CRITICAL APPROACHES

Auteur

Gender

Psychoanalytical

AUTEUR

Recognised in the 1950s by the writers of Cahiers du

Cinema as a master Film-maker, Hitchcock is an

example of the classic auteur, a master of mise-en-scene

with an unmistakable ‘world view’.

The ‘Hitchcock film’ contains elements of style and

distinctive marks identifiable with his presence as a

creative force who brought together a number of

elements – the graphics of Saul Bass, the music score of

Bernard Herrmann, the performances of James Stewart

and Kim Novak.

AUTEUR – PURE CINEMA

“When we tell a story in cinema, we should resort to

dialogue only when it’s impossible to do otherwise. I

always try first to tell a story in the cinematic way,

through a succession of shots and bits of film in

between”.

Cinéma Pur (French for "Pure Cinema") was an avant-

garde film movement begun by filmmakers, like René

Clair, who "wanted to return the medium to its elemental

origins" of "vision and movement."

AUTEUR – COLOUR

Hitchcock was a crossover director from the silent era

to black and white with synchronous sound to the full

use of technicolour

He produced 39 major black and white films (10 of

which were silent) and only 15 major films in colour

(only 7 prior to Vertigo).

His significant use of colour was something he carefully

considered to develop the cinematic experience and to

help visually convey the plot.

GERMAN EXPRESSIONISM

• Influenced by German Expressionism and Soviet

montage cinema.

• His elaborate editing techniques came from Soviet films

of the 1920s.

• He particularly acknowledged the significance of the

Kuleshov experiment, from which he derived his

fondness for the point-of-view shot and for building

sequences by cross-cutting between person seeing

and things seen.

AUTEUR –PURE CINEMA: THE KULESHOV

EFFECT

• The Kuleshov effect is a film editing (montage) effect

demonstrated by Soviet filmmaker Lev Kuleshov in the

1910s and 1920s. It is a mental phenomenon by which

viewers derive more meaning from the interaction of

two sequential shots than from a single shot in

isolation.

AUTEUR

• Self- publicist Hitchcock was a commercial film-maker,

who sought and achieved box- office success.

• He was always happy to exploit his ‘auteur status’ as a

marketing device, through his TV series no less than

his films.

• His films are assigned to him as in the credits and

publicity material making him a ‘star’ director.

• He also ‘signed’ his films through his personal non-

speaking appearances in them.

• In Vertigo he appears outside Elster’s office.

AUTEUR

The film has recurring themes from Hitchcock’s other

work including:

• Guilt (Strangers on a Train);

• Voyeurism (Rear Window); and

• Taboo subject matter (Psycho).

AUTEUR –PERSONAL LINKS

Vertigo’s themes can be seen as revealing a lot about

Hitchcock and the film is often considered his most

personal.

• The representation of Scottie as lonely links to

Hitchcock’s lack of childhood friends,

• Scottie’s treatment of Judy could reflect the way

Hitchcock treated actresses working on his films;

• and the guilt Scottie feels could be linked to Hitchcock’s

Catholic upbringing.

AUTEUR –ARTISTIC STYLE

• Mastery of the art of film making – the inspired use of

scale models and matte painting to create the bell

tower scene are a useful example.

AESTHETICS

• Title sequence’s innovative use of avant-garde film ideas

in a mainstream narrative. Designed by Saul Bass

accompanied by Bernard Herrmann’s score a

combination of emotional dream imagery and abstraction

by abstract film-maker John Whitney.

• He used a special pendulum that forms “modern art in

motion” geometric oval shaped spirals called Lissajous

waves.

TITLE SEQUENCE

This is a film about watching. In the opening credits

the woman’s face is only partially seen, she is

looking, she and the location are unidentified. This

woman does not feature in the film, she never

appears again.

MOTIF

• The motif of the spiral structures

the film: in the titles, Madeleine’s

hair, the steps in the tower, the

repetition.

SYD FIELD’S 3 ACT STRUCTURE

• The first act takes approximately one quarter of the

film’s runtime, and sets up the conflict. A plot point

thrusts the main character into the second act.

• This second act depicts the character’s struggle to

achieve his or her goal and takes up half of the

movie’s runtime.

• The final quarter of the film is the third act, which

features the climactic struggle in which the character

either achieves or fails to achieve the goal; the third

act then continues through the aftermath of this

climax.

SPIRAL NARRATIVE

• 3 acts, 2 halves, & a spiral

• Midpoint marked by Scottie failing to save

Madeleine

• Saving her would have helped him complete a

narrative circle

• He fails, and so ‘spirals’ into a psychological

breakdown

• Spiral continues when he fails again in act 3

MIRRORS

• Hitchcock’s recurring use of

mirrors, as in Psycho, to imply dual

identities. The clearest examples

are:

• The sequence at Ernie’s

• The flower shop/peeping tom

scene

• Scottie’s first visit to Judy’s room

• Ransohoff’s department store

scene.

CAMERAWORK

• Lengthy fluid camera

movements contribute to the

film appearing dreamlike at

times.

THE ‘VERTIGO’ EFFECT

• Ground breaking, inventive camera work. The

clearest example is the ‘Vertigo effect’, the dolly

zoom used to convey Scottie’s acrophobia.

Though invented earlier this technique was first

used in this film by camera operator Irmin

Roberts.

SPECTATORSHIP AND ALIGNMENT

Hitchcock uses shot reverse shot as a way of clearly establishing the character alignment.

These three screen grabs show us how Hitchcock uses camerawork to align and position us very much with Scottie's viewpoint in the first part of the film.

After Scottie has been tasked by ulster with trailing Madeline she takes him to the museum and we have this shot as part of an extended sequence that makes it very clear that the camera is aligned particularly using POV with Scottie. The shot reverse shot and framing clearly shows Scottie watching Madeline looking at the nosegay of flowers looking at the world in her hair and then using very subtle mobile framing to take us from her to look up to the picture of Carlotta and back to Madeline

SCOTTIE AS VOYEUR

We are positioned as Scottie through the use of POV shots linking to

Laura Mulvey’s theory we have a very obvious sense in which we

have the ‘male as bearer of the look’ and the extent to which that's a

potent powerful and controlling look - he spectator is connected to

Scottie for empathy yet the shot shows us Scottie in a very typical

sort of peeping tom/spying sort of shot we can see him through the

crack of the door but we can also still see Madeline in the mirror.

Although clearly we the audience and spectator are being aligned

with Scottie in terms of mode of address in terms of we're looking at

him we're encouraged to think of ourselves as Scottie looking at her

the subtle use of the reverse shot still puts us as an audience in a

position where we're looking at him looking at her.

MOTIF

The famous recurrent motif of the kind of profile

shot that features several times throughout the film.

The use of creepy green backlighting creates a

ghostly silhouette Again, this is very much used

with shot reverse shot and of course we are Scottie

looking at this woman in the darkness particularly

an important way to suggest a sort of evoking of a

sort of dream or fantasy.

NARRATIVE REVEAL

Things change quite considerably this sequence - it represents a crisis of

narrative and spectator identification.

Judy’s first-person voiceover reveals our assumptions and presumptions

about the narrative have been all wrong. Judy turns around and looks at the

camera - directly addresses us -so in terms of mode of address it's a crucial

moment which breaks the fourth wall.

This undermines all of the classical narrative elements we could have

argued that have gone before - it's almost positioning the audience to say:

‘Who should I believe? Who should I follow? What's going on? I thought this

person Scotty was the defining force in the narrative and now this woman

seems to be taking over’

GENDER

The representation of male

sexuality with a man

confronting his impotence and

his repressed desires can be

read as a comment on pre-

feminist gender politics in the

late 1950s.

CONNELL’S HIERARCHY OF MASCULINITY

Hegemonic masculinity

Complicit masculinity

Marginalized masculinity

Subordinate masculinity

Qualities include heterosexuality, whiteness,

physical strength and suppression of emotions

such as sadness.

Where a man may not fit into all the characteristics

of hegemonic masculinity but do not challenge it

either.

