August 31, 2010 12:30PM EDT

Retro Pick: Vertigo

Arguably Alfred Hitchcock’s greatest film, Vertigo is a story of memory and obsession that transcends the genre of the thriller, cutting straight to the heart of what movies are all about.
 


Chris Marker, who is perhaps this critic’s favorite filmmaker, is known to be a fan of Vertigo. Marker’s 1983 masterpiece Sans Soleil (which in 2083 will still be well ahead of its time) contains a sequence where Marker visits the real-life San Francisco locations where Vertigo takes place, even retracing some of the route Scottie Ferguson (Jimmy Stewart) takes as he follows Madeleine Ellster (Kim Novak). Don’t be surprised, though: Vertigo is about obsession, and obsession it inspires. Its defenders are fiercely passionate: Marker concluded an essay on Vertigo by writing, “Obviously, this text is addressed to those who know Vertigo by heart. But do those who don’t deserve anything at all?”

Vertigo was not initially regarded as one of Hitchcock’s crowning achievements, but appreciation of it has grown over time; the consensus now is that it’s easily his greatest film, and with good reason. All of Hitchcock’s best work managed to transcend the thriller genre in some fashion or another, but none did it as profoundly and poignantly as Vertigo. The story on paper is simple enough: retired cop Scottie Ferguson is hired by old chum Gavin Ellster (Tom Helmore) to follow around his wife, Madeleine, who has been acting a bit loopy as of late. As Scottie begins to tail Madeleine, it starts to look as if she may be imagining that she is possessed by the ghost of a long-dead woman.
 


That storyline would have been more than enough for a major Hollywood production. However, with Vertigo being the masterpiece that it is, that storyline is cut off more or less halfway through the picture, at which point we go through the looking glass, and everything changes. (And Vertigo earns its accolades.) Without giving anything away to those lucky few who have yet to see it for the first time, suffice it to say this film is resonant in no small part because it provides a double metaphor for our self-deceptions in the realms of love and artistic creation. The romance between Scottie and Madeleine is not so much fanciful as it is an extreme version of what every relationship goes through at the beginning, with delusion and deception being employed so as to make oneself seem more attractive; as Vertigo makes all too clear, the person we fall in love with never really existed.
 


Additionally, the romance between our leads is, as it has been oft-noted, a metaphor for the obsessions of the film’s helmer, for whom every detail had to be just so. The creation of art is an obsessive process, but obsessive so that we may be able to regain something we’ve tragically lost, Hitchcock wants to tell us. Of course, what we regain through the construction of art—be it cinema or otherwise—is nothing more than a stand-in.
 
Vertigo is a magnificently sad film, sad to the core, and it will break your heart over and over again. Go see it.

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Vertigo screens Sunday, September 5, at 8 pm at Symphony Space.