vertigo pack

A SERIES OF DOWNWARD
SPIRALS

Nick Carter explores the fasinating links between San
Francisco, Vertigo, Reality, Fantasy, Voyeurism and the
'Master of Suspense'

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2 A Series of Downward Spirals

A Series of Downward Spirals

So does Madelaine represent cinema then?

Nick Carter grapples with the debates about how Vertigo is a
self- reflexive meta-film, a film about film itself.

Film scholars have argued that

Vertigo is a film about cinema and

about spectatorship. how far do you

think this is true?

It is hard to argue that any film does not entail some
form of voyeurism or spectatorship. All films, by
their own nature, are there to be viewed, and cinema
provides us with an escape from reality into a world
where the dilemmas are ours to watch but not to
solve. Vertigo is no exception. Good intro. Cinema is
an inherently voyeuristic medium. ALL films are about
spectatorship.

I think that Vertigo is very much a film about
spectatorship. Even down to the basic narrative
structure it is a film all about watching. In the opening
sequence of the film, Scottie watches a colleague fall
to his death from a tall building. What follows is a
series of problems which are the direct consequence
of this. The viewing of this incident causes Scottie to
retire and get vertigo. He is later asked to watch over
Madeleine for Mr Elster. However, when the entire film
has unraveled itself, we realise that it was actually Mr
Elster who was watching Scottie, who in turn was still
watching Madeleine. Madeleine knew this all along as
she was hired by Mr Elster so she was really watching
herself being watched by Scottie. And how do we
know that all of this is happening? Because we are in
a cinema watching it for ourselves. Good.

The idea of spectatorship is emphasised when Scottie

follows Madeline for the first time. During this sequence,
one third of the shots are point of views. This clearly
illustrates how voyeuristic Hitchcock was when his was
creating this film. The repeated use of point of view
shots allows us to become Scottie. Although we haven't
been told to follow Madeline, our desire to do so is
strong. The fact that we observe Madeleine through
Scottie's point of view draws us into the film and helps
to create an overall sense of mystery and enigma
which are so fundamental to the story, yes

During the initial follow sequence, Madeline enters a
flower shop from a back entrance. Scottie follows and
enters into a storage room. He slowly opens the door so
that he can see Madeline. And as all this is happening
we are sitting in a darkened cinema watching Scottie,
who is in the dark watching Madeline, who is acting
as she knows she's being watched. Possibly one of
the most memorable shots in the entire film is when
we see that Scottie is watching Madeline and, at the
same time, see her reflection in a mirror. The complex
relationship between the watcher and the watched
is cleverly illustrated here and is a clear example of
spectatorship within the film. Yes. And don't forget the
horizontal 'curtain' wipe

The narrative is clearly about voyeurism and
spectatorship, and this is highlighted through the way
the film is shot. The first time we see Madeline we
are looking on from Scottie's point of view, following
Madeline as she walks through the restaurant. However,
Scottie then turns away, but the camera returns to
Madeline. She seems to pause in the middle of the
frame, almost as though she is being presented to us
to gaze at. The profile shot breaks "film rules" because
the shot is seemingly so out of place. It isn't there to
help with the narrative line, neither is it there because
it's a point of view shot. It is there for our own personal
spectatorship (and also to hint that Madelaine is only
'half a person)

This type of profile shot is not stranded alone in this film.
Regularly the audience is presented with Madeline as
an object to gaze at through the use of profile shots
and lingering soft-focus, high angle shots such as those

in the scene in Scottie's appt after he has 'rescued'
her) Robert Baird refers to these shots as being there
to help us recognise Madeline's face and help us to
see Madeline in Judy. When the evidence is presented
in this way it is hard to dispute. We see so many shots
of Madeline in profile that we subconsciously identify
Madeline with profile shots. So when the first shot of
Judy is presented in profile the subliminal suggestion is
that Judy and Madeline are indissolubly linked.

Madeline is also presented to us in other ways. After
she falls into the river, Scottie takes her back to his
apartment. She is woken by the telephone ringing,
which Scottie answers. He then gives Madeline a
dressing-gown to put on. The next shot we see of
Madeline is as she slowly walks though the door (one
of many entrances she makes toward 'us') into the
lounge area. Because she knows that we are watching
her, Madeline's behaviour draws our attention even
closer to her. By walking slowly and resting her hands
up behind her head she is encouraging us to watch her.
Combined with clever shots, such as shooting her from
above which exploits our natural desire to protect her,
she becomes an object of desire. When she disappears
from the apartment, and we realise she is no longer
accessible to us, she becomes even more desirable.

