor (the romantic comedy Sabrina) to write it. It was the perfect pair for a story with equal parts thrill and romance. Rumor has it, however, that Taylor did most of the work and Coppel was only there to fulfill his contract. No matter, the script is a gem. Look at the way it subtly inserts its theme on three separate occasions. At the start, Elster says, “You know, men could do that in those days. They had the power and the freedom.” Later, at the bookshop, the gossiping bookkeeper says Carlotta’s husband threw her away, because back then men had the power and the freedom to do so. Finally, during the climax, Scottie says to Judy that Elster threw her away when he got the money and the power. If you’re not listening closely, you’ll miss the theme, disguised as casual conversation, backstory and accusatory dialogue. Now that’s good writing — accomplishing multiple things at once.

From a structural standpoint, the script brilliantly breaks convention in that it reveals its twist not at the end of the film, but two-thirds the way through. It comes with a full half hour left, getting the surprise out of the way and spending the rest of the film exploring Hitchcock’s real focus: the tragic emotions of his characters. Vertigo throws us a curve ball that switches our perspective away from the protagonist, allowing us to experience the rest of the film from the antagonist’s point of view, an approach Hitch would repeat two years later in Psycho, where he bumped the transfer even earlier in the film.

For the first half , we are completely on board with Scottie, driving around with him, experiencing his voyeurism, sharing his initial doubts, then falling into his obsession. When Madeleine dies and Scottie goes catatonic, we fall into a sort of daze with him, drifting between the winds as we watch this lonely, heartbroken guy yearning for a dead woman. This allows Judy to enter the picture and snatch our sympathies without Scottie’s knowing.

Vertigo’s story appealed to Hitchcock for reasons that become more apparent in light of the director’s own obsessions. Hitchcock tended to become fascinated with the actresses he starred in his films. He chose women whose cool, blonde, sophisticated looks played against their sexuality, including

Novak, Grace Kelly, Vera Miles, Joan Fontaine, Ingrid Bergman, and Tippi Hedren, and carefully molded their appearances and actions to comply with his rigid standards of beauty and sexual appeal. Hitchcock had originally planned to film Vertigo with Miles, whom he had groomed for superstardom according to his wont, having wardrobe, hairstyle, and makeup specially created for her and instructing her to wear them off the set as well as during shooting. His efforts went for naught in this case, however. In a published interview with François Truffaut, Hitchcock said that Miles, who married after finishing work on his film The Wrong Man (1956), “became pregnant just before the part that was going to turn her into a star. After that I lost interest.” He then cast Novak: “I went to Kim Novak’s dressing room and told her about the dresses and hairdos that I had been planning for several months.” Vertigo is about just such attempts to realize an ideal image and to capture an illusion, using its main character’s obsessive pathology to convey this theme. When the seemingly normal hero, who has become warped in his desire for a woman who never really existed, screams, “Did he train you? Did he rehearse you? Did he tell you exactly what to do and what to say?” he might easily be referring not to the murderer who set him up, but to himself and to Hitchcock— the master who obsessively trained his pupil-actresses. In Vertigo, Hitchcock reveals himself to his audience, embodying, in Stewart’s character, his own obsessions and desire to make women over. Novak’s character, moreover, is an actress of sorts, a woman whose role-playing assists one man (Gavin/the director) in captivating another (Scottie/the viewer).

Although Scottie is the main character, Novak’s role—that of a woman who feels compelled to deny her own identity and allow herself to be degraded in order to please the men who ask her to play a part—is equally intriguing. What both Scottie and Hitchcock look for in their perfect woman is the erotic, carnal female disguised within the gray suit and pinned-back hair. Scottie (and Hitchcock) are unattracted to Bel Geddes’ frank Midge, who clearly lacks feminine mystique, even going so far as to compare the mechanics of a bra to those of a cantilevered bridge. Madeleine, by contrast, is never as forthcoming and is all the more exciting because of it. In fact, when she tries to reveal something of her real self (as Judy) to Scottie, he resists her, becoming all the more determined in his obsessive confusion of illusion and reality.

than acts in the real world. preceding Rear Window (1954), a voyeur who observes and imagines rather It also makes him, like the character he played in Hitchcock's immediately pointed out, Scottie's pursuit of the image becomes a "form of necrophilia." with Judy, who becomes the victim of romantic idealization. As Hitchcock light that reveals its hopelessness, at the same time letting us sympathize this point), Hitchcock allows us to study his quixotic fixation in an objective freeing us from Scottie's point of view (with which we have identified up to our psychological understanding of the romantic dynamics. By suddenly Hitchcock's revelation of the murder plot midway through the film deepens 31

One of Vertigo's most telling, and disturbing, scenes in this respect occurs after Scottie has pulled the unconscious Judy from the water, and she wakes up nude in his apartment, her clothes hanging up to dry. Since she could not have undressed herself, Scottie obviously undressed and viewed the image of his desire while she was unconscious. In reality, however, Judy's suicidal trance was all part of the scheme to hook Scottie, which means that her attempted drowning was an act tooâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;we learn later that she is an excellent swimmerâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;and that she was merely pretending to be unconscious when Scottie undressed her and put her in bed.

Later, when Scottie really does lose his ideal image to death, he can no longer function (Hitchcock, when losing Miles to marriage and pregnancy, said about filming Vertigo, “I lost interest, I couldn’t get the rhythm going with her again”) and must re-create her in the new Judy. The person under the disguise means nothing to him, however; all that matters is that she look and act like the ideal woman. Because Scottie is more concerned with loving an image than with loving a person, this image is taken away from him at the film’s end. A happy ending to his dilemma is not possible.

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Vertigo Themes

Death as both

Attractive and Frightening In the opening scene of Vertigo, Scottie is moments away from death as he dangles from the roof of a tall building. His fear is palpable, and while he is overcome with terror watching his comrade fall, letting go seems to be the only way out of the situation. Madeleine is the embodiment of this fear of and attraction to death. Supposedly possessed by a woman who took her own life, Madeleine wanders San Francisco, drawn to the idea of suicide and yet fearing death. One day after attempting to drown herself in the San Francisco Bay, she and Scottie wander among the ancient Sequoia trees and she expresses a dread of death. “I don’t like it, knowing I have to die,” she tells him, and she pleads with him to take her into the light. This confusion of impulses manifests itself on a more figurative level when Scottie attempts to mold Judy in Madeleine’s image. While Judy initially fights the annihilation of her real self—a kind of death—she eventually embraces it as a way to claim Scottie’s love, saying, “I don’t care anymore about me.” Scottie enacts these contradictory impulses when he drags Judy to the top of the bell tower with the apparent desire to kill her, and then reacts with horror and despair when she plummets to her death. 38

Bouquets of

FLOW In one scene, Scottie follows Madeleine to a flower shop, where she purchases a small nosegay. Its fragile perfection is an ideal representation of Madeleine

herself. The bouquet appears again several times, most notably when Madeleine stands at the edge of San Francisco Bay, plucking petals from the flowers and tossing them into the water. The destruction of the bouquet mirrors Madeleine’s fixation on self-destruction as she prepares to drown herself in the bay. After Madeleine’s death, Hitchcock provides a graphic depiction of Scottie’s nightmare in which a brightly animated bouquet swirls about and then violently

disintegrates—a symbolic representation of Madeleine’s death. When Scottie spends the day with Judy before her transformation into Madeleine, he buys her a single flower to wear as a corsage, not a replica of Madeleine’s signature bouquet as we might expect. It is a visual reminder that Judy does not possess the ideal perfection of Madeleine, but merely a small seed of it.

WERS 41

Spirals evoke the literal and figurative feelings of vertigo that hound Scottie and Madeleine/Judy. The opening credits feature a spiral emerging from a woman’s eye. When Scottie looks down from the roof at his fallen colleague, the dead man’s limbs are splayed in the shape of a spiral, indicating that events have spiraled out of control. As Scottie observes Madeleine in the museum sitting in front of Carlotta Valdes’s portrait, the camera zooms in on the back of her head to reveal a tightly wound spiraling bun, an exact replica of the style worn by Carlotta. The spiral foreshadows the dizzying chaos into which Madeleine will lead Scottie. The most physically jarring spiral is the one formed by the winding stairs of the bell tower as revealed from Scottie’s perspective. As he chases Madeleine up the stairs attempting to halt her apparent suicide, his acrophobia takes over and the camera shoots straight down the stairwell. His vertigo has made him powerless to save the woman he loves. The very structure of the film suggests a spiraling circularity: Scottie falls in love with Madeleine, loses her to death, then falls in love with Judy/Madeleine again, only to lose her to death as well.

Spirals 43

Tunnels and Corridors Tunnels and corridors repeatedly represent the passage to death. The first tunnel image appears when the camera reveals Scottie’s perspective as he clings to the rooftop gutter. The camera shoots straight down the side of the building, creating a tunnel effect. While visiting the sequoia forest, Madeleine shares a recurring dream in which she walks “. . . down a long corridor.” Nothing but darkness and death await her at the end of the corridor. She also dreams of a room in which there is a corridor-like open grave. When Midge walks away from Scottie for the last time, it is down a long sanatorium corridor that darkens around her. This passage marks a kind of death for Midge as she loses hope of rekindling her romance with Scottie.

Hitchcock turns the tunnel-to-death motif on its head in the corridor outside Judy’s apartment. Judy emerges at the end of the hallway after her transformative trip to the beauty salon. Rather than retreat down the corridor, she comes forward as Madeleine in a kind of resurrection scene. The next tunnel Judy travels through is in Scottie’s car, when he takes her back to San Juan Bautista to retrace the steps of her crime. As they drive toward the mission, tall trees on either side of the road combine with dusky lighting to give the impression of a tunnel.

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Impenetrable Nature

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of Appearances

The mask-like qualities of appearance are suggested during the opening credits of the film, which feature a woman’s expressionless face and a shot first of her lips and then of her nervously darting eyes. The depths of emotion and experience in this woman are unknowable to us. In the scene

in Midge’s apartment, Scottie appears to be a balanced man on the mend from a traumatizing experience, but it does not take long to realize that his healthy exterior masks a burgeoning madness. And while Midge is pragmatic, unromantic, and controlled in her responses, her exterior hides the soul of a passionate person. After her failed attempt to break into Scottie’s dream-world by painting her own head on Carlotta’s portrait, she flies into a surprising rage, flinging paintbrushes at her own reflection in the window—an attempt to shatter the mask that Scottie sees and mistakes for her whole identity.

