THE METAPHYSICAL FILMSCAPES OF

HITCHCOCK'S VERTIGO

by

Matthew Wigdahl

B.A., Colorado State University, 1974

A thesis submitted to the

University of Colorado at Denver

in partial fulfillment

of the requirements for the degree of

Master of Humanities

1997

©1997 by Matthew John Wigdahl

All rights reserved.

This thesis for the Master of Humanities

degree by

Matthew Wigdahl

has been approved ·

by

~t Date

Wigdahl, Matthew (M.H.)

The Metaphysical Filmscapes of Hitchcock's Vertigo

Thesis directed by Professor M. Kent Casper

ABSTRACT

An acknowleged film masterpiece, Alfred

Hitchcock's Vertigo (1958) manifests a cinematic

evocation of the early phase of Giorgio de Chirico's style

of Metaphysical painting. From 191 0 to 1 91 7 de

Chirico's works exhibit four methods to represent our

interior psychological and spiritual states. Exterior

vistas mark silent and dream-like cityscapes featuring

vague human figures, elongated shadows, receding

arcades, obtrusive statuary, and looming towers. He soon

combined these oneiric landscapes with oddly and

arcanely juxtaposed objects. Eventually, metaphysical

interiors evince a claustrophobic conflation of illusion

and reality. Finally, his mannequin figures elicit a

iv

strangely balanced sense of calm and foreboding.

Each of these manifestations of figure and space is

evoked in Vertigo. The film's dislocated characters

experience their wanderings against vast backgrounds

and among crowded interiors which eerily recall the

iconography and the dimensions of de Chirico's art. De

Chirico's way of seeing functions proto-cinematically.

It anticipates the generative power of film's imagery

rather than cinema's tendency to develop plot and to

serve narrative. Hitchcock, one of film's greatest

auteurs, bodies forth this generative power of the filmic

image in his masterpiece, Vertigo.

This abstract accurately represents the content of the

candidate's thesis. I recommend its publication.

Sign

M. Kent Casper

v

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Many thanks to my graduate committee: Professors Kent Casper, Stephanie Grilli, and Susan Linville for their inspiration, encouragement and support.

Additionally, thanks to my students Beau and Sam for their ideas and reflections.

I am especially indebted to Dan Chabas and Mary Kay Loner for their efforts in developing this paper's photo reproductions.

Finally, to my wife, Pam, for her inexhaustible patience, love, and time.

CONTENTS

Figures ........................................................................................ ix

CHAPTER

1. INTRODUCTION: FILM AND PAINTING ............................ 1

2. DE CHIRICO AND THE PITTURA METAFISICA ............. 7

De Chirican Seeing and Metaphysical

Cinema ........................................................................... 13

3. VERTIGO: WANDERINGS AND VISIONS IN DE

CHI RICAN FILMSCAPES ................................................... 1 8

Interiors ......................................................................... 2 7

Seeing and Wandering .................................. 34

Profiles and Portraiture ............................ 3 7

Shadows and Selves .................................... .40

Filmscapes ................................................................... 41

Equilibrium ...................................................... 4 7

Spatiality and lconography ................................... 51

The Emerging Towers .............................................. 57

Mission San Juan Bautista .................................... 67

vii

Re-Visions ................................................................... 72

APPENDIX

Figures ....................................................................................... 75

BIBLIOGRAPHY .................................................................................. 111

viii

FIGURES

Figure

3.1 Still from Vertigo, Scottie on the Ledge ................ 7 5

3.2 Giorgio de Chirico, The Tower ..................................... 76

3.3 Giorgio de Chirico, The Great Tower ........................ 77

3.4 Giorgio de Chirico, The Rose Tower .......................... 78

3.5 Giorgio de Chirico, The Enigma of the Oracle ....... 79

3.6 Still from Vertigo, The Belfry Tower ...................... 80

3. 7 Arnold Bocklin, Odysseus and Calypso ..................... 81

3.8 Giorgio de Chirico, Grand Metaphysical

Interior .......................................................................... 82

3.9 Still from Vertigo, Midge's Apartment ................... 83

3.10 Still from Vertigo, Chasm and Flowers .................. 84

3.11 Giorgio de Chirico, Hector and Andromache .......... 85

3.12 Giorgio de Chirico, The Fatal Light. .......................... 86

3.13 Giorgio de Chirico, The Endless Voyage .................. 87

3.14 Still from Vertigo, The Flower Shop ........................ 88

3.15 Giorgio de Chirico, The Jewish Ange/.. .................... 89

ix

3. 1 6 Giorgio de Chirico, The Double Dream of

Spring ............................................................................ 90

3.17 Still from Vertigo, Mission Dolores .... ~ .................... 91

3.18 Arnold Bocklin, The Isle of the Dead ...... ~ ................. 92

3.19 Still from Vertigo, The Cemetery at Mission

Dolores ......................................................... .-................ 93

3.20 Still from Vertigo, Palace of the Legion . of

Honor .............................................................................. 94

3.21 Giorgio de Chirico, The Lassitude of the

lnfinite .......................................................................... 95

3.22 Giorgio de Chirico, The Delights of the Poet. ....... 96

3.23 Giorgio de Chirico, The Enigma of the Hour ........... 97

3.24 Still from Vertigo, The Dare of the Sovereign ..... 98

3.25 Giorgio de Chirico, The Departure of the Poet ..... 99

3.26 Still from Vertigo, Old Fort Point .......................... 1 00

3.27 Giorgio de Chirico, Mystery and Melancholy of a

Street. ......................................................................... 1 01

3.28 Still from Vertigo, Scottie's Apartment ............. 1 02

3.29 Still from Vertigo, Parody of Carlotta ................. 1 03

3.30 Still from Vertigo, Doorway at Dawn .................... 1 04

X

3.31 Still from Vertigo, Arcade at San Juan

Bautista ...................................................................... l 0 5

3.32 Giorgio de Chirico, Melancholy ................................. 1 06

3.33 Still from Vertigo, The Tower from Below ........ 1 07

3. 34 Giorgio de Chirico, The Nostalgia of the

Infinite ........................................................................ 1 08

3.35 Still from Vertigo, The Tower from Above ......... 1 09

3.36 Still from Vertigo, Return to the Tower .............. 11 0

xi

CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION: FILM AND PAINTING

Given the evident likenesses between painting and film, it

is surprising how few critical studies based in either discipline

have addressed them jointly. 1 bud ley Andrew's insightful work

Film In The Aura Of Art posits the idea that "fertile" films are

"obsessed by the tradition of art behind them. "2 According to

Andrew, cinema renews art. Adopting the spirit of Andre Bazin

and Walter Benjamin, he asserts that the mechanically reproduced

nature of film reinvigorates art's withering aura. In separate

essays on such distinct masters of cinema as Griffith, Murnau,

Vigo, Capra, Delannoy, Bresson, Olivier, Welles, and Mizoguchi,

Andrew examines the inheritance that film derives from art and

the restoration it extends to the traditions of painting and

1 I am referring to full-length studies. There have, of course. been a considerable number of briefer examinations throughout both disciplines. I will reference the pertinent ones in this paper.

2 Dudley Andrew, Film In The Aura Of Art (Princeton University Press, 1984 ), pp. xi-xii.

1

literature. His study of Olivier's Henry V, for example,

acknowledges the film's obligations to its literary antecedent

and assesses the work's revitalizations of Shakespeare.

Additionally, Andrew details the film's appropriation of some of

painting's venerated images such as those of the Limbourg

Brothers and Jan Vermeer.

Dudley Andrew's film criticism is compelling. However, I

think it accurate to read him as a critic who, at least in Film In

The Aura Of Art, is focusing principally on the nature of the "art"

film, not on the interaction of the two art forms. My approach to

the interdisciplinary nature of this study has been strongly

influenced by Anne Hollander's text Moving Pictures which

comprehensively explores the proto-cinematic natures of works

from five centuries of Western art. Extending her book's vast

scope from the Late Gothic style of Jan Van Eyck to the urban

Impressionism of Gustave Caillebotte, Hollander argues that art

anticipated film; indeed, that paintings functioned cinematically

in their ability to evoke psychic movement in viewers. According

to Hollander, the impulses for cinema have, for generations, been

embedded in European paintings. Hollander has comprehensively

2

linked the two traditions. Her analyses encourage further

advances into the vast and unexplored affinities between film and

art, the likes of which this paper endeavors to investigate.

Such explorations comprise Angela Daile Vacche's recent

book, Cinema and Painting. Using the visual image as the unifying

factor of painting and cinema, Daile Vacche studies how eight

films incorporate diverse pictorial sources and traditions.3 She

also examines the interplay of the two media, the dialogical

nature o.f the image and the word, and the relationship between

creativity and gender.

Cinema and Painting is an expansive text, yet through a

variety of analytical approaches it tries to keep its sights on the

image and--with each film it studies--to continually readdress

the image's generative power. In her chapter on F. W. Murnau's

Nosferatu, Daile Vacche traces the film's balanced

manifestations of Romantic and Expressionist painting. After

identifying Nosferatu's own position in the contemporary context

of German Expressionist cinema, she positions it in a larger art-

3 Daile Vacche's Cinema and Painting (University of Texas Press) 1996, includes essays on Minnelli's An American in Paris, Antonioni's Red Desert, Rohmer's The Marquise of 0, Godard's Pierrot le Fou, Tarkovsky's Andrei Rublev, Murnau's Nosferatu, Mizoguchi's Five Women around Utamaro, and Cavalier's Therese.

3

historical milieu--observing its pictorial relationship to the

work of painters in both Die Brucke and Der Blaue Reiter as well

as citing its visual evocations of nineteenth-century German art.

For example, she specifically notes that in its opening shot the

film references the work of the expressionist painter Ernst

Ludwig Kirchner. Further, she also reveals how throughout

Nosferatu Murnau extensively draws on remoter Romantic

pictorial traditions conveyed in the landscapes of Caspar David

Friedrich.

To a considerable degree, Daile Vacche treats Nosferatu as

a film whose various mise en scene recall and reflect these

artists' paintings. From Daile Vacche's critical perspective, the

filmmaker Murnau is effectively using the screen as a canvas. In

another analysis of a film whose director literally does paint the

natural settings used in his work, Michelangelo Antonioni's Red

Desert, Daile Vacche adopts a different approach. She

simultaneously retreats from and adheres to the idea of the

auteur as the singular creative force behind the painterly design

of the shot. With Red Desert, Daile Vacche argues that Antonioni

uses his character's (Guiliana's) eyes to paint, thus increasing

4

"his freedom as a director who wants to insert abstract images

into the cinema."4

Whether through the auteur-based approach of equating the

director with the painter, or via the ocular "ventriloquism"S of

Antonioni, or; additionally, in the varied manner of her half-dozen

other examinations, Daile Vacche's consideration of how art is

used in film invites us (further than Andrew's or Hollander's

work) to look into the correspondences between cinema and

painting that the image elicits.

Daile Vacche's analyses of Red Desert and Nosferatu

provide a bridge to my own specific study. She associates the

cinematic atmospheres of both Antonioni and Murnau with the

twentieth-century Italian painter Giorgio de Chirico.6 This

critical approach conveniently links to my intentions here which

4 Daile Vacche, p. 62.

5 Daile Vacche's thoroughly discusses this metaphor of ventriloquism in her book's chapter on Red Desert.

6 Daile Vacche's arguments are generally tenable; however, I disagree with the way she specifically relates the visual atmospheres of de Chirico's works to either directors' films. Her evocations of de Chirico would be better applied to the first three films of Antonioni's tetralogy, L'Awentura, La Notte, and L'Eclisse, films which bear much more pronounced visual correspondences (particularly L'Awentura) to de Chirico 's art than does Red Desert. Additionally, her application of de Chirico to Murnau stretches the tenuous visual affinity between Nosferatu and de Chirico's paintings to fit what she identifies as their common aesthetic connection, a kind of surrealist sense of mystery. Daile Vacche primarily compares the perspectival relationships between early de Chiricos in general and Nosferatu's town of Wisborg.

5

are to examine the pictorial relationship between Alfred

Hitchcock's Vertigo and de Chirico's early paintings.

Andrew, Hollander and Daile Vacche delineate a variety of

ways to investigate the kinship between cin~ma . and painting. The

aesthetic and thematic similarities apparent . in the art and the

films they examine invite the varied approaches. Sharing common

perceptual starting ground with these critics, my study derives

its original impetus . from observihg an infusing presence of de

Chirico's unique metaphysical space and iconography in

Hitchcock's Vertigo and maintains an extended examination of

the reciprocally generative power of the mise en scene found in

both the film and in the paintings.

6

CHAPTER 2

DE CHIRICO AND THE PITTURA METAF/5/CA

Vertigo is a cinematic manifestation of Metaphysical

painting. So persuasive is the film's 'metaphysical' look that a

close study of its purely visual nature merits at least a cursory

examination of the . aesthetic tenets which this particular school

of art evinces. The pittura metafisica is an Italian art movement

and a style of painting formed during the first World War

principally by Giorgio de Chirico and Carlo Carra. It is usually

dissatisfying to even attempt a concise definition of a school of

art, but in broad art-historical terms, pittura metafisica can be

seen as proto-Surrealist in that it attempts to represent an

alternative reality that could convey an unconscious state by

depicting dislocated objects incongruously. Both de Chirico and

Carra claim to be the originator of Metaphysical painting. The

dispute still lingers long after their deaths, but the pictorial

evidence strongly suggests that de Chirico is the seminal

7

influence. 7

In strict terms, the designation pittura metafisica is

problematic and can be somewhat misleading. Specifically, this

label and its anglicized equivalent refer to the paintings,

manifestoes, and articles which were executed, announced, and

written by de Chirico, Carra, Filippo de Pisis, Giorgio Morandi,

Alberto Savinio (de Chirico's brother) and others beginning in

1 91 6 and continuing through 1 9 21 . Approaching both the term and

the style less formally allows us a more comprehensive yet a

keener understanding of what is meant by Metaphysical. Since

James Thrall Soby's first monogram on de Chirico appeared in

1941, nearly every critical observer of de Chirico has stretched

the term to apply it to the early body of his work. Prior to that,

7 The argument over who originated Metaphysical painting remains unsettled. For a relevant discussion see Caroline Tisdall's Historical Foreword in Massimo Carra, Patrick Waldberg, and Ewald Rathke, Metaphysical Art, (Praeger: New York, 1971), pp. 7-16. Tisdall points out: "It should also be remembered that when they met in 1917 both painters had distinguished achievements behind them: Carra as leading member of the Futurist movement in Italy, and de Chirico as the sole exponent of his personal vision of the enigmatic in Paris." This asociation of Carra with the Futurists is evidence enough to rule him out as the primary source of the style. Despite some peripheral affinities, the similarities between the Futurists and the Metaphysical painters are few. To a significant degree the two art movements are antithetical. The Futurist's formal links with Cubism via their infatuation with the machine put them at odds with the dream-like enigmas of the purely Metaphysical. So even though Carra appears to undergo a crisis with his Cubist/Futurist roots as early as 1914, his claim diminishes due to this previous association. And it nearly disappears in the light of de Chirico's earlier works which, dating from 1910, clearly manifest qualities which both artists espouse in later writings about the painterly and architectonic nature of the Metaphysical.

8

in his Surrealist manifestoes of the mid-1920s, Andre Breton

acknowledged the metaphysical nature of de Chirico's pre-1 91 6

paintings. Guillaume Apollonaire expressed similar reactions

upon viewing (and in many instances titling) de Chirico's works at

or very near the times of their creation or exhibition. Most

importantly, de Chirico himself used the word 'metaphysical' in

his own writings beginning as early as 191 0. The broader

connotation of 'metaphysical' that I will employ is based on the

tradition the term has been accorded throughout its nearly ninety

years of aesthetic and critical application. Thus, Giorgio de

Chirico's "personal vision of the enigmatic" as manifested in his

paintings from 1 91 0 through 1 91 7 functions here as the

touchstone of the Metaphysical.

The aesthetic connotations of the term and the foundations

of the formal art movement itself receive insightful and

impartial treatment in the essay "Quest for a New Art" by none

other than the son of de Chirico's collaborator turned rival,

Massimo Carra. The younger Carra cites art historian Werner

9

Haftmann who applies Nietzschean and Schopenhauerian casts. 8

The observations offered by Haftmann--while they are focused

strictly on the products of pittura metafisica--also encompass

the nature of the genius of de Chirico's earlier creative

outpouring. Moreover, there is an anticipation of the subsequent

Surrealist embodiment of this Metaphysical aesthetic and style:

Pittura Metafisica did not contribute a new kind of painting, but a new vision of things. This group of painters experienced the world of things as alien and mysterious--reflecting the modern attitude towards reality. There was something disquieting about the way an inanimate object, seemingly withdrawn into its solemn steadfastness, could affect human emotions. Any old thing forgotten in a corner, if the eye dwelt on it, acquired an eloquence of its own, communicating its lyricism and magic to the kindred soul. If a neglected object of this kind were forcibly isolated, that is divested of its warmth and of the protective coat of its environment, or even ironically combined with completely unrelated things, it would reassert its dignity in the new context and stand there, incomprehensible,

8 Two nineteenth-century philosophical perspectives underlie the spirit and stance of Metaphysical painting. By extension, I think they also imbue the cinematic atmosphere of Hitchcock's Vertigo . The first of these philosophers, Friedrich Nietzsche, from whom de Chirico derives so much of the impetus for his art, proclaims in The Birth of Tragedy that "the man of philosophic turn has a foreboding that underneath this reality in which we live and have our being, another and altogether different reality lies concealed, and that therefore it [the latter reality] is also an appearance." This excerpt, Nietzsche's frequently-cited presentiment, concerned as it is with apparent or even subliminally apparent realities, proceeds from intuition through which it calls these worlds of appearance into doubt. In the same text and just immediately after this, Nietzsche asserts that Schopenhauer (the second and the remoter of these philosophical influences upon developments in de Chirico's art) "actually designates the gift of occasionally regarding men and things as mere phantoms and dream-pictures as the criterion of philosophical ability." In a number of early writings, de Chirico cites the influences of both Nietzsche and Schopenhauer on his method of seeing.

10

weird, mysterious.9

Besides echoing those nineteenth-century philosophical

voices of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche--so integral to the

formulation of the young de Chirico's aesthetic--Haftmann's

interpretation of the Metaphysical style anticipates aspects of

film theory. Both the philosophical and the filmic associations

are evidenced in his remark about the object's ability to acquire

"an eloquence of its own." According to Haftmann, to achieve a

metaphysical vision the eye must dwell upon the mundane object

for that object to convey "its lyricism and magic." This extended

and penetrative seeing is· at the core of Andre Bazin's film

theory. 1 o Bazin--who championed the Italian neorealist

filmmakers and celebrated as well other masters of cinematic

"realism," Renoir, Welles and Wyler--admired cinema's long

takes and deep focus techniques which can convey a realist

aesthetic. For Bazin the extended single take and the deep focus

photography involve the spectator's participation, engaging the

9 Werner Hattmann as quoted Carra, p. 19. 10 The crux of Bazin's argument occurs in the chapter entitled "The Evolution of the

Language of Cinema" in Bazin's What is Cinema? trans. Hugh Gray (University of California Press, 1967).

1 1

viewer to derive a considerably greater meaning from the single

filmic image than through that process which montage supplies.

Even though Bazin drew his inspiration from a "realist" filmscape

and not a "metaphysical" one, the method of seeing is common to

both. In each, the reciprocating eye regenerates the already

vitalized objects ·it sees.

In addition to associating them with their successors in

cinema, Haftmann suggestively includes the Metaphysical

painters within the larger parameters of Surrealism by examining

the ironies which emerge when an object is juxtaposed with

completely unrelated objects. Haftmann's language here is

reminiscent of the Surrealist's own source of the dissociative as

expressed by Lautreamont in his famous observation about "the

chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a

dissection table." 11 Although it is tempting to give this creative

principle of Surrealism considerable attention, a closer analysis

of specifically metaphysical vision will provide a more direct

bridge to cinema.

11 The Surrealists claimed Isidore Ducasse, the "comte de Lautreamont", to be a principal precursor. This famous saying, although obviously linked to Surrealism, has resonances within the metaphysical approach to seeing and painting.

12

De Chirican Seeing and Metaphysical · Cinema

"To find the daemon in everything"12 is, for de Chirico, the

key to the metaphysical way of seeing.

And this 'daemon', that is, the mysterious ~ppearance concealed behind every object is revealed to the artist in certain magical or 'abnormal' moments of his creative contemplation. 1 3

Carra goes on to state:

It was De Chirico himself who chose Nietzsche as an example of an artist who knew how to gather these 'happy moments of the metaphysical', attributing to him the merit of having taught 'the non-sense of life, and how this non-sense can be transformed into art .... The Fearful void discovered in this way is itself the inanimate and calm beauty of matter.' To this void and illogic De Chirico assigns the meaning of magic, the means of capturing the 'daemon'.14

Carra expands on the spectral nature of de Chirico's philosophical

bases for painting and further delineates his technique:

It seems that De Chirico resolutely pursued this tone of fantasy and fiction, that an element of narrative was dear to him more for its magic than for its discursive contents.

12 Carra, p. 20. Here he is quoting de Chirico from the painter's own writing of 1918. 13 Carra, p. 20. 14 Carra, p. 20.

13

His means to this end included many subtle mannerisms, even subterfuges: violent light flowing from the sides to penetrate the composition in a melodramatic way, raw shadows and impetuous colors, presences as ambiguous as absences, real or imagined, but suggested, images between mystery and suspense, Nordic nostalgia for the unknowable, and intellectual irony. All these elements used with, at times, over skillful mastery create the impression of a great theatrical inspiration.1 s

Art historians often refer to de Chirico's paintings as

spatial theater. The works may indeed be inspired by the theater

or perhaps painted to render its effects; yet, to me, nearly the

complete scope of the early de Chirico oeuvre, his output

beginning in 1 91 0 and extending through at least 1 91 7, is

cinematic or, more toward my purposes, proto-cinematic. · I see

in these paintings anticipations of filmic space and iconography

as they will be evoked and utilized by some of film's most

notable directors. Certain auteurs, the aforementioned Murnau

and Antonioni for example, share broader aesthetic and

ontological similarities with de Chirico; however, Murnau never

really composes shots tinged with de Chirican atmospheres or

characterized by his arcanely juxtaposed objects, and Antonioni's

cinema--despite the avowed similarities--maintains an

15 Carra, p. 20.

14

idiosyncratic sense of the metaphysical.