Follow the cultural ’norm’ but can’t fully access it

e.g. men of colour and disabled men

Display oppositional qualities. Effeminate and gay

men are examples of men who exhibit a

subordinate masculinity identity.

LAURA MULVEY

• Laura Mulvey‘s Visual Pleasure and Narrative

Cinema (1975) examined the representation of

sexual difference as active male/passive female,

with women displayed as erotic objects for the

characters within the lm and the spectator.

Mulvey suggested that the use of subjective

camera from the male protagonist’s point of view

results in the spectator identifying with the male.

FEMALE EMPOWERMENT

Scottie is undermined by his weakness and

fascination with the mystery of Madeleine.

Judy confession places the spectator in a

position of knowledge, spectator changes

identification because of this.

ORPHEUS AND EURYDICE

• Vertigo has many links to several Greek and Roman myths.

• Perhaps the most obvious mythological influence on the film is the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, in which the musician Orpheus loses his wife, Eurydice to death and ventures into the underworld to rescue her, only to lose her again.

SCOTTIE AS ORPHEUS

• Firstly, Scottie's (Orpheus) character attempts to save Madeleine, (the Eurydice character), from drowning in the San Francisco Bay. He succeeds, only to lose her in a “suicide” off the bell tower.

MADELINE ’S RECREATION

• Scottie then gets a second chance to save Madeleine from death, this time by recreating Judy in Madeleine's image. He achieves this resurrection, but then loses her again when she plunges from the bell tower.

• And just as in the Orpheus myth it is Orpheus's fault—his failure to follow the instruction not to look back at his beloved as he leads her out of Hades—that he loses Eurydice again, so in Vertigo it is Scottie's flaws that lead to his losses: his acrophobia causes him to lose Madeleine and it is his insistence on recreating a dead woman that leads him to lose Judy.

VOYEURISM

One of Hitchcock’s major themes—particularly in his 1950’s works—is voyeurism.

Vertigo can be seen as a long romantic poem to voyeurism that leads the viewer through lengthy specific sequences of silent pursuit, and through a much darker and broader story of one man’s pursuit—to unthinkable extremes—of his chosen romantic ideal. Scottie watches Madeleine and we watch Scottie watch Madeleine.

Indeed one way Hitchcock establishes his voyeurism theme is through the use of eyes and swirls—from the opening sequence, to Madeleine’s hairstyle, to the expressive eyes of the main characters…

MANIPULATION

Not only are we, the audience manipulated, but some of the main themes are clearly obsession and control by manipulation and fabrication of reality:

Scottie is manipulated by his friend Gavin, who also manipulates the Judy who in turn manipulates Scottie.

When the deception is complete and Scottie believes that the woman he loves has died, he is lost until he sees a girl who resembles her.

He then does to her what had been done to him – he manipulates her, denies her her own identity and makes her over until she is the simulacrum of a woman who never was.

When he discovers how he had been fooled by a theatrical illusion, he hisses, “Did he train you? Did he rehearse you? Did he tell you what to do and what to say?” –apparently not realizing that he is furious and indignant about the very behavior he has been exhibiting.

Hitchcock uses mirrors and mirror images to reinforce the idea of manipulation and confusion over what is real and what is not.

Madeleine: It's as though I were walking down a long corridor that once was mirrored, and fragments of that mirror still hang there. . . .Scottie: The small scenes, the fragments of the mirror. . . . Do you remember those?

FANTASY AND MANIPULATION

• Consider the scenario, though, from Judy’s perspective:

• She’s picked up by one significantly older man, Elster, who gives her a new persona (Madeleine) and then involves her in the original Madeleine’s murder.

• Elster promises her a deeper attachment, only to dump her unceremoniously after the deed is done.

• Then Judy finds the process repeated with Scottie—yet, despite his earnestness, his behavior is doubly humiliating, as it carries an implicit rejection of Judy’s own self in favor of the fantasy of Madeleine.

• Judy, like so many of us, is so desperate for approval and love that she allows all of this to happen, ultimately leading to her death.

JACQUES LACAN

Lacan speculated that: