Written by: Alec Coppel, Samuel A. Taylor (screenplay); Pierre Boileau, Thomas Narcejac
My third stop on Roger Ebert's "Great Movies" list brings me to Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo.
I've written about it here before, but it absolutely bears discussing again.
Vertigo is a dense film - much more dense than it may appear on first or even second viewing. The bait-and-switch-and-bait-and-switch of the story can be very disorienting, focusing thought on the work to mainly the plot.
But there's so much beauty to this film that the analysis must go further. (And it has, much better than I could ever analyze, elsewhere and many times.) The movie keeps calling you back. Look closer. Try again.
The music is perfectly eerie at just the right moments. The notes move in circles up and down the scales, then repeating, which helps enhance the theme and the suspense.
The colors are striking and bold. No holding back here. They are used to draw your attention to (and simultaneously away from) what you are supposed to notice.
I feel weak trying to write about this movie. I've seen it so many times over the last twenty years that it's hard to isolate one part of it here or there, and each of those parts has so many layers that it could be dissected in its own right for an entire post.
(As an example, with spoilers: The first bell tower scene. She begs him not to go up into the church with her. How much of it is Madeline/Judy trying to save him from the trauma she knows is waiting for him if he tries to follow her? How much of it is her trying to manipulate him with reverse psychology? Does she really love him or is she just using him? Where does the acting end and her personality begin? It's worth thinking about.)
No comments:
Post a Comment