Sight & Sound Challenge: 1 Sedentary Woman. 50 Films. Next Up: 'Vertigo' (1958)
- amandagreer22
- May 14, 2015
- 6 min read
It's almost summer. The sun is shining, the bees are buzzing, and pale skin is burnin'. To honour the one season a year in Canada where you can sit outside without a goosefeather-lined parka, I've logically decided to spend most of these warm hours indoors, watching films.
Why?
Because I'm a true cinephile, that's why.
(And I'm also prone to sunburns).
Me on the Fourth of July
So, I gave myself a challenge. One of the most respected lists of "Best Films of All Time" is Sight & Sound magazine's. I love the magazine, I love films, so I thought, "Why not?" And here I am, ready to plough through all 50 films.
A lot of them I've seen, (being a Cinema Studies grad, I'd be a bit ashamed if I hadn't seen at least a few), and some of them I haven't. Some of them seem intriguing, some of them seem a little dull, some of them I know to be a little dull. Nevertheless, I'm determined to make the most of this challenge.
Hopefully, at least once a week, I'll post a review/recap/restrospective on one of the films. I'm hoping to do them in order, so let's start with the first one: Alfred Hitchcock's classic, Vertigo (1958).
Like many film students, I enjoy scoffing at Hitchock, simply because most people like him and enjoy his films. However, I find my contrariness compromised every time I watch a Hitchcock film, since his genius becomes more inarguable with each passing frame.
It's infuriating, and Vertigo is no exception.
I'd seen the film when I was a kid. My mom, a huge Hitchcock fan which, as I developed into the moodiest teenager outside of a J.D. Salinger story, was probably the resaon I became so anti-Hitchcock, decided we should watch every single Hitchcock film. When I sat down to watch Vertigo this time, all I could remember was Jimmy Stewart following someone up a tower then having a funky neon-coloured anxiety dream.
Turns out there's a lot more to Hitchcock's film than acid-tinged dream sequences.
In 2012, when Sight & Sound's most recent "50 Best Films" list was released, Vertigo appeared in the news quite a bit, as it murderously shoved Orson Welles's Citizen Kane out of the #1 spot--a position Welles's film had held for 50 years.
Vertigo, you rascal!
It's also pretty ironic, since, upon Vertigo's 1958 release, Orson Welles described it as "worse than Rear Window." I think it's pretty obvious that Ole' Orson wasn't a huge fan of Rear Window, either.
Pictured: Genuine Enthusiasm
Hitchcock's film centers around John "My Friends Call Me 'Scottie'" Ferguson, played by James "My Friends Call Me 'Jimmy'" Stewart, an ex-detective suffering from an intense, vertigo-inducing, fear of heights. He quit the force when this crippling fear led to the death of a police colleague and is now left with a corsetted backbrace and something to prove. Lucky for him, an old college chum, Mr. Elster, calls him up and asks him to follow his wife, Madeleine, who has been acting rather strangely. In fact, Mr. Elster reveals, he believes Madeleine has been possessed by the spirit of Carlotta Valdes, Madeleine's grandmother who committed suicide at the age of 26--the same age that Madeleine is now.
The next two hours are full of intrigue, mystery, and, of course, romance, as Scottie begins to unravel to mystery of Madeleine while, finding himself falling in love with her. Has Madeleine really been possessed by Carlotta? Is it all an act? How is Mr. Elster wrapped up in all this? Will 50-year-old Scottie ever get laid by this 26-year-old youth?
Well, you basically find out the answers to all these questions with 40 minutes of the film left to go, which is one reason why critics in 1958 weren't thrilled with Hitchcock's production. Now, however, critics have agreed that Hitchcock's dream-like wanderings away from the traditional suspense-thriller-mystery formula gesture to something deeper--an exploration of the malleability of identity itself.
Vertigo's contemporary critical success can, in large part, be attributed to the Cahiers du Cinema crowd of the 1960s. If you haven't heard of them, basically these were all young French film theorists/writers, many of whom turned themselves to filmmaking. Throughout the 1950s and '60s, these brave souls fought for American Hollywood cinema to be considered artistically viable. They held up Nicholas Ray's films, like Rebel without a Cause and, of course, Hitchcock's productions as examples of Hollywood filmmaking that was both entertaining and aesthetically experimental. They saw in Vertigo a trans-genre exploration of life and identity that actually became more valuable in its refusal to adhere to a strict mystery genre formula.
Moving on from this crash course in film theory history, watching Vertigo today does, in fact, instill a sense of unstable identity and personality in the viewer. As I was watching, I found myself completely enthralled by Madeleine's character, played with excellent confusion and temerity by Kim Novak. As Madeleine later transforms into Judy Barton, and then again back into a hybrid of the two women, Vertigo's toying with identity became even more complex. I found that Madeleine/Judy in particular, and Scottie's female friend, Midge Wood (Baraba Bel Geddes), made for an incredibly interesting study in female identity. Both women navigate and subvert the archetypal roles laid out for them. Madeleine is revealed to be not the glamorous, wealthy young wife the viewer is first led to believe she is, but a rather poor, lonely woman living in a hotel room. Mr. Elster, in fact, taughter he how to behave and look like Madeleine, his wife, in order to outsmart Scottie and the authorities in his wicked plans. Later in the film, this poor young woman, Judy, is then transformed back into blonde-haired, tailored-suited Madeleine by the overflowingly masculine Scottie. He wants to create his perfect woman, the woman so effortlessly embodied by Madeleine. In this sense, Madeleine/Judy Barton do not have their own identities, but merely the identities created for them by men. Mr. Elster creates Madeleine, and then, when this identity crumbles, Scottie re-creates her.
~*~*~*~Seduction~*~*~*~
Scottie's friend, Midge, also experiments with identity. Clearly infatuated with Scottie, she jokingly paints a portrait identical to the one that Madeleine always stares at. The portrait features a woman who looks startlingly like Madeleine. However, Midge swaps out Madeleine's face for hers in this version, to which Scottie reacts angrily. Midge, then, attempts to assume Madeleine's identity through her humourous painting. However, because she attempts to construct this identity herself, without Scottie's approval, it is deconstructed just as quickly.
Whether this exploration of female identity is liberating, through its exposure of identity as constructed by masculine forces, or restricting by that same reason, could make for a 40-page paper. However, it's also intersting to note that Vertigo's cinematography also emphasizes identity and its construction. As with Midge's portrait, the film focuses on many artworks, including paintings. It also focuses on reflections, as in the image above and below. Madeleine/Judy in particular is often shown in mirrors, doubled visually as she is narratively. It's a clever cinematographic technique, and one of the many reasons why Vertigo was named Sight & Sound's "Best Film Ever Made."
Of course, Hitchcock and cinematographer Robert Burks's experimentations don't stop with these silly mirror tricks. No, no, no, they go quite a bit further. Many people will tell you that Vertigo is the first film to employt the infamous "dolly-zoom" shot, in which an unstable spatial environment is evoked by moving the camera forward with a dolly while zooming out, or vise versa. The shot spectacularly evokes the vertigo that Scottie experiences throughout the film, demonstrating film's capacity to convey the subjective and the personal.
Although this is heralded as the single-most ingenious technique in Vertigo, there's still a crazy amount of innovation going on with its cinematography.
I remembered all the spectacular shots of San Francisco Bay and the Mission from my childhood viewing, but what I had completely forgotten about was Hitchcock's use of neon lighting. This lent the film a grungier feel, almost dirty, and perfectly reflected the narrative's transition from romantic-thriller to murder mystery-melodrama. The way he lights Kim Novak as she walks from the bathroom of her hotel room over to Scottie, having been re-transformed into Madeleine, is breath-takingly surreal. I wouldn't be surprised if David Lynch had taken a few notes while watching this film.
Kim Novak as Judy as Madeleine Because Hitchcock Hates Simplicity
The neon lighting blurs the lines between dream and reality through its colour palette. The neon green seems to reflect Scottie's strange dreams earlier in the film, positioning this later scene as an outgrowth of those dream sequences.
Watching Vertigo, it's impossible not to appreciate Hitchcock's attention to detail which I'm convinced is the root of his genius. Outside these flashier examples, each shot in the film is clearly composed with so much strategy and foresight that the finished products work effortlessly together. Only a true visionary director can achieve an effect like that. He doesn't fully rely on short-reverse shot and transparent narratives, like many Hollywood directors seems to do. Instead, he breaks down genre barriers, creates complex female characters, and proves that Hollywood does have space for aesthetic ingenuity.
Is the film the best that has ever been made? That's hard to say, and quite the title to impose on a single work. However, it belongs on Sight & Sound's list and is a definite must-watch for any cinephile.
I give this film: 4/4 Creepy Jimmy Stewarts
Next time: Citizen Kane
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