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Madeleine’s character is nothing but appearance. She is a fabrication loosely based on the legend of a dead woman, and Scottie’s attempt to understand and penetrate that appearance is what leads to his downfall and the downfall of Judy/Madeleine. After assuming Madeleine’s appearance at Scottie’s insistence, Judy has difficulty penetrating her own mask. By the time Scottie drags her up the steps of the bell tower, she no longer has a firm grasp on her true identity and alternates between speaking as Judy and as Madeleine.

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POWER and Freedom

Power and freedom are held up as privileges men had in the past, but presumably do not have in the present. While discussing his nostalgia for the San Francisco of the past, Gavin Elster tells Scottie that he misses the days when men had “power [and] freedom.” Later, when Scottie is researching the story of Carlotta Valdes, the bookshop owner and historian Pop Leibel tells him that the wealthy man who abandoned Carlotta and kept her child was able to do so with impunity because men in those days had “the freedom and the power” to do such things. Scottie yearns for the time when he felt he was the master of his own destiny, before his brush with death on the rooftop. The words freedom and power again are spoken by Scottie as he drags Judy up the stairs of the bell tower.

The Folly of

Romantic Delusion 50

While Scottie’s acrophobia is his most apparent, his true tragic flaw is his penchant for romantic delusion. He fools himself, and is easily fooled by others, into believing in illusions that are romantically gratifying to him. Hitchcock presents Midge as a highly sympathetic character and prompts viewers to root for her in her vain attempts to woo Scottie. Midge is the antithesis of romantic delusion, firmly grounded in the real world and able to offer Scottie a mature kind of love. But this is the kind of love that Scottie rejects in favor of the illusive, dreamlike love he finds with Madeleine. And it is his decisive submission to delusion that ensures the film’s tragic ending. Judy pleads with Scottie to accept her as she is, to try to move beyond the dead Madeleine, but this is something he cannot do. Judy’s startled fall from the bell tower is the film’s final example of the folly and danger of romantic delusion. When the shadowy figure of a nun appears behind Judy and Scottie in the tower, Judy seems to be overtaken by the romantic notion that it may be the ghost of the real Madeleine returning to the scene of the crime.

GREEN 52

The color green appears frequently throughout the film, typically in association with eerie or uncanny images. For example, when Scottie first sees Madeleine in Ernieâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Restaurant, she stands out vividly from everyone else in the room because of her dramatic green stole, giving her a startling and somewhat unsettling appearance. In his apartment, as he becomes more withdrawn from the outside world and immersed in a dream world, Scottie wears a green sweater. Judy, who seems to be the ghost of Madeleine, first appears wearing a green dress. Her room is illuminated at night by the buildingâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s green neon sign, and when she emerges into Scottieâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s view as the fully transformed Madeleine, she is bathed in the green light, making her look even more like the specter of the dead Madeleine. Thus, while green sometimes symbolizes life, as in the sequoia forest, it also symbolizes the ghostly or uncanny. Both associations with the color green are traditional and can be seen in the earliest folktales. For example, because green can represent the spring and the rebirth of nature, it is also associated with the life after death embodied by ghosts and spirits, as in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

The Male Gaze This transfer of sympathies from the male to the female raises interesting questions about Hitchcock’s intentions. You’ll note how Hitch lingers in Judy’s apartment as the twist is revealed, and has us literally inside her head during her and Scottie’s walk through the park. We get Novak’s POV, not Scottie’s, and she sees a happy couple laying in the grass, amidst fluttering birds and optimistic music. In this new light, the twisted tale becomes a masterful meditation on the male ego and the unattainable woman. We feel for Judy as she is repeatedly subjected to Scottie’s attempts to remake her into his “ideal object” and looks up at him with those tragic eyes to say, “Couldn’t you like me? Just me, the way I am?” It is both a delicious ode to the helpless male fantasy and a scathing commentary supported by even the most strident feminist. As with all of Hitchcock’s films, one can debate whether it is a sick example of the “male gaze,” or a useful window into the dangers of the “male gaze.” I prefer the latter. While I agree with Laura Mulvey that Rear Window and Vertigo “cut to the measure of the male desire,” (E) I think the point is for us to admit and question that desire. It’s no coincidence that we begin to see Scottie in a different light, and we don’t like what we see. This is the true lesson of the film.

Trees

like it, knowing I have to die.” The couple looks at the cross-section of a felled tree, which shows how old the tree was when it was chopped down and suggests that the tree would have gone on living forever had it not been for human intervention. Madeleine’s response to the trees is complex. She appears simultaneously to be afraid of dying and afraid to embrace life. Ultimately, she runs away from the forest, feeling alienated from life and wanting to die.

Scottie and Madeleine’s visit to the forest of sequoia trees is one of Scottie’s last attempts to return to a healthy worldview. He tells Madeleine that the tree’s scientific name means “always green, ever living,” making explicit the idea that sequoia trees symbolize life in the film. However, the trees remind Madeleine of her own mortality. In response to this immense life force, she says, “I don’t

Sequoia

Hitchcock also uses shadows and mirrors to symbolize Madeline/Judy’s dual nature. The clearest example of her divided self comes in the shot where Scottie sees Judy silhouetted by the green light of a neon sign out the window. The outline of her body strips away all pretense of “Judy,” rendering her a carbon copy of Madeline. As Hitchcock cuts to a frontal view, Judy’s half-lit face leaves no doubt as to her dual nature. Her eyes move from the shadows and into the light, as if desperately wanting to escape the bounds of her evil side. This same idea of dual nature is expressed through the use of mirror doubles, another Hitchcock auteur icon (i.e. Claude Rains in Notorious, or Anthony Perkins in Psycho). The first mirror double in Vertigo comes as Madeline and Gavin Elster leave Ernie’s Restaurant for the first time. The double image hints that they’re both phonies. It happens again as Scottie watches Madeline through a cracked door at the flower shop. Note that Scottie is quite literally witnessing her phony side.

Shadows and Mirrors 58

It happens again the first time Scottie comes to Judy’s apartment. Scottie thinks he recognizes her. She convinces him otherwise. However, we the audience should know who’s telling the truth, based off Hitchcock’s mirror mise-en-scene. The most poignant example happens just before Scottie figures out the truth. This mirror shot comes accompanied by dialogue clues like, “I have my face on” and “Can’t you see?” Judy’s “face” line mirrors a quote by the archetypal femme fatale in Double Indemnity (1944), where Barbara Stanwyck looks into a mirror and says, “I hope I got my face on straight.” For all this, some critics describe Vertigo as a sort of “film-noir in Technicolor.” Indeed, our hero goes on a night journey and winds up fooled by a femme fatale. There are multiple shots that scream noir, from the aforementioned shadows and mirrors, to Stewart’s silhouette entering the flower shop, to the Laura-like portrait of Carlotta

rsorriM dna wsodahS 59

ALFRED HITCHCOCK 1899 - 1980

Alfred Hitchcock’s iconic self–portrait.

Marion Crane (Janet Leigh) absconds with $40,000 of stolen cash from a Phoenix bank and drives

toward California, where she plans to start a new life with her paramour. Before reaching her destination,

Physco

however, fate delivers her to the Bates motel, which is run by the seemingly harmless mama’s boy,

Norman (Anthony Perkins). Following Marion’s mysterious disappearance her sister and her

boyfriend team up with a private investigator to find

The Birds

out what happened to her. Clues can be found in the shower of room #1 of the Bates motel.

The story begins as an innocuous romantic

triangle involving wealthy, spoiled Melanie Daniels

police for an arrest?

Lisa and Stella, will Jeff be able to convince the

(Tippi Hedren), handsome Mitch Brenner (Rod

his neighbor from across the courtyard (Raymond

(Suzanne Pleshette). The human story begins

Taylor), and schoolteacher Annie Hayworth

Burr) has murdered his sick wife! With the help of

Rear Window

of the birds in the area. At first, it’s no more than a sea gull swooping down and pecking at Melanie’s

head. Things take a truly ugly turn when hundreds of birds converge on a children’s party. There is never an explanation as to why the birds have

run amok, but once the onslaught begins, there’s virtually no letup

North by Northwest Brandon and Philip are two young men who share

a New York apartment. They consider themselves

intellectually superior to their friend David Kentley

and as a consequence decide to murder him.

Together they strangle David with a rope and placing

he stumbles across something. Jeff suspects that

Late one night as Jeff watches outside his window, activities.

keep him away from spying on his neighbors

Ritter) and his girlfriend, Lisa (Grace Kelly) can his daily visits from his nurse, Stella (Thelma

through his appartment rear windows. Not even do but watch his neighbors from the courtyard

in his appartment for six weeks, with nothing to

He has been confined to a wheel chair and stuck

attempting to take a picture of a race car accident. photographer who has broken his leg while Jeff (James Stewart) is a professional

lost microfilm, off his tail.

the body in an old chest, they proceed to hold a

police and get an evil crime syndicate, looking for a

small party. The guests include David’s father, his

him across the country to prove his innocence to the

fiancée Janet and their old schoolteacher Rupert

embroiled in a web of intrigue and murder that takes

security is slowly eroded by the curious behavior

from whom they mistakenly took their ideas. As

finds himself, through a case of mistaken identity,

Bodega Bay, where the characters’ sense of

Brandon becomes increasingly more daring, Rupert

A suave, succesful New York advertising executive

the home of Mitch’s mother (Jessica Tandy) at

begins to suspect.

Rope

in a San Francisco pet shop and culminates at

Alfred Hitchcock is one of the most well known directors of all time, as he helped perfect the murder and mystery genre.His started his directing career in1925 with “The Pleasure Garden” and ended in 1976 with the film “Family Plot”, and set a standard for all other directors in the film industry.

Many techniques used by Hitchcock, along with some of the storylines have become common standards for the films of today. Most Americans know Hitchcock from several of his famous movies such as “Psycho” and “Vertigo”, but it was in England years before that he developed into an amazing director and created films which set the tone for his later works.It is very interesting to analyze some of his earlier works to see how he became such a prominent figure in modern History. Hitchcock was raised in England where he lived with his parents.He had a strong interest in filmmaking since he was young, and when a new Paramount studio opened where he lived, he rushed to get a job there. They hired Hitchcock as a “Title designer” for silent films.Basically, he would write out the words which are displayed after each shot in a particular film which helped move the story along during the silent film era. From there, he worked his way up to become an assistant director, and directed a small film which he was never finished, and was never released (Philips 22).Hitchcock’s first real debut as a director took place in 1925 when he released the film “The Pleasure Garden” (Giannetti 182).Just a year later he released a film that really helped his career take off titled “The Lodger”.”The Lodger” is a model example of a typical Hitchcock plot.The basic idea behind the plot is that an innocent man has been accused of a crime that he didn’t commit, and through mystery, danger, and love he must find the real criminal (Philips 23).

It wasn’t long before Hitchcock became known as the “Master of Suspense”, which is a title he actually gave to himself.The first talkie created by Hitchcock was the movie “Blackmail”. The film, which was released in 1929, had originally supposed to be a silent film, and there are some people who think it

should have stayed that way. nevertheless, it was a incredible breakthrough for both Hitchcock and the British film industry as it was their first film with sound (Giannetti 182).However, there were a few problems that arose with the transition to sound.A girl named Anna Ondra played the female character Alice, and had a thick Eastern accent which came to be impossible to interpret in the film.This was obviously never a problem for her prior to “Blackmail” since she had only starred in silent films.Hitchcock helped to fix this problem by getting someone to dub over her voice which turned out to be the perfect solution (Philips 23). This film features a classic Hitchcock story where the character wants the police to understand what happened, but decide it isn’t a good idea. They figure that the police would never believe them anyway, so they’re on their own (Philips 23).

Hitchcock loves to return to the same themes time and time again, but he somehow manages to never make the same movie twice.Each movie has a certain characteristic that sets it apart from all the rest.In “Blackmail” for example, the visuals and sounds set themselves apart, but do not detract from one another. Hitchcock managed to keep a strong emphasis on the visuals when incorporating sound into his films. The sound does not overwhelm in “Blackmail”, so the viewer is still able to pay attention to the fine details.For example, the image of hands continually reaching for Alice is as evident as it should be.This also applies to the glove which is forgotten in the studio, the setting of the murder (Thomson 28).The sound only works to improve on what is already there. The film that really set off Hitchcock’s career is the 1935 film “The 39 Steps”, which was based off a book written by John Buchan.”The 39 Steps” is a murder mystery with a little bit of espionage.The story is about a man named Richard who is new to London.After a fight breaks out at a nearby theater,

Richard is approached by a girl in distress who pleads to go home with him. He agrees, and soon finds out that she is hiding from several men that are chasing her.From then on he is involved in chases, confrontations, and romance (Philips 24). There were several changes in the story line that Hitchcock knew would work better on screen.The Professor in the novel is unique because of his hooded eyes, not a missing finger as shown in the film.Hitchcock thought a missing finger would be more dramatic to the film than someone with half shut eyes because it is much more noticeable, and has a stronger effect (Rose 10).

This film is one of the most popular early works of Hitchcock, because it derives Hitchcock’s distinct and unique style of directing. A lot of the ideas from this film are reworked in later films such as “Saboteur”, and “North by Northwest” (Giannetti 183). This film also displayed his talent as being able

to make a novel’s story line work in a movie with just a few adjustments. The length of Hitchcock’s movies are important to him, he was once quoted as saying: “The length of the film should be directly related to the endurance of the human bladder”, a standard all directors should work by in my opinion” (Anderson 56). He was able to compress the novel to a length that would not only interest the audience but improve upon it as well. Hitchcock also uses the technique of irony quite often which many viewers may not realize, but it is part of what makes him so great.As mentioned in “The 39 Steps”, Richard allows the women to go home with him, at which point she tries to explain to him what happened at the theatre.Richard tells her that she shouldn’t bother telling him because he’s a nobody.The real irony in this statement is that throughout the movie Richard goes on to pose as a milkman, a mechanic, a parade marcher, and a political speaker.This strongly contradicts his statement because he is virtually everyone (Thomson 29).

“The 39 Steps” definitely had a large historical impact on movies.After this movie came out almost every chase and spy thriller have copied its approach. Directors discovered that movie-goers really enjoyed this type of film.The movie gets the viewer so involved in the suspense, action, and romance they

almost forget about the actual 39 Steps.Even more amazing, the film contains minimal special effects, but it doesn’t need them since the suspensful plot and the staging of the shots make the audience stay in their seats to find out what happens (Rose 101). Hitchcock came to America in 1939 as an already very established filmmaker.”Rebecca”, released in 1940, was Hitchcock’s first American film and was a huge success, winning best picture.During this decade Hitchcock also created two other Masterpieces:”Shadow of a Doubt in 1943, and “Notorious” in 1946.It wasn’t until the 1950s however, that Hitchcock really took off in the US and became a household name.This era produced some of his best work such “Strangers on a Train” in 1951, “To Catch a Thief” in 1955, and “Vertigo” in 1958.1960 is arguably the pinnacle of Hitchcock’s career when he released the hit “Psycho”, which generated over 18 times more money than was put into it.His final work came in 1976 when he released “Family Plot”, putting an end to one of the most amazing directing careers in the history of film (Giannetti 279-81).

There is no denying that Hitchcock enjoyed the majority of his success here in America, but he wouldn’t have become the great director he was without his experience over in England.It was there that he developed into an amazing director, and began to show the world some of the things he was capable of. The consistency of quality plot lines and technical creativity earned him the recognition of being one of the greatest filmmakers of all-time.

