The Alfred Hitchcock
Scholars/'MacGuffin' webpage
ACADEMIC HITCHCOCK - 2
Camera Movement
in Vertigo
by Richard Allen
[Editor's note. Richard
Allen, Chair of Cinema Studies at New York University, co-edits
the 'Hitchcock Annual'. His 'Hitchcock and Romantic Irony:
Storytelling,
Sexuality and Style' will be published by Columbia University Press in
Fall, 2007. Below, he deftly relates the Ernie's Restaurant scene
in Vertigo to the key camera-movements of the film.]
Vertigo seems to me of all
Hitchcock’s films the one nearest to
perfection. Indeed, its profundity is inseparable from the perfection
of form: it is a perfect organism.
- Robin
Wood
HITCHCOCK'S VERTIGO, LIKE REBECCA, is a film about the allure the dead may exert on the living, but in Vertigo
the deathly object of desire
is fully incarnated in the figure of Madeleine possessed by Carlotta
Valdes - whose picture hangs in the San Francisco art museum. That the
ghostlike Madeleine brings to life the youthful image of Carlotta gives the character a sense of timelessness, of mask-like
immortality. As legions of critics have pointed out, Madeleine is a
fetish object for Scottie Ferguson (James Stewart) as indicated by the
way in which, when he loses her, he reconstructs
her image in the body of one Judy Barton (Kim Novak) from Salina,
Kansas, who, of course, turns out to have been Madeleine after all.
However, Vertigo is reduced if it is simply conceived as a film about
male perversion; it is also, equally, a film about love. Hitchcock
fully implicates the spectator in the allure of Judy, not simply
through character-identification and point-of-view but through the
orchestration of camera movement, color, graphic, mise-en-scène, and
performance in a manner that makes the film itself a
correlate for the spectator of Scottie’s aestheticized object of
desire. The result is a film of aching beauty, a supreme achievement
in the history of cinema.
In this essay I want to focus upon
one aspect of this achievement -
Hitchcock’s camera movement in Vertigo - and in particular three
set-pieces of camera movement that are interrelated in their structure and
meaning: the scene at Ernie’s Restaurant that initiates
Scottie’s pursuit of Madeleine; the famous zoom in/track out point-of-view shot that evokes Scottie’s acrophobia;
and the equally celebrated 360-degree pan that encircles
Scottie’s embrace of Judy Barton re-transformed into Madeleine.
The scene at Ernie’s
Restaurant begins with a camera movement
towards a doorway of radiant red glass, which has the force at once of
a barrier and a lure. The next shot consists of a languid, fluid camera
movement that tracks back from Scottie at the bar through a partition
that
at once separates and connects the bar and the dining area, as he
glances screen-left to the back of the restaurant. The
camera pauses momentarily to take in the dining room with
its glorious, deep-saturated red “tapestry” walls
and formal white floral arrangements. It is positioned exactly opposite
a picture framed by white flowers on the far
wall in a manner that evokes, like a mirror, the pictorial framing of
the shot itself. The camera then begins to move forward
from this “establishing shot” towards the object that
Scottie’s gaze seeks out, Judy Barton as Madeleine Elster,
shining in an emerald green gown.
The significance of this shot can
only be understood by examining what comes
after it. As many critics have pointed out, much of the film is
structured as an alternation between a
forward-tracking shot and a backward-tracking
reaction-shot, employed both when Scottie
follows Madeleine on foot and when his car follows hers through the
streets of San Francisco.1 The forward-tracking movement in Ernie's restaurant
suggests the forward-tracking shot that is used
throughout the film to imply Madeleine's allure for Scottie. The backward-tracking movement in the Ernie's scene evokes
the backward-tracking shot used throughout
the film to register the manner in which Scottie is bonded to his
object of desire. Intercut together, they evoke the sense of the
character at once pursuing and being drawn towards his
object.
In The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956),
Hitchcock made a joke out of this
camera movement: the protagonist, Ben Mckenna, is shown walking up a
passageway to the wrong place, having mistaken
Ambrose Chapell, a person, for Ambrose Chapel, a building. The
forward-tracking shot and the backward-moving
reaction-shot evoke the
sense of the character being “led up the
garden path.” In Vertigo, Scottie is also led up the garden path,
but this time the path is in a graveyard and the consequences are not a
joke, but something that is “deadly” serious.