The film also delivers a false ending. Hitchcock exploits
our expectations of conventional Hollywood film
resolutions. Scottie is holding and kissing Madeline at
the sea front with big cinematic music and loud crashing
waves and we expect the credits to start rolling.
However, the audience couldn't be more wrong. And all
this is only made possible because of the qualities of
spectatorship which are so strong throughout the film.
Hitchcock's ability to manipulate his audience in this
way is a real skill and one which marks him as a truly
great director. The kiss scene mocks the conventions
of romantic mainstream cinema, it refers to the fact
that hyperreal Hollywood representations of love/

romance can never match up to reality. Remember the
theme of how fantasy always exceeds reality? There
is a parallel here with how cinema can never match
reality. Madelaine is cinema, Judy is reality... .and
Scottie is held captive by a construction that does not
exist

All films concern spectatorship; audiences are invited to
peer into the lives of others whether they are fictional
or not. However, I believe that Hitchcock pushes the
concept of voyeurism to the absolute limit in Vertigo.
But the fact that the audience largely remain oblivious
to this is both unique and hugely skilful. If there ever
was a film which demanded a second viewing, it's
Hitchcock's Vertigo.

Good essay Nick. Well structured and concisely
argued. 17/20 = A-

You do miss a trick with the male gaze though. All
those shots when she is presenting herself to us and

pretending that she doesn't know we are watching

this is just like cinema! It's what all actresses do in all
fictional cinema See?

Also , there is the theory that Elster is Hitchcock

The invisible director, manipulating the scenes from
backstage

Madelaine or Judy?
Cinema or Reality?
Fantasy or Reality?
Whore or Virgin?

A Series of Downward Spirals

A Series of Downward Spirals

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A Series of Downward Spirals

act

"The

Roger Ebert, the only film critic to win the Pulitzer
Prize, offers this analysis of the film.

way this film
ctivates audience

involvement is a crucial as-
pect of its power, as viewers,
we become deeply identified
with Scottie's vulnerability. We fol
low him in his heroic but miscarried
quest to overcome it. Remember-
ing, when we can, that Scottie and
the other figures we watch are ac-
tually fictional film characters, we

.

are forced to realize that we are
exploring our own fears, fan-
tasies and identifictaions as
enthralled viewers"

/

The University of Haifa

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Did he train you? Did he rehearse you? Did he
tell you what to do and what to say?
This cry from a wounded heart comes at the
end of Alfred Hitchcock 's "Vertigo," and by the time
it comes we are completely in sympathy. A man has
fallen in love with a woman who does not exist, and
now he cries out harshly against the real woman who
impersonated her. But there is so much more to it
than that. The real woman has fallen in love with him.
In tricking him, she tricked herself. And the man, by
preferring his dream to the woman standing before
him, has lost both.

Then there is another level, beneath all of the oth-
ers. Alfred Hitchcock was known as the most control-
ling of directors, particularly when it came to women.
The female characters in his films reflected the same
qualities over and
over again: They were
blond. They were icy
and remote. They were
imprisoned in costumes
that subtly combined
fashion with fetish-
ism. They mesmerized
the men, who often
had physical or psy-
chological handicaps.
Sooner or later, every
Hitchcock woman was
humiliated.

"Vertigo" (1 958), which is one of the two or three
best films Hitchcock ever made, is the most confession
al, dealing directly with the themes that controlled
his art. It is *about* how Hitchcock used, feared and
tried to control women. He is represented by Scot-
tie ( James Stewart ), a man with physical and mental
weaknesses (back problems, fear of heights), who
falls obsessively in love with the image of a woman-
-and not any woman, but the quintessential Hitchcock
woman. When he cannot have her, he finds another
woman and tries to mold her, dress her, train her,
change her makeup and her hair, until she looks like
the woman he desires. He cares nothing about the
clay he is shaping; he will gladly sacrifice her on the
altar of his dreams.

But of course the woman he is shaping and the wom-
an he desires are the same person. Her name is Judy
( Kim Novak ), and she was hired to play the dream

A Series of Downward Spirals

woman, "Madeleine," as part of a murder plot that
Scottie does not even begin to suspect. When he
finds out he was tricked, his rage is uncontrollable. He
screams out the words: "Did he train you? . . ." Each
syllable is a knife in his heart, as he spells out that
another man shaped the woman that Scottie thought
to shape for himself. The other man has taken not
merely Scottie's woman, but Scottie's dream.
That creates a moral paradox at the center of
"Vertigo." The other man (Gavin, played by Tom
Helmore ) has after all only done to this woman what
Scottie also wanted to do. And while the process was
happening, the real woman, Judy, transferred her
allegiance from Gavin to Scottie, and by the end was
not playing her role for money, but as a sacrifice for
love.