Works Cited: Anderson, Michael.”Alfred Hitchcock”.New York Times.2001, Vol. 153 Issue 52669, p56, 2p.16 Nov 2003.Academic Search Premier. Giannetti, and Scott Eyman.Flash-Back.4th Ed.New Jersey: Prentice-Hall Inc., 2001. Phillips, Louis. “The Hitchcock Universe:Thirty Nine Steps and then some”. Films in Review.Mar/Apr95, Vol. 46 Issue 3/4, p22, 6p.18 Nov 2003 Academic Search Premier. Rose, Lloyd.”Alfred Again”.Atlantic Monthly.Oct 83, Vol. 252 Issue 4, p100, 2p.19 Nov 2003.Academic Search Premier. Thomson, David.”Hitchcock”.Sight & Sound.Jan 97, Vol. 7 Issue 1, p26, 4p, 6c. 16 Nov 2003.Academic Search Premier 76

You know why I favour sophisticated blondes in my films?

We’re after the drawing-room type, the real ladies, who become whores once they’re in the bedroom. – Alfred Hitchcock

Hitchcock’s typically ungallant comment in the famous interview with François Truffaut summons not only his “naughty boy” persona of smuttiness and unsubtle innuendo—he loved to pun on his last name and to make toilet jokes—but also the more knowing artist who recognized the double nature

of one of his signature motifs: the cool, aloof blonde. Petrarch’s timeworn oxymoron “icy fire” captures the quality Hitchcock searched for in his succession of fair-haired beauties, from the manacled Madeleine Carroll in The 39 Steps through the oddball blondes, one real, one fake, in his last film, Family Plot. With her precise diction, virginal beauty, and regal air—John Ford applauded her screen test as revealing her “breeding, quality and class”— Grace Kelly best embodied the remote, composed but approachable blonde who was Hitchcock’s ideal. (“I signed [Tippi Hedren] to a contract because she has a classic beauty,” Hitchcock told a reporter. “Movies don’t have them anymore. Grace Kelly was the last.”) More than the unfortunate others, Kelly managed to elude the director’s sexual predation (and depredation), maintaining her sophisticated poise and serene elegance. She was the lucky one. Those who resisted—Janet Leigh, Tippi Hedren—found themselves tormented both off-screen and on, submitted to needlessly protracted, gruelling shoots: a six-day stint in the shower (Leigh) or endless avian onslaught (Hedren), their marmoreal loveliness defiled for the world to behold. However one characterizes the dual nature of “the Hitchcock blonde”— earthy-ethereal, detached-passionate, femme fatale-ingenue—the misogynist dichotomy of the virgin and whore that the director’s own statement seems to imply does not actually pertain. Rather, in his cinema the inviolate exists to

be violated: stabbed, strangled, or tossed off a tower, emotionally humiliated, traumatized, or otherwise injured. (Buñuel was somewhat less severe in his treatment of unattainable blondes, for whom he shared a fascination with Hitchcock; see Viridiana, Belle de Jour, Tristana.) In Hitchcock’s punitive universe, the blonde can sometimes be disciplined (by death or mortification) for an actual crime—Marnie and Marion (Psycho) steal from their employers, Vertigo’s Madeleine is complicit in murder and fraud—but she often appears to be punished merely for being desirable. And, in a cruel irony, Hitchcock’s actresses were made to feel unappealing until they had achieved his prescribed degree of blondeness: Anne Baxter, replacing the Nordic Anita Björk in I Confess, was immediately instructed to dye her tresses so bright that she became almost unrecognizable.

He loved blondes, and couldnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t understand women not bleaching their hair for the privilege of working with him. â&#x20AC;&#x201D; Joseph Cotten

A cinema as complex as Hitchcock’s resists generalization; no observation matches all instances. The amiable working girl who makes one wrong step and regrets it, Marion Crane seems a distant relative of the glamorous, sometimes arch socialites Eve Kendall (North by Northwest), Melanie Daniels (The Birds) and Lisa Fremont (Rear Window), as does The Man Who Knew Too Much’s freckle-faced singer Jo McKenna (the sole blonde in this series with a child, an anomaly that Hitchcock typically turned into an instrument of intimidation). Too, the semiotic thicket of Hitchcock’s cinema can be tricky to navigate. Turning the innocent into the ominous, the “pure” into its sordid opposite, the Catholic Hitchcock, greatest purveyor of name symbolism since Dickens, often ensures his blondes have posh monikers or ones fraught with religious association, even as their characters appear to be (or indeed are) spies, thieves, kidnappers or cheats. Aside from the basic vagaries of determining hair colour—some critics count Ingrid Bergman as a Hitchcock blonde, though both her bearing and tint seem to deny that appellation—blondeness remains something of an “elusive signifier” in Hitchcock. Despite its frequent association with the brassy and

