Vertigo

VERTIGO is perhaps Alfred Hitchcock’s most fascinating film?

Vertigo ranks among the greatest classics in film history. When it was first released, it wasn’t an immediate success, but over time it has reached and captivated ever new audiences. Vertigo means dizziness—and here, the viewer is hypnotically drawn into that very sensation.

Police officer John «Scottie» suffers from such severe acrophobia that he is forced to leave the force. He nevertheless agrees to take on a job for an old friend: to follow the man’s wife, who has begun acting strangely. But instead, Scottie ends up falling in love with her. The whirlwind of events he is pulled into is brilliantly mirrored in cinematographer Robert Burks’ startling visual effects used to depict Scottie’s vertigo—and especially in the dream sequence designed by artist John Ferren.

At first glance, the film appears to be a murder mystery—but what is truly disturbing is that it’s about the murder of love itself: about the disintegration of one’s own and others’ identities, obsessions, and the fluid boundary between the living and the dead.

Where most of Hitchcock’s earlier films are easy to admire for their craftsmanship and psychological suspense, Vertigo is one of the few that also confront and engage the emotions. While, for instance, Psycho is a fairly straightforward horror film, Vertigo is a complex and deeply unsettling psychological thriller in which the protagonist could just as easily be one of us. It’s also a sharp portrait of San Francisco’s sleek façades and, together with Rear Window and Psycho, forms a trilogy exploring the nature of voyeurism.

Laura Mulvey writes about the film in her landmark essay Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, stating: «The look is central to the plot, oscillating between voyeurism and fetishistic fascination.»

This film is part of