All of these emotional
threads come together
in the greatest single
shot in all of Hitchcock.
Scottie, a former San
Francisco police detec-
tive hired by Gavin to
follow "Madeleine," has
become obsessed with
her. Then it appears
Madeleine has died. By
chance, Scottie encoun-
ters Judy, who looks
uncannily like Made-
leine, but appears to be a more carnal, less polished
version. Of course he does not realize she is exactly
the same woman. He asks her out and Judy unwisely
accepts. During their strange, stilted courtship, she
begins to pity and care for him, so that when he asks
her to remake herself into Madeleine, she agrees,
playing the same role the second time.
The great scene takes place in a hotel room, lit by a
neon sign. Judy has arrived, not looking enough like
Madeleine to satisfy Scottie, who wants her in the
*same* dress, with the *same* hair. His eyes burn
with zealous fixation. Judy realizes that Scottie is
indifferent to her as a person and sees her as an ob-
ject. Because she loves him, she accepts this. She locks
herself into the bathroom, does the makeover, opens
the door and walks toward Scottie out of a haunting
green fog that is apparently explained by the neon
sign, but is in fact a dreamlike effect.

As Hitchcock cuts back and forth between
Novak's face (showing such pain, such sor-
row, such a will to please) and Stewart's (in
a rapture of lust and gratified control), we
feel hearts being torn apart: They are both slaves of
an image fabricated by a man who is not even in the
room— Gavin, who created "Madeleine" as a device
to allow himself to get away with the murder of his
wife.

As Scottie embraces "Madeleine," even the back-
ground changes to reflect his subjective memories
instead of the real room he's in. Bernard Herrmann's
score creates a haunting, unsettled yearning. And
the camera circles them hopelessly, like the pinwheel
images in Scottie's nightmares, until the shot is about

the dizzying futility of our human desires, the impos-
sibility of forcing life to make us happy. This shot, in
its psychological, artistic and technical complexity,
may be the one time in his entire career that Alfred
Hitchcock completely revealed himself, in all of his
passion and sadness. (Is it a coincidence that the
woman is named Madeleine—the word for the French
biscuit, which, in Proust, brings childhood memories of
loss and longing flooding back?)
Alfred Hitchcock took universal emotions, like fear,
guilt and lust, placed them in ordinary characters,
and developed them in images more than in words.
His most frequent character, an innocent man wrongly
accused, inspired much deeper identification than the
superficial supermen in today's action movies.
He was a great visual stylist in two ways: He used
obvious images and surrounded them with a subtle
context. Consider the obvious ways he suggests Stew-
art 's vertigo. An opening shot shows him teetering on

a ladder, looking down at a street below. Flashbacks
show why he left the police force. A bell tower at a
mission terrifies him, and Hitchcock creates a famous
shot to show his point of view: Using a model of the
inside of the tower, and zooming the lens in while at
the same time physically pulling the camera back,
Hitchcock shows the walls approaching and receding
at the same time; the space has the logic of a night-
mare. But then notice less obvious ways that the movie
sneaks in the concept of falling, as when Scottie
drives down San Francisco's hills, but never up. And
note how truly he "falls" in love.

There is another element, rarely commented on, that
makes "Vertigo" a great film. From the moment we
are let in on the secret, the movie is equally about
Judy: her pain, her loss, the trap she's in. Hitchcock
so cleverly manipulates the story that when the two
characters climb up that mission tower, we identify
with both of them, and fear for both of them, and in
a way Judy is less guilty than Scottie.
The danger is to see Judy, played by Novak, as an
object in the same way that Scottie sees her. She is in
fact one of the most sympathetic female characters in
all of Hitchcock.

Over and over in his films, Hitchcock took delight in
literally and figuratively dragging his women through
the mud— humiliating them, spoiling their hair and
clothes as if lashing at his own fetishes. Judy, in "Ver-
tigo," is the closest he came to sympathizing with
the female victims of his plots. And Novak, criticized
at the time for playing the character too stiffly, has
made the correct acting choices: Ask yourself how
you would move and speak if you were in unbear-
able pain, and then look again at Jud\

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