brazen in early cinema—e.g., the well-named Joan Blondell, Jean Harlow, Barbara Stanwyck—blondeness originally derived its fascination for the director, or so he claimed, from the wholesome nature of “The Girl with the Golden Hair,” silent star Mary Pickford. Hitchcock often complicates the classical light-dark duality and its traditional clusters of connotation. In Vertigo and Marnie, each a Pygmalion tale of a man’s fetishistic obsession with, and reconstruction of, a duplicitous woman to satisfy his desires (as well as an obvious allegory about Hitchcock’s domineering treatment of his actresses), Kim Novak and Tippi Hedren play both ends of the spectrum, dyeing their hair less for beauty than for ruse. After what seems like a perverse deferral of revealing the heroine’s face in Marnie’s opening sequences—we see only her body from the back and hear her described by a policeman reiterating her employer’s estimation: “black hair, wavy, even features, good teeth”—our first glimpse of the character’s visage is introduced by the “stain” of her previous self being washed away, a sink swirling with dark dye before Marnie finally heaves into view: Venus-like, triumphantly, almost ecstatically, a blonde. She does not, however, expunge her transgression along with the raven stain: she remains criminal, a kleptomaniac and prisoner of sexual pathology despite

the “purity” signaled by her blonde rebirth. Similarly, Vertigo’s wraithlike Madeleine (the whorl of her blonde chignon signifying for Chris Marker one of the film’s many spirals of temporality) transforms into the dark and down-toearth Judy from Kansas, only to again be remade into her former chimerical self, the chic, platinum enigma with the Proustian name and tailored grey suit, by an increasingly abusive man in love with her phantom. Tincture means little more to Madeleine than a means of deception, while Scottie fetishizes it as a talisman of lost time. “Are you crazy? Are you trying to kill her?” a doctor reportedly demanded of Hitchcock during Tippi Hedren’s harrowing ornithological ordeal in the final weeks of shooting The Birds. Hitchcock’s impulse to punish his actresses has been duly analyzed by everyone from Lacanian theorists and feminist critics to Donald Spoto, author of three biographical studies of the auteur. Among the first scholars to emphasize what he called “the dark side of [Hitchcock’s] genius,” Spoto has increasingly focused on the psychodrama of the director’s relationships with his actresses, blonde and not, while maintaining that Hitchcock was “history’s greatest filmmaker.” (After all, the list of great directors with vicious attitudes or sadistic means runs to reams.) Spoto

prefaces Spellbound by Beauty, his latest Hitchcock study, by observing that of the more than 140 references to actresses in the Truffaut interview with the director, none of them is complimentary, even about the actresses he was fond of (Ingrid Bergman, Grace Kelly), while many of them are hostile. Spoto presents a self-loathing, isolated artist, imprisoned by his ego and fleshy immensity, plagued by childish sexual delusions that he imposed upon his actresses, persecuting them when they failed to respond. â&#x20AC;&#x153;Torture the women!â&#x20AC;? Hitch often joked, and proceeded to do just that. To invoke the language of his religion, does the indisputable greatness of his art absolve his most grievous sins? â&#x20AC;&#x201D;James Quandt

Reviews

The film was not a box-office hit in 1958, but over the years it has come to be regarded as a Hitchcock classic. With the rise of the auteur theory and interest in directors’ lives and careers (along with a number of books delving into Hitchcock’s dark side), Vertigo has come to be regarded as a great work of art that, more than any other Hitchcock film, gives the audience a sense of who the director really is. It is also a masterpiece of filmmaking technique, including one of cinema’s most important innovations—the dolly-out, zoom-in shot that visually represents Scottie’s sensation of vertigo. As Hitchcock told Truffaut, “I always remember one night at the Chelsea Arts Ball at Albert Hall in London when I got terribly drunk and I had the sensation that everything was going far away from me.” Although he first attempted to visualize this sensation in Rebecca (1940), Hitchcock was dissatisfied with the effect and continued to think about the problem for fifteen years. For the vertigo effect in the bell tower (and elsewhere in the film), he finally hit upon the idea of dollying the camera away from the stairs (which meant physically pulling the camera away) while simultaneously zooming the lens in on them. When presenting the idea to his crew, Hitchcock was told it would cost $50,000, “because to put the camera at the top of the stairs [they had] to have a big apparatus to lift it, counterweight it, and hold it up in space.” Since there were no characters in the shot, Hitchcock asked, “Why can’t we make a miniature of the stairway and lay it on its side, then take our shot by pulling away from it?” The resulting shot, which cost $19,000 to produce, is unique to Hitchcock and completely new to film.

Criticisms & Responses

Judging by the IMDB message boards, the sudden disappearance of Midge does not sit well with many of you. It may also be one of the “loose ends” British film critic Tom Shone referred to when he said, “Hitchcock is a director who delights in getting his plot mechanisms buffed up to a nice humming

shine, and so the Sight and Sound team praise the one film of his in which this is not the case — it’s all loose ends and lopsided angles, its plumbing out on display for the critic to pick over at his leisure.”

the sudden disappearance of Midge does not sit well with many of you We’ll get to the “lopsided angles” in a second (I believe Mr. Shone to be wrong; see the “What Lies Above” section). As for the “loose ends,” would the conclusion feel better if Midge were the one to spook Judy off the tower instead of a random nun? I am admittedly torn. Part of me thinks it’s more realistic to have a nun who simply “heard voices” and came upstairs to investigate. The other part thinks Midge could have conceivably followed them up the bell tower, because she has already been set up as tailing Scottie. Either way, it’s a touch of genius to have a shadowy figure climb the staircase and strike fear in Judy’s eyes. We (and Judy) wonder two things: Has the ghost of Elster’s wife come back for vengeance? Or, has the ghost of Carlotta returned to levy some divine justice?