Many observers see in the films of Orson Welles an

expansive and Baroque use of space; however, I sense something

visually 'metaphysical.' There is more than a mere suggestion of

the de Chirican in Welles. There are images in Citizen Kane which

subtly recollect perspectival devices and atmospheric effects

that the Metaphysical painter employs. In the Jed Leland

flashback episode of Kane, the reporter Thompson seeks and then

finds an aging and hospitalized Leland in order to glean more

information about Kane's enigmatic deathbed utterance. I have

long seen the space before and beyond the architectonics of the

looming bridge as well as the receding and rondured distance

from the hospital's rooftop promenade as filmic realizations of

the metaphysical. These images, in addition to other Welles'

designs, 16 shot in a softened deep focus by Gregg Toland, seem

cinematic expressions of de Chirico.

Space, then, whether it be the expansive and melancholic

emptiness of de Chirico's piazzas or the crowded juxtapositions

16 Although I tend to agree with those who say that the filmic space of The Magnificant Ambersons (1942) evinces a sense of the Baroque, I think that at least two of Welles' later works, The Lady from Shangai (1948) and, to a pronounced degree, A Touch of Evil (1958) convey an evocation of de Chirico.

15

of his interiors, informs the Metaphysical. Space is the source of

de Chirico's aesthetic. To return briefly to the painter himself:

We are constructing in our painting a new metaphysical psychology of things. The absolute awareness of the space that an object must occupy in a painting, and of the space that divides each object from the others, establishes a new astronomy of things connected to our planet by the fatal law of gravity. 1 7

The emotive power of de Chirican space 1 B--its disquieting

atmospheres of receding colonnades and elongated shadows; the

baffling dimensionality of its overlapped planes and figures

among illusory interiors; and the mysterious and incongruous

possibilities evinced in the isolations and juxtapositions of its

objects--indeed, all the pictorial elements which comprise the

metaphysical plenitude of de Chirico's art--are most

significantly and beautifully developed in narrative cinema in

Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo. In this masterpiece, film bodies

forth an evocation of Metaphysical art.

The film's affinities to de Chirico's art rise from the

compelling arrangements of its cinematic space which invites us

17Carra, 21

18 The description "emotive," because it has been noted by so many observers of de Chirico, becomes operative in any critical investigation of his art.

16

to see it as we would a painting. Thus, Hitchcock's work merits

repeated viewings and asks its spectators to see past its

pleasure-driven look or its murderous gaze into its painterly

scope. Through reseeing it, we come to know the compressed and

reflective interiors, the vague and melancholy distances, and the

distracted and isolated human figures of Vertigo as

metaphysical. 1 9

19 The Metaphysical vision in Hitchcock. which I will develop extensively in my next chapter's analysis of Vertigo, manifests itself, albeit sporadically, in all periods of his filmmaking. There is a shot in The Thirty-Nine Steps(1935) which was the first Hitchcockian image to impress upon me its metaphysical character. Richard Hannay has just encountered the distrusting Scottish crofter. Hannay inquires about a obtaining a ride in a departing van which the crofter says is going the other way. The shot of the van, the lighting upon it, and its overall cinematic atmosphere all convey something quite Metaphysical. There are many other images throughout Hitchcock's work which seem infused by it: the 'windmill' sequence in Foreign Correspondent (1940); the first views of the incoming train in Shadow of a Doubt (1943); Bruno on the steps of the Jefferson Memorial in Strangers on a Train (1951); James Stewart on that eerie walk up the silent London street in search of 'Ambrose Chapel' in The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956); the bird's-eye matte shot of the UN plaza in North By Northwest (1959). Since Hitchcock's films are so predicated upon mystery and enigma, it seems only fitting to see these and so many other of his images in a metaphysical light.

17

CHAPTER 3

VERTIGO: WANDERINGS AND VISIONS IN DE CHIRICAN FILMSCAPES

The visual properties and enigmatic themes apparent in the

early works of de Chirico infuse the cinematic and psychological

atmospheres of Hitchcock's Vertigo imbuing it with a

Metaphysical look. I can find no acknowledgement of such an

influence on the part of the filmmaker; nor can I locate, for that

matter, many substantial references within the catalogue of

Hitchcock criticism which demonstrate the influence of art on

Vertigo or on any of his films.20 Evidence resides in the

delineation and analysis of the striking visual correspondences

between de Chirico's body of work from 1 91 0 through 191 7 and

Hitchcock's masterpiece.

To see the final shot of Vertigo, the image of the newly-

shocked and redevastated Scottie, emergent from the shadowed

20 Of course, the fact that Hitchcock commisioned the Surrealist Salvador Dali to design the dream sequence in Spellbound (1945) stands in notable contrast to my claim. Yet beyond this directly acknowledged incorporation of art into his films, neither Hitchcock nor his myriad observers, reviewers and critics make much reference to his films' manifestations of painting.

18

and arched window of the tower's belfry, is to be visually

reminded of de Chirico. Although the process of being 'reminded'

may suggest something rather mundane, the very act of . . .

reminiscence proves fitting to Vertigo as it does to de Chirico.

Because reminiscence itself denotes the apprehension of an idea

known in a previous existence, it applies to both. Thus, not only

is the reaction attuned to the character of Scottie, whose failed

"second chance" with Judy/Madeleine simultaneously reveals to

him the apparent reality and the real guise of his own and of his

love's prior existences; but additionally, the observation--

because of its doubled view of the artistic representation as

something which is at once cinematic and painterly--is

instinctively and intuitively metaphysical.

Perhaps Scottie's climactic emergence from the mission's

tower onto its ledge (Fig. 3.1) reminds us of the painter's work by

the waving of Scottie's tie, an image reminiscent of those

fluttering pennants atop so many of de Chirico's towers in what

otherwise seem breathlessly quiet atmospheres. More likely it is

the eerie and dramatic play of figure and ground created by the

relationship of the roughly-plastered tower wall and the deeply

19

recessive sky that recalls de Chirico. One would think that all of

our visual attention would be drawn to Scottie, shocked out of

and perhaps back into his vertigo by the sudden, second death of

his own re-creation. And it almost is, but for Hitchcock's

framing which leaves perhaps one/fifth of the composition of the

shot open to the tragically receding sky, our visual abyss-~an

equivalent to what Scottie sees beneath him--thus a

metaphysical expression of Scottie's desolated interior state.21

For the first of many instances in Vertigo, De Chirico's most

noted aesthetic dictum comes to mind: "Who can deny the

troubling connection that exists between perspective and

metaphysics?"22

Other factors that comprise the final shot of Vertigo

simultaneously reinforce and counter typically de Chirican

devices. It is unlike a de Chirico in that it is a relatively close

shot from a midair perspective. In most of his Tower paintings,

De Chirico's point-of-view is usually from a grounded or slightly

21 I am reminded of Antonioni's shot of Lidia (Jeanne Moreau) in La Notte where the character appears about to be crushed by the wall which dominates an even greater percentage of the screen than does the tower's exterior in the final shot of Vertigo. Antonioni's aesthetic kinship with de Chirico is much more pronounced.

22 Cited in Soby from de Chirico's own writing in the Italian magazine, II Convegno.

20

suspended distance, and what is even more likely, it is painted

from the filmic equivalent of a long shot or an extreme long shot.

De Chirico's towers stand off, rise up or loom high above, and in

this, they bear a much closer relationship to so many other of the

movie's images to be addressed. (Fig. 3.2: The Tower, 1911-12,

Paris, Collection Bernard Poissonnier; Fig. 3.3: The Great Tower,

191 3, Paris, Collection Bernard Poissonnier; and Fig. 3.4: The Rose

Tower, 1913, Venice, Collection Peggy Guggenheim.)

However, before leaving the film's climactic tower shot, a

frame aptly representative of the mature Hitchcock, we must

readd~ess images within it and immediately preceeding it which

recall seminal figures in the art of the young de Chirico.

Scottie's downcast posture apparent in figure 3.1, subtly evokes

an image of de Chirico's own in The Enigma of the Oracle (Fig.

3.5: 191 0, Venice, Private Collection). In this work, a shrouded

and, by a subtle suggestion, nearly headless figure stands on the

edge of a lofty chamber's precipice under a fluttering black

curtain. The mysterious figure appears to lean out, precariously

balanced, as if about to plummet into the abyss. A second figure,

with only its ghostly white head and shoulders visible, looms

21

from behind another black curtain drawn closed on the painting's

right side.

Isolated, the shrouded figure resembles Scottie, slightly

hunched and enwrapped by the dark arch behind him. Yet our

perspective of the two figures is completely different. Whereas

we see the filmed image from the character's front, de Chirico's

shrouded figure is viewed obliquely from behind and from its left.

With each, the downward tilt of the head suggests the enigmatic.

In the de Chirican figure, the mystery lies in the unanswerable:

what does it see? what oracular knowledge has it gained? With

the Hitchcock, we share the character's knowledge . . It is his next

step that remains in doubt.

The resemblance of this mysterious early de Chirican figure

to the emotionally shattered Scottie of Vertigo is not completely

uncanny. It does suggest that Hitchcock was, to some degree,

aware of the visual allusion.23 Just prior to the climax and back

inside the belfry, the film's penultimate shots of Scottie and

Judy (Fig. 3.6) offer other visual links to The Enigma of the

23 Hitchcock's training in art history might partially explain his apparent adaptation of the image. His use of the figure perched on a precipice is a motif often referenced in Symbolist art, from whose larger aesthetic atmosphere Vertigo perhaps may draw upon.

22

Oracle, reinforcing the metaphysical natures of both images.

Scottie has brought Judy to the top of the tower to "free"

himself by exorcising his past. This "second chance" in many

ways duplicates the behavior of Gavin Elster, who used Scottie

for his own murderous purposes. Having arrived in the belfry

through its trapdoor, Scottie flings Judy toward its edge and the

edge of the film's frame leaving a considerable space between her

and himself. Behind this space looms the dark presence of the

tower's bell, beyond which, out another arched opening, we see

glimpses of the foreboding sky.

In The Enigma of the Oracle and the first belfry shot of the

climax to Vertigo, space assumes importance. In each work, it

seems that space fills the void. Effectively, space completes

each composition. In the de Chirico, the voluminous space before

the brick wall and above the uneven stone floor imparts the

unknowable essence of the oracle's enigma. In Vertigo, the space

conveys the presence of a number of absent characters: Elster and

the "real" wife; the supposed possessing spirit, Carlotta Valdes;

perhaps even the nearly pure phantom of Judy's mind, the scolding

Sister Teresa. In addition to de Chirico's own observations on the

23

supremacy of space, we recall Massimo Carra: "presences as

ambiguous as absences, real or imagined, but suggested, images

between mystery and suspense. "24

Hitchcock's allusion to de Chirico may not be a conscious

one, but its metaphysical spirit is nonetheless unmistakable. The

allusive nature of the film image is further compounded by the

fact that the shadowy figure in de Chirico's The Enigma of the

Oracle is borrowed quite directly from an artist whose work he

avowedly imitated, the Swiss painter Arnold Bocklin. A

strikingly similar figure to the shrouded one in de Chirico occurs

in Bocklin's Odysseus and Calypso (Fig. 3. 7: 1881-83, Basel,

Kunstmuseum). In the Bocklin as in the de Chirico, the figure is

placed on the far left of the canvas and turned obliquely away

from us. But in the Bocklin, the figure is completely silhouetted

and, more important, not literally on a precipice but on the shore

of the sea. For this is a man of candor, yet one who is seemingly

cloaked in mystery. It is Odysseus at that moment in Homer when

we first encounter him near the sea's edge: sick for home and

longing for Penelope, while simultaneously enthralled by Calypso,

24 Carra, p. 20.

24

who is depicted on the right side of the composition before the

arched entrance to her cave. This multiple alignment of

characters, (in fact it is a quadruple one with its descent from

the classical literary antecedent, through the two art works, and

finally to the film), intrigues in many ways. Perhaps its first

allure surfaces when we realize that the prototype for the

shrouded figure who evolves visually into Scottie is Odysseus,

the archetypal wanderer.

But setting the wandering theme of Vertigo aside for the

time, we are attracted by other ramifications of these

representative images. In all three visual sources and even in the

Homeric textual archetype, there is a brooding absence. In The

Odyssey as in the Bocklin painting, it is of course, Penelope. In

Vertigo it is the "other": either the ghost of the murdered "real"

Madeleine; or that other, who, in the entrancing realm of the

film's ironies, is actually here--a simultaneous presence and

absence. Only in the de Chirico is the "other" presence

unidentified, but nonetheless it remains enigmatically present.

Further, a notion of the oracular informs each work.

Odysseus' sojourn with Calypso is nearly at an end. The nymph's

25

own melancholy is apparent in Bocklin's painting as she sits

forlorn having heard from the Olympian's winged oracle, Hermes,

that the immortals--most persuasively Athena--want Odysseus

to head home: The title . of the de Chirico as well as its imagery

create the oneiric circumstance which is fraught not only with

the indecipherable . interpretations of prophecies but also with

their unfathomable sources. The implication in Vertigo is that

the oracular power is embedded in the setting of the film's

planned destination: the place of both its initial and revisited

climaxes, the Mission San Juan Bautista. Thus, the film evokes

the oracular through the suggested reference to the precursory

and prophetic powers of John the Baptist. But in contrast to

heralding the arrival of a greater "coming," the tower's mission

setting serves to witness an initial and then a second leaving.

In conscious imitation of the trajectory of the film, I will

eventually return to these concluding tower shots; however, prior

to that I will first, among other excursions, examine de Chirico's

metaphysical interiors and draw parallels to Hitchcock's own

cinematic interiors in Vertigo.

26

Interiors

Beginning in 191 5 and continuing through the brief period of

his collaboration with Carlo Carra, Giorgio de Chirico created

works which he called metaphysical interiors. These are

paintings which conflated his previously developed

representations of vastness and the architectonic with oddly

juxtaposed objects and figures evincing multiply planar forms.

