a thread for hitchcock's 'vertigo'

a do-it-yourself type thing

a 30-film Brooklyn fest of movies that "engage" Vertigo

(before clicking, guess as many as you can)

http://www.bam.org/film/2015/the-vertigo-effect

The lack of Les Diaboliques there seems the most obvious omission

http://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/apr/13/alfred-hitchcock-peter-ackroyd-michael-wood-review

two new bks.

A former ILXer gives the Ackroyd book a brutal review in the latest Sight and Sound

a 30-film Brooklyn fest of movies that "engage" Vertigo

more (at least in my mind):
antonioni l’avventura
wenders paris texas
hitchcock rebecca
almodovar broken embraces, talk to her, skin i live in, etc

Don't forget La Jetée and, more obviously Twelve Monkeys.

and High Anxiety

Ah yes.

Don't forget La Jetée and, more obviously Twelve Monkeys.

― You Play The Redd And The Blecch Comes Up (James Redd and the Blecchs), Monday, April 13, 2015 6:11 PM (6 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

and High Anxiety

― The burrito of ennui (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Monday, April 13, 2015 6:12 PM (6 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

absolutely. those are included (i already clicked, so i'm not guessing)

Doesn't Les Diaboliques come before Vertigo?

The museum sequence in Dressed to Kill.

they included some movies earlier than Vertigo, so "engagement" applies before and after

XP The source novel for Diabolique was written by the same guys who wrote the Vertigo novel.

yes!

i'm thinking no one guessed Pal Joey.

Nope. Think it may be time to peek

go ahead, i was not meaning to make it a contest.

no memory of the Demme film included.

I just bought this yesterday for $1 on VHS, going to watch it towards the end of the week. Excited!

More on this series below... I wish Legend of Lylah Clare was in it. btw The Joy of Life is a must.

http://bam150years.blogspot.de/2015/04/filmmakers-film-vertigo.html

some more (not included) films that engage with vertigo in my mind:
solaris
not just mulholland drive but twin peaks, lost highway, inland empire, etc
that obscure object of desire
the double life of veronique
exotica
in the mood for love/ 2046
black orpheus
last year at marienbad
postman always rings twice
the third man
peeping tom

The museum sequence in Dressed to Kill.
not really crazy about dressed to kill, but man, that sequence justifies its existence.

this movie is insane

key to its greatness

idk if I would rate it my favorite Hitchcock - that's probably Psycho, or maybe Rebecca. Having never seen it start-to-finish before last night I was shocked by how unrelentingly bleak it is, how there's no real protagonist or antagonist, the degree to which it just seems relentlessly morbid and nihilistic.

also man SF used to be a lot less crowded, apparently.

even before AIDS! (purposefully morbid and offensive)

Scottie is p much his own antagonist.

Not in my top five but Stewart is bonkers

the line where theater audiences tend to produce a sickened laugh is "Judy, it can't matter to you."

Scottie is p much his own antagonist.

this is how I started to feel about halfway through the film when his stalkerish obsessive craziness really starts to make him look unhinged. by the end I was practically expecting him to throw her out of the tower (which in some ways does sort of happen - man kills the thing he loves, twice!)

sometimes I walk around muttering YOU WERE A VERY APT PUPIL

Muttering? He SPITS that line out ... twice!

My favorite Hitch is Rear Window, but this is the closest runner up.

But I don't spit...movie lines.

Remind me to tell you about the time I swallowed the heart of an artichoke.

*pushes Eric off bell tower*

calm down guys

there's something about all the static framing in Rear Window that I just don't enjoy watching. Probably a result of never having seen it on the big screen, but in general it's a film where the formal conceit - I'm watching a film about watching things! - turns out to be more appealing in theory than in execution.

gentleman seems to know what he wants

Big screen helps immensely. The sound design seems far more "active" inside a cavernous theater too.

You can go up, you can go down

Take a look at the clip I just posted in the Kubrick thread.

Agree, Vertigo is great. The hero of the movie is actually is villain, but the twist is done in the most brilliant way.

this is a seriously upsetting movie, every time i see it i end up feeling like i've been through the movie equivalent of a panic attack. rebecca is my favorite hitch these days but i have no problem with vertigo getting the automatic top spot.

how unrelentingly bleak it is, how there's no real protagonist or antagonist, the degree to which it just seems relentlessly morbid and nihilistic.

final shot should have consigned the scream to oblivion

Not enough love here for Bernard Herrmann's score which is insanely good.

magnifique

Where is this lack of love that you remark upon?