Once that figure comes out of the shadows and into the light, it’s irrelevant who it is, because the important part is what the shadow does to Judy. As she cowers backward to her death and Scottie staggers out to the edge of the bell tower, raising his hands helplessly toward the heavens, it’s a tragic ending where the femme fatale has succumbed to guilt and the hero has overcome his character flaw (vertigo) while losing his love in the process.

And what of the murder plot itself? Critic Kim Newman says he loves the film despite the fact that Elster’s plot is revealed much in the manner of a Scooby Doo villain. I agree that the complexity of the scheme may far outweigh its practicality, but hey, this is a movie! Do we really go to them for accuracy alone, or do we want to be taken on a ride? Thankfully, Hitchcock does care about authenticity when it comes to one particular part: allowing Elster to get off scott free (pun intended), as often happens to the bad guys in real life. The crew shot an alternate ending of Elster’s murder conviction to please the studios, but it has since been restored to Hitchcock’s original vision. In addition to the evil scheme, the whole idea of Scottie not realizing Judy is Madeline is admittedly absurd. New York Times critic Bosley Crowther wrote that the premise is “devilishly far-fetched.” We doubt the plausibility as much as we do the mistaken identities in Preston Sturges’ The Lady Eve (1941). However, the possibilities it opens for character exploration are far worth the trade off. In fact, it may be Hitchcock’s biggest ruse that he so successfully takes us along for this ride, despite having Elster lie right to our faces at the start: “I’m not making it up. I wouldn’t know how.” For this, every time Hitchcock is called the “Master of Suspense,” we should also add the phrase “Master of Suspension of Disbelief.” As director Norman Jewison said, “Hitchcock could tell us the most absurd stories and we’d believe them, because he dealt with some pretty weird stuff.” All of these things — the absurdities; the disappearance of Midge; the jolt nun

ending — could make Vertigo slightly inaccessible to mainstream viewers on first go round. It certainly does not carry the full-fledged accessibility of Psycho or North By Northwest, but only slightly less so. Compared to other works that equal its artistic genius — 8 1/2, Tokyo Story, Citizen Kane, The Rules of the Game – there’s no comparison in terms of audience hook. I mean, this is a Hitchcock mystery! Even in times when Stewart is endlessly driving around San Francisco, we’re curious to find out what happens next in what is largely a ghost story. You’ll be hard-pressed to find a film that pulls such thrills and such intrigue from so high an art piece.

Legacy

There’s a reason Alfred Hitchcock continues to fascinate us half a century after his heyday and decades after his death. It’s the same reason he has four of the AFI’s Top 10 Mysteries: Dial M for Murder (#9), North By Northwest (#7), Rear Window (#3) and Vertigo (#1). The man was notorious for stringing us along, making us think we knew the answers and then shocking us as men who knew too much.

Yet to simply call Vertigo the greatest mystery of all time does not do it justice. It may also be the most romantic film you’ll ever see, and by that standard, also the most tragic. Note that Vertigo was voted #18 on the AFI’s 100 Passions and #18 on the AFI’s 100 Thrills. That shared number almost speaks to the film’s notion that deep romance and dark horror are somehow tied through fate. How many films can claim to be voted more thrilling than The Shining and Halloween, while simultaneously voted more romantic than Pretty Woman and When Harry Met Sally? The two genres come crashing together beautifully during the climax as Scottie looks at Judy with tears in his eyes and says, “You shouldn’t keep souvenirs of a killing. You shouldn’t have been that sentimental.” Vertigo works on so many levels it isn’t even funny, except that sometimes it is, with an amused bra smirk here or sharp “Johnny O” jab there, reminding us of the sense of humor that followed Hitch each time he casually appeared in cameo. Hitchcock walked so many lines and kept just the right balance, between humor and suspense; tragedy and romance; social commentary and suspension of disbelief.

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Yet his greatest tightrope was always the one between rousing entertainment and high art. This may be why he’s the only filmmaker featured on Apple’s famous “Think Different” commercial. There’s a little bit of Steve Jobs in Hitch’s blend of commercial accessibility and liberal imagination, just as sure as the song “Vertigo” launched the iPod; just as sure as Scene d’Amour continues to loop on mine. His crowning achievement may begin as a fetishistic fascination, but it becomes something you covet and crave, like a lost lover remade. It replays tirelessly in your head, like its own looping score and spiraling graphics. And like the “vertigo effect” it invented, its gorgeous images rush toward you the second you pull away. All you can do is give in, allow yourself to get sucked into, lose sleep over and eventually become obsessed with Vertigo, the greatest film by history’s greatest director.

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Work cited: Fraley, J. (2013). Vertigo (1958). Available: http://thefilmspectrum.com/?p=6832#C1. Last accessed 2nd May 2013. Unknown. (Unknown). Vertigo (1958). Available: Fraley, J. (2013). Vertigo (1958). Available: http:// thefilmspectrum.com/?p=6832#C1. Last accessed 2nd May 2013.. Last accessed 2nd May 2013. Unknown. (Unknown). Themes, Motifs, and Symbols. Available: http://www.sparknotes.com/film/ vertigo/themes.html. Last accessed 2nd May 2013.

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Visually immersing you into the fascinating world of Hitchcockâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Vertigo.

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