Video Vertigo
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.
September 30, 2011 at 9:32 am
B. Kite and Alexander have done a superb job with this first installment of the series, I’ve already watched it twice! (with a viewing of Vertigo proper sandwiched in between). I really look forward to the next episode, and great news about the download option, this is definitely something I’d love to put on disc in its completion to revisit in the future.
Thanks for the heads up, David!
September 30, 2011 at 12:19 pm
Good to hear from you!
I think it’s a terrific piece: through very different means it evokes some of the same spooky, elusive quality of the film, and the investigation of the narrative is really sensitive.
September 30, 2011 at 2:27 pm
Quite interesting (though the pixels are annoying.) However there’s one important aspect of Vertigo that Kite and Alexander fail to mention. It’s a fulfillment of Hitchcock’s dream of making a movie out of James M. Barrie’s Mary Rose. That highly curious play deals with a beloved coming back from the dead — to the consternation of her lover. That’s Vertigo in a nutshell.
September 30, 2011 at 3:58 pm
Well, they have a different slant on it here: since Scottie has never met Carlotta OR the real Madeleine Elster (if we take the crazy narrative at face value), it’s really a make-believe figure he wants to bring into reality, Pygmalion-style. In which case it’s Psycho that’s the fulfillment of the Mary Rose dream, in which a departed one is willed back into existence.
September 30, 2011 at 4:03 pm
YUCK!
Mary Rose wasn’t about incest. Scottie never knows the real Madeleine, but then neither do we. Still she dies and is brought back through Judy. The line “There’s something in me that tells me I must die” appleis directly to Judy. And then there’s her incredible “It wasn’t supposed to happen this way,” before she runs to Bell Tower.
September 30, 2011 at 5:51 pm
What I love about this essay has to do with the way it embraces all that uncanny stuff, which seems to shine all the brighter since the “rational explanation” the movie offers is so bizarrely IRrational.
September 30, 2011 at 6:25 pm
Chris Marker’s VERTIGO exegesis in SANS SOLEIL and his “remake” La Jetee emphasizes the eternal quality of it. Especially “Here I was born and there I died…and it was only a moment for you.”
You know I’ve been planning to re-see VERTIGO for a while now, especially since I got access to the Masterpiece edition with the original mono soundtrack.
The irony of the film is how convincing Scottie’s love for Madeleine is, since she doesn’t exist. Scottie fell in love with a phantom, which further ties it with MARY-ROSE. In fact, Bill Krohn in his book on Hitchcock, notes that he joked about the film with a pretend title, “To Lay a Ghost” which isn’t really that far from the film.
September 30, 2011 at 10:34 pm
I can’t comment on Vertigo without mentioning my late friend Warren Sonbert — who gave Vertigo Tours around San Francisco long before the film became fashionable. A great experimental filmmaker and a humungous opera buff he wrote an opera column for the “Bay Area Reporter” under the name “Scottie Ferguson.”
September 30, 2011 at 10:35 pm
He was the first person to point out to me that Bernard Herrmann “sampled’ Tristan und Isolde in his Vertigo score.
September 30, 2011 at 10:56 pm
excellent..I have it saved for when I have the proper time to get into it,looks fascinating..I love Vertigo and return to it again and again only to get royally screwed along with Scotty ;o)
October 1, 2011 at 12:46 am
B. Kite informs me that downloaders get a small extra, an extended title sequence with the full version of the Sinatra song. With more static!
October 1, 2011 at 3:12 am
I saw Vertigo as a child in the 60′s on tv, and it existed as just a memory because the film wasn’t all that available until the mid 80′s. (I could be wrong about this; I’m not sure) But anyway, to hypothesize about why Vertigo would resonate with a child, it might have to do with the film’s unique time signature, while not Teletubbies, it is an “again, again” type of thing. In a sense I think “movies” move away from us into projected linear time, but Vertigo does something else.
have yet to have patience with the vid-essay. I kind of think you should go one of two ways with things like this: either play with the visuals and keep words to a minimum, or lots of words and stick to the images as they are.
The way it is now I think it would be better with the narrator talking to himself in Marker style.
October 1, 2011 at 9:59 am
You’re absolutely right about Vertigo’s unavailability — along with Rope, The Trouble with Harry and Rear Window, it was locked away until the eighties, when I saw them all on their cinema re-release (at Edinburgh’s lovely Dominion Cinema).
I don’t have a problem with the words and images interplay, although admittedly I got to read the text first. Maybe you could try listening to the audio separately and then watching. The images do enhance the words, but maybe it’ll help if you get a fix on the words first.
October 2, 2011 at 1:14 am
Thanks for confirming about Vertigo re-release in the 80′s.
Somehow I knew I wasn’t going to get any points for drawingany comparisons between Teletubbies and Vertigo.
trying the Vid-essay again.
October 2, 2011 at 1:30 am
No, I think it’s an interesting comparison. As I see it, little kids like repetition because it’s reassuring: they can confirm that what seemed to happen just then really did. Anything alarming becomes less so when repeated.
Not sure that applies to Vertigo, but the recurring structure certainly does do something to the way we perceive it in memory.
As I say, try just listening to the essay-film and then watch it with sound afterwards.
October 2, 2011 at 6:28 am
Thanks David.
Yes, started with audio then started watching.
Its quite dense with ideas so I need to watch again. Thought the strobing images were most interesting.
Just an aside, watched Spirit of St. Louis recently, forgetting who directed, and thought, this is pretty modern looking; just a talking head, with a little bit of sky in the background. I’d say there are alot of similarities, in the cockpit scenes and the parts Stewart had in Rear Window (physical confinment) and Vertigo (mental confinment). Wonder if Rear Window had any role in Wilder’s picking of Stewart to play Lindbergh.
Only saw half of the film, but thought it was a rather presaging look at the making of global celebrity.
October 2, 2011 at 11:33 am
Whenever i’ve caught part of The Spirit of St Louis I’ve tended to enjoy it more than when I’ve seen the whole thing. Maybe because the opening sequences stress just how absurdly too old for the role Stewart is. Once he’s in the air that doesn’t matter.
Wonder what Wilder felt about Lindbergh’s far-right politics? I guess the guys redeemed himself somewhat once WWII got going. I seem to recall Spielberg (a big fan of the Wilder movie) optioned a new Lindbergh bio some years back, then dropped it like a hot potato once he realized what Lindbergh had been involved in during the 30s.
October 2, 2011 at 4:09 pm
Yes I watched the second half.
I liked the scene in Spirit on St Louis, when Lindbergh lands in Paris and the mob grabs him out of the plane. He looks quite terrified. The black and white footage at the end has a curious sort of dampening effect too, just because it’s so anonymous. It could be any 20th century parade down Broadway.
October 2, 2011 at 9:40 pm
On the subject of messing about with Hitchcock, have you seen Christoph Girardet & Matthias Müller’s ‘Phoenix Tapes’ ? It’s a truly mesmerising piece of work. Anyone who loves Hitchcock should see it if they get the chance.
October 2, 2011 at 11:25 pm
I’m about to! Hadn’t heard of this but it sounds fascinating.
February 1, 2012 at 1:33 pm
The filmmakers are exactly right when they say Vertigo is about obsession rather than suspense: just why it disappointed its 1958 audience. I admire how they describe Madeleine and Judy having to walk “Carlotta’s stations” – thank you for that phrasing.
I’m attracted to the idea that the Judy portion of the film is Scottie’s dream: I’ve thought it begins with the inquest, in which the coroner speaks as surely no real coroner would, showing that we’re now in Scottie’s mind, i.e. experiencing the inquest scene through his guilt.