The camera
movement in Ernie’s Restaurant evokes
the combination forward track and backward track that defines the
point-of-view structure of the film, but here the camera movement does
not straightforwardly articulate a point of view. Instead, Hitchcock
self-consciously sets up the relationship between the
elements of the point-of-view structure that the rest of the film will
enact. He traces objectively the structure that the rest of the film
will trace subjectively. Scottie does not actually see Madeleine
directly, instead it is the camera itself that traces the connection
between Scottie and the object of allure. Since Scottie does not
literally see Madeleine, the camera does not occupy his point of view.
Instead the camera stages the relationship between the looker and the
object of his look, creating a subjective shot structure but with the
subjectivity removed. Hitchcock here, as it were, announces the
identification that will be made by his camera with the subjective allure that Madeleine holds for
Scottie. In the microcosm of Ernie’s restaurant, the shimmering
allure of Madeleine is equated with the allure of the world of the film
itself as an idealized, aestheticized, hyperbolic reality, more
real that reality itself, that is, a surreal universe.
The other side of the
beautiful illusion of timeless beauty is the fact of human mortality and sense of life’s
meaninglessness that the illusion of timeless beauty papers over. This
abyss of meaning is opened up in Vertigo by the famous vertigo-shot
itself whereby Hitchcock embodies for the spectator the visceral experience
of Scottie’s acrophobia in the
combination zoom in/track out point-of-view shot. This
representation through camera movement and zoom of the experience of
falling creates an effect that is precisely the opposite of the camera
movement that brings into being Scottie’s relationship to
Madeleine and the world of the film that mimes that relationship. The
effect of the vertigo-shot is to close down the gap between
self and world which must be maintained to sustain the beautiful
illusion of Madeleine, and the shot also, equally, has the effect of
disrupting the spectator’s absorption in the world of the film.
Hitchcock’s reverse-field cutting between the forward-tracking shot and backward-tracking reaction-shot sustains the
distance between self and other, even as it articulates the
allure of immersing the self in the other. In the vertigo-shot, the
relationship between self and other implodes. Scottie is at once pulled
into and seems to fall into the spatial field in a way that collapses the
distance between subject and object that elsewhere is sustained by the cutting
between forward and backward motions of the camera. Scottie
confronts an implosion of space in a colorless spiraling void in a manner
akin to madness. The experience of vertigo on the bell-tower of
the Mission San Juan Bautista leads both to the destruction of Scottie’s
beautiful illusion and of the subjectivity (his own) that it serves to
sustain. Madeleine perishes moments after Scottie’s attack of vertigo, and
Scottie himself is reduced to a catatonic state. Equally, in the
vertigo shot, the beautiful illusion of the film itself is destroyed,
the contemplative experience of beauty ravishingly created in
Ernie’s restaurant is transformed into the sensation of shock and
overt manipulation.
The 360 degree camera movement that occurs after Scottie has succeeded
in reconstructing Judy as Madeleine recreates this beautiful illusion
as a microcosm that transcends the drab colorless environment of the
everyday represented by Judy’s aging hotel room. But here, the
illusion that is created is no longer one of which Scottie is primarily
an observer. Rather it is world of illusory perfection that somehow
contains the observer within it. Brilliantly, Hitchcock contrives the
movement of the camera as a spiral with Judy and Scottie together
within its eye, as if the gap between self and other has been
transcended, in contrast to the implosion of self and other created by
the vertigo shot itself. We should note that in the shot/reverse-shot
that precedes this camera movement, Scottie looks at Madeleine bathed
in ghostly jade light and we see that jade light reflected back in the
look of his eyes, as if the eye of the beholder has become or merged
with the object of his gaze.
As Scottie kisses Judy as Madeleine in close-up, the camera starts to
track around them to the right but pans left as if being drawn into
them - then continues to track right and is again drawn in. Suddenly,
the background of the shot begins to transform into the environment of
the Mission San Juan Batista stable, the historical place of
Scottie’s last encounter with “Madeleine” and the
place associated with Carlotta Valdes. As Scottie senses the background
changing - that's to say, as his historical memory is triggered - the
camera slows its movement and begins to pull back to medium shot.
Simultaneously, the background itself begins to move from left to
right, creating a sense that the spiral is being opened out by
centrifugal forces. Then, as the hint of a memory recedes, the camera
again begins tracking and panning to conclude the shot in the
tightest close up of the sequence, set against a background of ethereal
timeless jade green light (nominally motivated by the presence of the
neon sign outside the hotel room).2
It's an idealized image of romantic embrace, as if the
contradiction between present and past has been
“dialectically” overcome in a moment of sublime
transcendence.