Love for the clothes: http://clothesonfilm.com/costume-identity-in-hitchcocks-vertigo/25039/

Fri, Sep-21; see also Sep-25
6:00pm @ Gene Siskel Film Center
Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958, 129m)
NOTE: "Vertigo will be screened in a rare original IB Technicolor release print. If you have only seen one of the recent restorations, or seen the film on DVD or other video, you haven't really seen it. The sound in the most recent restoration was badly redone, and this is a film that especially depends on the 'look' of IB Technicolor. "
― Josh in Chicago, Thursday, August 2, 2012 10:29 AM (3 years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Got to see this print with a sell-out crowd tonight. The "You haven't really seen it." thing is seriously indiesnob hyperbolic. Yes, much of the time it looks fantastic (if frustratingly a bit soft and/or fuzzy at times), and to hear the proper soundtrack in Glorious MONO--as god intended!--is worth the price of admission and then some. If anything, the way to sell such a screening is "Probably the last time you'll see it on actual film", which is sad for different reasons.

Afterwards, as the audience was exiting, I found myself next to a group of 20-somethings who must have been viewing for the first time. They were lamenting the lack of Midge in the last section. I told them about the alternate "extended" or "censorship" ending, which they all felt would have been superior to the "real" ending.

Fuckin' Kids!

just rewatched on the big screen last week with someone who'd never seen it. every bit as gloriously fucked up as I remembered.

xpost (to ... me?) I know the Music Box here is booking it for their 70mm Fest. So what's the story there? Was it filmed in 70mm? Was the sound originally mono, even in 70mm?

Anyway, it's a great movie, and I've loved Hitchcock since I was a little kid, but this one even more than most of his films really underscores his disinterest in endings. It's like ... run, run, run, suspense, and ... over the edge, the end. So many of his great films end that way, like NXNW. Rear Window is probably my fave, too, not least because of the few extra tidying-up character beats they toss in rather than a hard cut at the climax to "The End."

Ah, I see. Filmed in VistaVision, but the 1996 restoration transferred it all to 70mm, with new foley effects and other stuff. Long story from Wiki:

In 1996, the film was given a lengthy and controversial restoration by Robert A. Harris and James C. Katz and re-released to theaters. The new print featured restored color and newly created audio, utilizing modern sound effects mixed in DTS digital surround sound. In October 1996, the restored Vertigo premiered at the Castro Theatre in San Francisco, with Kim Novak and Patricia Hitchcock in person. At this screening, the film was exhibited for the first time in DTS and 70mm, a format with a similar frame size to the VistaVision system in which it was originally shot. When restoring the sound, Harris and Katz wanted to stay as close as possible to the original, and had access to the original music recordings that had been stored in the vaults at Paramount. However, as the project demanded a new 6-channel DTS stereo soundtrack, it was necessary to re-record some sound effects using the foley process. The soundtrack was remixed at the Alfred Hitchcock Theatre at Universal Studios. Aware that the film had a considerable following, the restoration team knew that they were under particular pressure to restore the film as accurately as possible. To achieve this, they used Hitchcock's original dubbing notes for guidance of how the director wanted the film to sound in 1958. Harris and Katz sometimes added extra sound effects to camouflage defects in the old soundtrack ("hisses, pops, and bangs"); in particular they added extra seagull cries and a foghorn to the scene at Cypress Point. The new mix has also been accused of putting too much emphasis on the score at the expense of the sound effects. The 2005 Hitchcock Masterpiece Collection DVD contains the original mono track as an option. Significant color correction was necessary because of the fading of original negatives. In some cases a new negative was created from the silver separation masters, but in many instances this was impossible because of differential separation shrinkage, and because the 1958 separations were poorly made. Separations used three individual films: one for each of the primary colors. In the case of Vertigo, these had shrunk in different and erratic proportions, making re-alignment impossible. As such, significant amounts of computer assisted coloration were necessary. Although the results are not noticeable on viewing the film, some elements were as many as eight generations away from the original negative, in particular the entire "Judy's Apartment" sequence, which is perhaps the most pivotal sequence in the entire film. When such large portions of re-creation become necessary, then the danger of artistic license by the restorers becomes an issue, and the restorers received some criticism for their re-creation of colors that allegedly did not honor the director's and cinematographer's intentions. The restoration team argued that they did research on the colors used in the original locations, cars, wardrobe, and skin tones. One breakthrough moment came when the Ford Motor Company supplied a well-preserved green paint sample for a car used in the film. As the use of the color green in the film has artistic importance, matching a shade of green was a stroke of luck for restoration and provided a reference shade.

I remember the controversy surrounding the sound effects, but I guess I didn't remember the details that it was a devil's bargain supposedly necessary to restore the rest of the film, or at least bring the presentation up to snuff.