Vertigo

There’s a scene in Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo in which Scottie Ferguson (James Stewart) and Madeleine Elster (Kim Novak) study a sign in Redwoods State Park tracing the lifetime of a tree back almost a thousand years. This seemingly superfluous moment, combined with the film’s overall haze of dreaminess, imbues Madeleine’s mysterious character with a spectral timelessness, but is she haunting Scottie or is he haunting her? The complexity of Vertigo, which film critics in the decennial Sight and Sound poll recently named the greatest film ever made, may weaken its entertainment value for some, but as a work of art there is much to enjoy and interpret. It’s a psychological thriller in two halves: the first creates the dream, the second unravels it. In the first half, Novak is the angelic, inscrutable Madeleine; in the second, she’s earthy, self-possessed Judy Barton. Ostensibly a private detective hired to tail another man’s wife, Scottie’s obsession with Madeleine results in both her destruction and her resurrection, her fate linked in Scottie’s mind to the insanity and suicide of her great-grandmother Carlotta Valdes. The film is striking for its fusion of fantasy and reality, high art and low crime, the gauze of the world Hitchcock creates punctured by lust, greed, and other sins. Aside from the use of vivid colors and painterly compositions, the film also boasts the invention of the dolly zoom, now commonly referred to as the Vertigo shot, a combination of zoom lens and forward dolly that creates in the viewer a sensation of falling. Bernard Herrmann’s score is one of his most emotionally expressive for Hitchcock, and, using the motif of spiral motion, graphic designer Saul Bass pioneered “kinetic typography” in the opening credits.