From a movie that everyone should watch came new colors to the knowhow of Cinématographe. Hitchcock’s masterpiece “Vertigo” made an ordinary romance into a thrilling universe set at San Francisco. This location contributed so much with the plot and gave us, movie freaks, those strange sensations of ‘labyrinth’.
How is that? Well, let me break a little technique. “Vertigo” literally means that weird sensation you’d feel when looking down from a (really) high place. In the same way, John Ferguson, nicknamed Scottie, has the problem in its increased version: Acrophobia. The first sequence of the movie relates his fear as consequence from the experience he lived when working at the police department. Scottie retired from the job at the very day he was chasing a criminal across a rooftop and saw a police officer falling to death. Hitchcock seems to like psychological analysis based on consequences left from a disaster, which was brutal and made Scottie into a frustrated professional. Well, you’d be surprise for how more unusual Scottie’s life can get. That’s so when Gavin Elster, a man he knew from college, hires him as private investigator to follow Madeleine Elster, Gavin’s wife and a mysterious woman who has been acting a little weird. He tells Scottie that she drives a long distance without knowing it, like she’s mad, possessed or something. A well-intriguing situation found when Gavin Elster gave a look at her car’s speedometer, because as you’ll see, this was happening while he was at work. For instance, he was only suspecting, but then it came that wondering feeling about the relation of his wife’s weird actions with the suicide of her great-grandmother named Carlota Valdes.
Finally, back to the part which Galvin needed Scottie’s service, what happens then is a confused private investigator made into a witness for the most unusual issues. Since Madeleine jumping unconsciously into San Francisco Bay until her quiet moments looking for hours at a museum painting of Carlota, everything seemed to be really disturbed in her head or was it just the detectives’ eyes taking him far of places? Not quite sure, dear Scottie…
“Vertigo” is pure technique. Hitchcock does interesting moves through the camera that give us the same feeling James Stewart as Scottie seems to have. The Art Direction’s wonderful in every ways and especially in the color aspects. The meticulous editing made into fast transitions creates a complex impression, even though if these impressions are from just simple facts. The character’s affair is touched deeply by Bernard Herrmann’s “Scene d’Amour” and not only it, but all that thrilling has a Mr. Herrmann’s composition.
Let’s clear these things up; we have an investigator searching for reasons in a mad woman’s actions whose husband hired him in the first place. Now what would happen if this woman falls in love with Scottie for they have met each other in such an unusual way? Right in the moment of this happening, I had an impression that the movie was tearing itself apart into two different ones and though the love scene is the end of one, this beautiful love scene is also the beginning of a retarded trajectory towards the end. Speaking physics, it’s like an object moving with a great acceleration, that starts to lose it until stopping and then making it all the way back in a retarded movement.
Now you’re wondering why all this stuff is relevant.
I’ll tell you my favorite scene – when Scottie has an epiphany through a nightmare.
While Mr. Herrmann’s “The Nightmare and Dawn” plays, Scotties realizes the solution to the greatest mystery of the 7th Art. A real significant thing about this nightmare is its color and form language, especially about the spiral, which deeply means that whole falling concept.
A dream obsessed with death realizes the consequence felt after knowing that even a killer can leave clues or as Scottie says “Souvenir”.