However, Bernard Herrmann’s liebestod-inspired Wagnerian theme,
together with Hitchcock’s ghostly light, reveals that this ideal
is one that cannot be reconciled with living historical reality, and
Hitchcock’s camera movement reveals the conditions under which
this microcosm will unravel in the very act of being created. For if
the circling movement overcomes the contradiction between past and
present in a moment of sublime transcendence, it also suggests, by
bringing the past back into the present, the illusory nature of that
transcendence. Judy participates in Scottie's fantasy because she is in
love with him and wants their love to be realized, but the terms upon
which their love is realized can only bring about its destruction. For
at the moment their past embrace at the Mission is replicated exactly,
Scottie, the literal-minded dreamer, is reminded, as it were by
Hitchcock, the narrator, that if the beautiful illusion that is
Madeleine has now been completely recreated, then it must have always
already been an illusion, a fraud, though at this moment he is not yet
ready to fully comprehend the implications of this intuition.
This 360-degree camera movement culminates the pattern in Vertigo
that links camera movement to the spiral. The forward-tracking
point-of-view shot, backward-tracking reaction-shot structure of the
film creates a movement in which the object of sight and desire, the
lure for the gaze, keeps, as it were, receding from view. On her way to
visit Carlotta’s grave, Madeleine disappears from view into the
flower-shop, she disappears from view as she enters the church, she
disappears from view again as she leaves the church for the graveyard,
and finally she vanishes altogether at the McKittrick Hotel. Now, the
idea of an object of allure that is forever out of reach, suggests not
the circle whose end joins its beginning but the vortex of a spiral
whose ends perpetually never connect. As critics have shown, the spiral
motif in Vertigo defines the
meanings of vertigo in the film and links Scottie’s acrophobia to
the theme of sexual desire. By filming Scottie’s pursuit of
Madeleine on the hills of San Franscisco, Hitchcock builds a downward spiralling motif into the overall structure of the chase.3
However, since Scottie does not initially connect with the object he
pursues, the spiral of pursuit remains for a time in a state of
unstable equilibrium. The slow languid movement of fascination and
nascent desire is so intense in the sequences of pursuit it evokes a
“subjective” dream-like experience of time.
In the vertigo shot, the spiral structure, embodied in the staircase of
the Mission San Juan Bautista, suddenly stretches like a spring whose
tension has collapsed. Scottie will never reach his destination.
Scottie's vertigo stretches to breaking-point the thread linking his
present desire to its future realization. We might speculate that had
Hitchcock the resources of computer-controlled micro-camera technology,
he would have filmed the movement of the camera in this shot as a
spiral movement of increasing velocity. In the actual film, the
out-of-control spiral is brilliantly evoked by the
“movement” of the spiral staircase. In the spiraling
360-degree camera movement that culminates Scottie’s re-creation
of Madeleine, Hitchcock achieves the opposite, mirror effect of the
vertigo shot. Instead of being pulled into the vanishing point in a
manner that destroys the possibility of any relationship between self
and other, Scottie now, as it were, is magically united with his object
of desire, in a moment of suspended animation at the eye of a spiral
where time is standing still. The camera movement now registers not a
moment in time, nor a sense of the loss of time, or time receding, but
the utopian sense of an infinite present - as if by achieving his
object of desire, Scottie has momentarily transcended the limits of
mortality. However, as we have seen, Hitchcock deftly reminds us that
this is but an illusion by momentarily transforming the mise-en-scène
of the present in Judy’s hotel room to a scene from the past in
the stable of the San Juan Batista Mission. Exposed to the doubt cast
by memory, this imaginary temporal enclosure will inevitably unravel
back into a sense of history, of the passing of time, of separation,
and of mortality.
Notes
1. For a close analysis of the car pursuit, see Charles Barr, Vertigo (London: BFI, 2002), pp. 40-44.
2. Hitchcock recalled this green light from the stage of his youth:
“I remember the green light - green for the appearances of ghosts
and villains.” Quoted in Donald Spoto, The Dark Side of Genius:The Life of Alfred Hitchcock (New York: Da Capo Press, 1983), p. 22.
3. See Tania Modleski, The Women Who Knew Too Much: Hitchcock and Feminist Theory (New York: Routledge, 1989), p. 92.
ACADEMIC HITCHCOCK - 1 (Murray Pomerance on TMWKTM)
ACADEMIC HITCHCOCK - 3 (Theodore Price on Marnie)
.
All material © copyright 'The MacGuffin', muffin@labyrinth.net.au
Last modified 5 February, 2007,
using Nvu 1.0 and Windows XP Home.