Hitchcock Biographer Patrick McGilligan Discusses VERTIGO with John Greco

by guest contributor John Greco

John Greco of Twenty Four Frames recently interviewed award-winning biographer Patrick McGilligan, author of Alfred Hitchcock: A Life in Darkness and Light (Harper Collins, 2004). The focus of their dialogue was the director's mysterious and magnificent Vertigo.

An Inconsequential Yarn

by guest contributor Steven DeRosa

“They say every true San Franciscan has one foot on a hill and the other in the past.”—Kate in Samuel Taylor’s The Pleasure of His Company

Since Vertigo is a film that garners such personal reactions, I wanted to begin this piece on something of a personal note. It’s not a matter of whether one likes the film or doesn’t.  For those who truly connect with Vertigo, it’s because it resonates with something inside of them. I was in high school when I saw Vertigo for the first time and the build up to seeing it was intense. It was only a few months before that I had begun to seriously study the master’s work, having been introduced to The Lodger, The 39 Steps, Sabotage, Notorious, Rear Window, and North by Northwest. Having become hooked on Hitchcock through that line up in school, I began my own exploration of every Hitchcock film I could get my hands on and by reading the corresponding chapter from Donald Spoto’s The Art of Alfred Hitchcock afterward. Then I’d re-watch the film over again, etc.

VERTIGO: More than just the streets of San Francisco...

By guest contributor Michael Nazarewycz

It’s easy to take for granted a film’s location.

Some settings, of course, are mandatory to support the historical accuracy of a film; consider the importance of location in a war picture or biopic.  Other settings might not be important for historical accuracy per se, but are critical to the believability of a film.  For example, Oliver Stone’s Wall Street (1987), title aside, never would have worked anywhere else but in New York City, given the high-finance, decade-of-decadence aspects of the story.  Beyond instances like these, though, it’s easy for filmmakers to pigeonhole movie locations into high-level descriptions like big city, sprawling country, hot resort, or cozy hamlet.

But where do you set your film when you need more than geography?  Where do you set your film when the location is less about sense of place and more about state of mind?

Kim Novak in VERTIGO: A Hypnotic Presence

by guest contributor Brandie Ashe

Scratch the surface of the prototypical “Hitchcock blonde”—a cool, reserved exterior masking a fiery and determinedly passionate woman—and the subtle differences in their characterizations become more evident.  In her three films for the director, Grace Kelly’s characters are paragons of dignity, displaying a patrician façade that eventually gives way to a sizzling sexuality. Tippi Hedren’s two characters for Hitchcock have an overt veneer of sophistication that nonetheless belies an innate playfulness at the heart of each woman.  And in her three films for Hitch, Ingrid Bergman is the foreign exotic who smolders with a hint of endearing uncertainty.

The Costumes of VERTIGO

by guest contributor Christian Esquevin

“I don’t wear suits, and I don’t wear gray. Another thing, I don’t wear black pumps,” said Kim Novak to Edith Head, the costume designer for Vertigo. “I don’t care what she wears as long as it’s a gray suit," Hitchcock retorted when Edith reported this conversation to him. Thus began the creative tension over the costuming of Vertigo. But in a clash of opinion over the visual aspects of a Hitchcock film, Hitch always prevailed. Indeed, he had the colors already in mind along with the costume types he wanted even before pre-production for Vertigo began. Kim Novak wore the gray suit with the black pumps - her iconic look in Vertigo. “I had never had a director who was particular about the costumes, the way they were designed, the specific colors,” said Novak about Hitchcock later.

Bernard Herrmann - Composer Of Haunting Music and Treacherous Dreams

by guest contributor Whistlingypsy

Just as my fingers on these keys

Make music, so the self-same sounds

On my spirit make a music, too.

~ excerpt from Peter Quince at the Clavier by Wallace Stevens

"I don’t think Mozart’s going to help at all."

~ Midge in Vertigo

British composer Ralph Vaughn Williams, who greatly influenced young Bernard Herrmann and for whom he had a great admiration, took the subject of film score composition seriously and in encouraging his contemporaries to do the same said, “I believe that the film contains potentialities for the combination of all the arts such as Wagner never dreamed of, and I would therefore urge those distinguished musicians who have entered the world of the cinema to realize their responsibility in helping to take the film out of the realm of hack work and make it a subject of a real composer.” Music constitutes an essential part of the film experience, yet we often fail to acknowledge its importance to the way we perceive film. This is not to say that music is comprehensible only to those who have formal training; to the contrary the ability to appreciate music is a capacity we all share. The often overlooked genius of composing for film in general, and of Bernard Herrmann specifically, is an ability to work within the parameters of music theory while exploiting the viewer's instinctive knowledge of musical conventions, creating a lush musical landscape perfectly suited to the emotional content of the image captured on film.

Deadly Obsession: Alfred Hitchcock's VERTIGO

by guest contributor R.D. Finch

"What's that old Oscar Wilde thing? 'Each man kills the thing he loves...' That I think is a very natural phenomenon, really."

Alfred Hitchcock, in a 1963 interview

In his fifty-five year long career in films, Alfred Hitchcock directed sixty-seven movies. At least a dozen of these are bona fide masterpieces, and about an equal number are excellent movies that fall just short of the masterpiece mark. By any measure that's an impressive record, one unequaled by any other filmmaker I can think of. Even more impressive is that Hitchcock's pictures are not rarefied works of art of interest mainly to aesthetes and film scholars, but full-blooded movies that appeal equally to ordinary filmgoers looking for accomplished entertainments and to cinephiles looking for an intellectually and artistically stimulating film-viewing experience. Of all Hitchcock's pictures, none managed to combine these two modes—entertainment and art—so skillfully, so intriguingly, and so pleasingly as his 1958 film Vertigo.

2012 arrives...

...and A Month of VERTIGO is about to begin...

A Month of VERTIGO: the Bloggers...

Arriving with 2012 will be this blog’s first major event, A Month of VERTIGO. The month will feature 10 11 bloggers and one ‘vlogger' reflecting on facets of Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958).

Unpopular with critics and audiences when it was released, Vertigo has endured. Today it is generally considered the great auteur's masterpiece of masterpieces and is one of the most highly regarded films in movie history. Vertigo is an ambitious work of grand scale and reputation - a staggering review subject for the lone blogger. And so, we eleven twelve have joined together to contemplate this masterwork from many angles.

Here's what to expect at The Lady Eve's Reel Life during January 2012: