My friend B. Kite, the Brooklyn brahmin, through years of transcendetal meditation, psychoplasmics and mild drug abuse has finally extruded from his cranium a monofilament antenna of neurons, stacked like zouaves, end on end, into the upper ionosphere, with which to receive strange signals.
Filtering through the space debris comes the cosmic impulses that led Hitchcock to make VERTIGO, mixed in with a lot of static of course. Assisted by his spirit guide, Alexander Points-Zollo, B. Kite has laid this signal onto tape, with helpful ruminations, and Part One of the result is available for your perusal over at Moving Image Source.
A video essay, in other words, and a particularly good one. Treating the movie as object with bracing disrespect (if you want to enjoy Robert Burks’ cinematography, you’ll have to watch the movie itself), the filmmakers create a kind of drifting dream, like freefalling into white noise, as bits of VERTIGO break through like fractured memories. This is not going to be for everyone, but if VERTIGO is already a kind of experimental film, VERTIGO VARIATIONS takes things to the natural next level, probably freaking out the people who already find the Hitchcock a bit too strange for a “thriller”…
It’s worth noting that the movie is available to watch on-site, but also as a download, which the makers HEARTILY recommend — seems the static patterns suffer when compressed for streaming. There’s good static and bad static. So download it, then this movie can be yours to cherish, burn to disc, and make frame grabs to print onto coffee mugs. Truly, we are living in the future.
Meanwhile, there’s also a limerick by me up at Limerwrecks as part of a week devoted to GILDA.