The ·paintings resemble cubism, yet they maintain a purer

metaphysical sense through their residual evocation of the

spatial, however obliquely-angled and oddly-dimensional they

may appear. Many of these works are titled as Metaphysical

Interior. Others begin that way: Metaphysical Interior with

Biscuit and Cigarette Holder, for example. Superficially then,

these Interiors appear to incorporate the analytic cubism of

Picasso and Braque into de Chirico's own seemingly proto-

surrealist milieu; but either association is peripheral. If these

27

works do not necessarily transcend form, the cubist's

fascination, they go round it. And it will be recalled that

de Chirico's work is not considered purely Surrealist. He is

effectively co-opted and claimed by them in Andre Breton's First

Manifesto of Surrealism published in 1924.25

De Chirico's Grand Metaphysical Interior (Fig. 3.8: 191 7,

Private Collection) provides an apt representation of this phase

of the artist's work and serves as an effective link to Hitchcock's

own cinematically metaphysical interiors in Vertigo. De

Chirico's work "proposes," as art historian James Thrall Soby

observes, "an unforgettable counterplay between realism of

detail and fantasy of over-all invention. "26 A number of

sequences in Vertigo provide filmic manifestations of this sense

of the dislocational as it can be witnessed in de Chirican

interiors. The first is Midge's apartment (Fig. 3.9), the refuge

Scottie seeks after the film's first "fall" and his ensuing

vertigo.27 Another dozen of the film's designs, perhaps more, can

25 Although the Surrealists, namely Breton, were disgruntled with what they considered de Chirico's lapsed powers, the first manifesto still identifies his early work as a precursor of their own.

26 Soby, p. 41.

27 The film's first kaleidoscopic shot employing the backward track and the forward zoom to depict Scottie's vertigo could be said to function as an interior.

28

be perceived in similar compositional terms.

Coming as it does immediately after the film's prologue (a

precarious rooftop chase sequence) and particularly following the

vertiginous subjective shots before, during, and after the fall of

the policeman, the interior of Midge's apartment seems a safe

enough haven. But Hitchcock's treatment of the setting, after an

establishing shot places us firmly and comfortably in it, edges us

toward multiple and more incisive ways of seeing via the use of

overlapped and angular elements of the mise en scene which

eventually convey a pronounced sense of dislocation for both the

viewer and the viewed.

The set of Midge's apartment recalls the design which

comprised nearly every shot of Rear Window.28 However, in the

earlier Hi.tchcock film, the deep-focused space beyond the

windows invited ours as well as the character's gazing. Certain

shots of Rear Window's peopled courtyard and adjacent

apartments seem imbued with the painterly spirit of George

Bellows or, in more suspenseful or "metaphysical" moments of

28 As Donald Spoto in his The Art of Alfred Hitchcock has observed, the images as well as the actor (Stewart) and the situation (incapacity) are also recalled in this opening sequence.

29

the film, with those of his contemporary Edward Hopper.29

However here, in the establishing shot and to a considerable

extent in the backgrounds of the ensuing matching shots of

Scottie and Midge, interior and exterior elements assume a de

Chirican cast and curiously merge. The visual busyness of the

steep slopes of Telegraph Hill becomes one with the cluttered

foreground of Midge's studio. Planar distinctions blur. The initial

part of Vertigo's first interior sequence is primarily composed of

finely-fitted matching shots, each of which contains only one

character. Scottie and Midge may be in the same room, but after

the establishing shot we see them only in isolated frames. They

are juxtaposed cinematically by montage. Here Hitchcock's use of

an element of traditional film language30 tells the story, but it is

the pictorial depth and the rich iconography of each interior's

mise en scene which affords the insights into the characters.

Many de Chirican Interiors exhibit a canvas which either

contains a completed work or one in-progress. The picture-

within-the-picture in the Grand Metaphysical Interior (Fig. 3.8)

29 The Hopper/de Chirico connection is nicely assayed in Robert Rosenblum's article "DeChirico's Long American Shadow" in Art in America, Vol 84 no 7, July 1996, pp. 46-55.

30 Despite the relative proximity of Midge and Scottie. the overriding sense of their distinct isolation effectively renders the editing closer to parallel montage.

30

features a scene of heightened realism juxtaposed with

ambiguous images from the supposed real world. Many other of de

Chirico's Interiors suggest similar juxtapositions. In this early

scene from Vertigo, Midge is seated working at an artist's table

dynamically angled across the center of the screen. lntersticed

almost subliminally into the parallel montage is a shot of Midge's

ongoing work, a sketch of a woman in a brassiere. The clarity and

simplicity of the sketch counters the cluttered and overlapped

ambiguities of the apartment's decor. Scottie is also seated,

cane in hand, proclaiming his fervent desire to be a "free" man.

Each character is completely surrounded by the furnishings and

appurtenances of Midge's studio. If the composition were

predicated more around color than form, its crowded mise en

scene would exhibit a pictorial connection to the work of

nineteenth-century Symbolist painters such as Pierre Bonnard or

Edouard Vuillard. 31 But its true kinship is with de Chirico. Not

only does it echo his interior illusional spatiality, it also

establishes a remarkably contrasted resonance to the vast

metaphysical exteriors of the artist's earlier work and, by

31 Hitchcock's spatially-crowded images recall these artists' use of ho"or vacuui, that dread of any trace of compositional emptiness.

31

extension, to the similar filmic images which will dominate later

in Vertigo.

Artists' brushes supply the common element of each mise

en scene. They protrude upwardly from the lower right hand

corner of the shots of Midge and from the lower left of shots of

Scottie. Sketches, drawings, flowers and an unusually

juxtaposed brassiere fill the compositions. A dangling cloth

flutters almost imperceptibly from Midge's drawing board. There

appear to be no gaps in either shot's planar recessions. Scottie

seems protected from the precipitous void beyond the windows. In

these closed and foreshortened shots, the world's physical

exterior looks nearly denied.

Yet the vulnerability of Scottie's own physical and

psychologcal states is exposed when he and the camera move

away from the tightness of these shots. In the remainder of this

sequence Scottie moves through and stands somewhat tentatively

in the apartment's space. He relies on his cane which balances

him above the floor, functions as the edge of a hypothetical desk,

and supports him leaning against the wall. Throughout the rest of

the sequence, he is continually filmed against increasingly sparse

32

and emptier backgrounds: a blank wall, a dark divan, an open foyer.

When he returns to the· area next to the windows to test his new~

found faith in conquering his vertigo, his collapse from the top of

the stepstool· is predicated upon his glimpse into a hitherto

unseen gap in the planar depth: the apparently bottomless chasm

below Midge's apartment. Hitchcock's highly artificial

composition (Fig 3.1 0), with its slightly dimmed yet strangely

luminescent atmosphere, peers into absence employing elements

reminiscent of both the expansiveness of de Chirico's vague

vistas and the confinement of his troubling still lifes. The

flowers, foregrounded near the window's ledge, provide an aptly

de Chirican punctuation with their suggestion of "iconographical

irrelevance. "32 Scottie's abbreviated plummet is arrested by

Midge who holds him in her "motherly" way much in the manner of

a pieta. Or, it could be argued, that the two of them are subtly

suggestive of the pairs of de Chirico's intertwined manniquined

figures33 (Fig. 3.11: 1917, Milan, Feroldi Collection) who begin to

appear concurrently in this phase of his art.

32 James Thrall So by, The Early Chirico p. 32 Additionally, the funereal flowers establish an asociation with dizziness and falling which manifests itself throughout the film.

33 The variations and self-forgeries of Hector and Andromache ( 1916, 1917 and as late as 1924) come to mind as do many others.

33

Seeing and Wandering

On a literal level, Vertigo is also about. seeing . . It does not

exhibit the overt allusions to spying, watching, viewing, or just

plain looking that Rear Window displays;34 nor does its script

underlie the movie's images with an excess of optical references

as do many of Hitchcock's works.35 Yet, it revolves around seeing:

Gavin Elster's plot to murder his wife using her look-alike, the

shopgirl Judy Barton, must begin with his seeing her as a fit

double to act as his accomplice. His manipulation of Scottie's

witnessing the actual murder and perceiving it as an apparent

suicide rests on his ability to visualize Scottie as he knew him in

their "college days" and to recognize in Scottie's recently

acquired disabilities of acrophobia and vertigo, the perfect and

final steps to his own murderous plan. Judy's vision is at once

34 Although Laura Mulvey in her "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" insists on Scottie's "blatant" voyeurism, I maintain that Vertigo's watching manifests itself meta-artistically. It is, as my reference to Dominique Pa"ini asserts later in this paper, "a representation on representation. "

35 Samuel Taylor's rescue of Alec Coppel's script of Vertigo does have a number of subtle references to seeing, but they are so interwoven into the script so as not to overwhelm. Strangers On A Train (1951), The Lady Vanishes (1938), and Secret Agent (1936), among others, come to mind as films whose screenplays emphasize the metaphor of seeing.

34

the film's most acute yet also its most myopic as the second half

of the film reveals. She sees into the conscious clarity of Gavin's

foul scheme while simultaneously looking into the obscuring

heart of Scottie's dimmed innocence. In each, she also sees her

own increasingly adumbrated selves. Moreover, she sees it all

twice. Scottie, who until the moment of Judy's flashback is our

source of seeing, labors earnestly for glimpses into the

possessed soul of the woman he loves. Penultimately, his

reflected discovery of the necklace springs from unconscious

sources of seeing which lead to his and the film's conclusively

tragic vision.

Wandering leads Scottie into subsequent metaphysical

interiors and across increasingly vast de Chirican filmscapes. By

way of Gavin's shipbuilding office, Ernie's Restaurant, a flower

shop in downtown San Francisco, and the Mission Dolores we

witness a series of enticingly claustrophobic interiors balanced .

by ever-expansive, silently oneiric vistas that, commingled, draw

us and Scottie into the chimerical mystery of Vertigo.

35

The sequence in Gavin's office36 parallels the preceding one

in Midge's apartment. Its two characters begin the scene a

considerable distance from one another37 and conclude it in close

proximity with Gavin overlapping Scottie in an over-the-shoulder

composition which is shot from behind Gavin toward Scottie. The

cinematic choreography that finally aligns them so is extensive

and intricate. Its culmination yields an image obscurely yet

ingeniously suggestive of a de Chirican work like The Fatal Light

(Fig. 3.12: 1915, Venice, Collection Peggy Guggenheim).38

Hitchcock's alignment produces a lack of dimensionality or at

least a drastically abbreviated depth plane. In the sequence's

final shot the two not only appear quite pronouncedly overlapped,

but they also evince a nearly depthless and cutout quality as do

the manniquin figures in a number of de Chirico's paintings which

36 There is a marvelous dream of de Chirico's that Soby relates in The Early Chirico,

(p. 5.) It yields an uncanny correspondence with the opening images of Gavin's office. When later in his life he was asked by the Surrealists to relate his most impressive dream, de Chirico described this recurrent one about his father: "I struggle in vain with the man whose eyes are suspicious and very gentle. Each time that I grasp him, he frees himself by quietly spreading his arms, which have an unbelievable strength, an incalculable power. They are like irresistable levers, like all-powerful machines, like those gigantic cranes which raise from the swarming shipyards whole quarters of floating fortresses with turrets as heavy as antediluvian

mammals." (italics mine)

37 Robert Harris' 1996 restoration of Vertigo places them together in the scene's establishing shot.

38 In some catalogues it is called The Blinding Light In fact, Soby himself refers to it by the two different titles. It may be one of de Chirico's self-copyings.

36

date from 1915.

Profiles and Portraiture

The viewer appropriates Scottie's vision at Ernie's. We do

at the moment when Scottie, seated at the bar, leans back to view

the woman he has been hired to follow. The camera obliquely then

circuitously retreats in a looping fashion before it begins a direct

tracking shot toward Madeleine. Despite the camera's moving

away from Scottie's subjective point of view, the sudden

steadiness of its track and the penetrative purpose ·of its gaze

link our seeing with Scottie's.39 Madeleine rises from the table

and walks directly toward us just ahead of Gavin who, of course,

is intentionally detained by the maitre d' to allow Scottie and us

to see what amounts to our first profiled view of Madeleine.

Dominique Pa"lni, in a remarkably applicable study of

Vertigo, 40 discusses this first "vision" of Madeleine at Ernie's

39 William Rothman and Laura Mulvey come most immediately to mind in their persuasive observations about the power of the gaze in Hitchcock.

40 Dominique Paini "How Films See Art : A Case Study" in The Journal of Art October 1991 pp 28-29. Palni 's article was part of the second colloquium convened at the Louvre in that same year concerned with the relationship between film and painting.

37

and four subsequent visions of her41 as crucial to perceiving

Hitchcock's general incorporation of art and his specific

referencing of portraiture in this film. Pa"lni maintains that the

traditional portrait's role in cinema (as in much of art history)

usually centers around the idea of a "painting within a painting."

Pa'ini claims that:

Hitchcock implies throughout the film that cinema is the heir of painting, that it is indeed a form of painting. In so doing he transforms the traditional cinematic mise en scene into a mise en portrait that specifies the type of passion that motivates the main character, Scottie.42

In another observation, Pa'ini asserts:

One can postulate that Vertigo is as much a representation on representation as it is a representation of representation. Scottie's Svengaliesque obsession with finding one woman by "remodeling" another invites the spectator to view the film as a parable of artistic activity. 43

Although this last observation anticipates events of the

final third of the film, Scottie's obsession with Madeleine's

41 For PaTni "four sequences suggest this passage from the face to the portrait and from the portrait to the shadow .. . . First sequence: The first vision in the bar .. .. Second sequence: The second vision at the flower shop . . .. Third sequence: Scottie at the cemetery .. . . The fourth vision in the museum."

42 PaTni , p. 28.

43 PaTni, p. 28.

38

image is born in this first profile shot which is so integral to

Hitchcock's employment of mise en portrait. This technique

corresponds with de Chirico's frequent use of the device of a

painting-within-a-painting. He first uses it in The Endless

Voyage (Fig. 3.13: 1914, New York, Private Collection).44

Madeleine's profile at Ernie's resonates even more with the

reclined and foreshortened head at the bottom left of The Endless

Voyage than it does with the manniquined figure which dominates

the vertical dimension of that canvas. Her face's powerful

presence in the front plane of the frame recalls the de Chirican

countenance and reverberates meaningfully throughout Vertigo.

In addition to the connotations of death which this effigy

foreshadows, the profile of Madeleine sets off a whole series of

intra-iconographic profile references which have repercussions

among almost all the characters in the film.

44 Soby, in The Early Chirico, P. 46, speculates that the device first occurs in The Endless Voyage.

39

Shadows and Selves

. - -

We revisit metaphysical interiors by way of Scottie's close

pursuit of Madeleine to the flower shop. Through an obscure

entrance off the alley, Scottie follows her. In an abbreviated but

important shot, we see his shadow before we see him. It is

projected onto the door's opaque window pane. The visual

relationship of shadow and self will assume great meaning in the

film. Within, his and our espials of her (achieved by a

marvelously graduated wipe line from screen left to screen right)

reveal the store's brilliantly-colored floral interior, a kind of

Redonesque vision; however, the sequences's most notable shot is

indeed one marked by many de Chirican associations. Its

disorienting power resides in the compacted images of the real

Scottie and the reflected Madeleine (Fig. 3.14 ). The shot's

compression of Scottie's head peering from the obscurity of the

adjacent storeroom next to Madeleine's own brightly mirrored

profile links it to a de Chirico work like The Jewish Angel (Fig.

3.15: 1915, London, Collection Roland Penrose) or with the

40

manniquin figures found in the middle ground of The Double Dream

of Spring (Fig. 3.16: 1915, New Canaan, Connecticut, Private

Collection). In these works, it is the juxtaposing of the figures'

heads rather than any other pictorial quality which connects

Hitchcock and de Chirico. Scottie's hasty exit through the

storeroom effectively leads Madeleine out of the flower shop. His

rapidly retreating figure almost appears to fall . into the

backlighting of the opaque frame. Departing, Scottie's shadow and

self become indistinguishable.

Filmscapes

In the Mission Dolores sequence, Vertigo begins to break out

of this kind of claustrophobic mise en scene into somewhat

expanded filmic atmospheres which correspond to Scottie's

increased scopic capacity. The exterior shot of the mission's

streetside facade introduces the configuration of the arch. From

this foreshortened perspective we see the arch shape triplicated,

with its third and opened entrance serving as the access through

41

which Scottie will follow Madeleine here and throughout. The

pilastered white walls are purely de Chirican (Fig. 3.17). There is

a striking interplay between their stark brightness and the

darkness of the arched doorway into which, after climbing a few

steps, both seem to be engulfed: first the shadowless Madeleine

and then Scottie, self and shadow entering simultaneously.

A brief interlude inside the mission's church reaffirms both

existences. Surprisingly, the perspective within is considerably

deeper than in the exterior shot. From the back corner of the

church's vestibule, Scottie and his shadow double separate. He

sees the figure of Madeleine, (herself a fleeting shadow against

the huge arched wall behind the altar) disappear again through a

similarly-shaped doorway at the altar's right. This time her

passage is from the church's tenebrous realm back into the world

of light. Scottie's already well-developed pattern of following

drives him out the same door. Even at this point in Vertigo, the

imagery associated with such leads and pursuits transcends the

mere possessed and the mundanely occupational. It directs us

deeper into an entrancing mix of the psychological, the morbid,

and the erotic.

42

The mission's cemetery setting with its "diffused"45 look

is closer in spirit and artistic expression to Bocklin than it is to

de Chirico. Its chiaroscuro technique recalls the Swiss painter's

The Isle of The Dead (Fig. 3.18: 1880, New York, Metropolitan

Museum of Art). The shots are replete with de Chirican

iconography: the stark white walls, the looming towers and the

arched configurations; however, the atmosphere is Bocklinesque.

De Chirico does not really address the dead as directly as Bocklin

does,46 and here Madeleine's visitation to the grave of her

possessing ancestor calls for the painterly treatment that

Bocklin might give it (Fig. 3.19). Throughout the sequence her

image remains more defined. She does not assume the vague

semblance of an attenuated shadow as in a de Chirico townscape,

but remains highlighted in at least a half-dozen compositions ·

wherein she recalls the prototypical shape of that figure of

Bocklin's first seen in Odysseus and Calypso (Fig. 3. 7). In fact,

the brightness of her image stands out like the statuesque form

45 According to Spoto, p. 310, Hitchcock was quite proud of the cemetery sequence: "I diffused it, you know. I gave it a kind of undefined outline. I wanted to put a feeling onto it. "

46 Two of de Chirico's landscapes from 1909 attempt just this. They are very derivative of Bocklin and not as fully realized. It truly seems that in the works of the next year de Chirico finds his genius which inarguably draws a metaphysical feel from BOcklin but incorporates only limited iconographically Symbolist sources.

43

on the prow of the boat in The Isle of the Dead. Madeleine, like

her Bocklinesque visual precursor, is also seen among similarly

dark cypresses and in an enveloping obscurity in each of the

sequence's compositions. Art historian Stephen F. Eisenman

identifies the Bocklin work as a "siren song in praise of blissful

solitude and easeful death."47 A passage from de Chirico's own

writing in the magazine Convegno, illustrates the profound

influence on him by Bocklin. It reveals an intriguing relevance to

the cemetery shots from the Mission Dolores sequence as it also

conveys so much of the ideas and spirit which underlie the whole

of Vertigo:

Bocklin's metaphysical power always springs from the precision and definition of a decided apparition. . . . Each of his works evokes that same disconcerting shock of surprise we all feel when we meet an unknown person whom we think we have perhaps seen once before, though we do not know where or when--or when, in a city new to us, we come upon a square, a street, a house, which we mysteriously seem to recognize.4B

Leaving her entranced position near Carlotta's grave,

Madeleine pauses near Scottie, allowing him and us the third

47 Stephen F. Eisenman, Nineteenth Century Art, (Thames and Hudson: London, 1994). p.318.

48 The II Convegno article as cited in Soby, p. 27.

44

vision of her profile. For a moment, the beguiling sense of

portraiture established in Ernie's and re-modeled in the flower

shop's mirror seems about to falter. The 'siren' leading her

victim to 'solitude' and 'death' appears to be on the verge of

stepping out of her portraited self to warn the man she is luring.

Composure regained, she turns from Scottie and also from the de

Chirican interplay of illusion and reality. She drifts off to more

magical and Bocklinesque distances where her illuminated figure

is subsumed by the dark vegetation.

Scottie's pursuit of Madeleine into the Palace of the Legion

of Honor is reprinted in figure 3.20. I think it is the first

exterior shot in the film that is most like the de Chiricos of

1912-14. Its broad, steep walkway recalls the wide and

aperspective mass of space and light in the center ofThe

Lassitude of the Infinite (Fig 3.21: 1913, New York, Collection

Mrs. John Stephan). Its square orientation suggests the receded,

central portion of The Delights of the Poet (Fig. 3.22: 191 3, New

York, The Museum of Modern Art). The dissolving figure of Scottie

evokes the transparent beings in The Enigma of the Hour (Fig.

3.23: 1912, Milan, Feroldi Collection). Even the presence of

45

Madeleine's green car approximates the role of trains, an integral

compositional factor in these and other contemporary de Chiricos.

Arches and columns appear throughout this prolific and

enduring phase of de Chirico's art. Correspondingly, the images

will resonate within Vertigo itself. This shot's single arch and

its many columns dissolve resonantly into the solitary dark

column and the vaguely illusory arches of another metaphysical

interior, the quiet gallery where Scottie observes Madeleine who

sits apparently transfixed by the Portrait of Carlotta. In sharp

contrast to the first metaphysical interior, Midge's crowded and

sound-filled studio apartment, the museum's gallery is spacious

and silent. Despite the profound difference in the mise en scene,

the same aesthetic is at work here as in the first interior: the

interplay of realism and illusion, the clash of definition with

ambiguity. When reduced, the essences of de Chirico's

Metaphysical Interiors center around the notion of what is

reality and what is art. And, by extension, how do they inform

each other? Ultimately, what observations are they making?

Scottie, the "hard-headed" detective, appears engaged by these

questions as he observes the apparent interaction of reality and

46

illusion in Madeleine and in the Carlotta.

The notion of Scottie as observer is crucial to an

understanding of this interior. In the first one, the camera's

point-of-view is authoriaL. We watch Midge and then Scottie

alternately in. separate mise en scene. The pronounced artists'

brushes in the foreground define the particular cinematic

perspective. · Here, the camera once again appropriates Scottie's

vision or vice versa. In either case, Scottie sees the hand corsage

on the bench next to Madeleine and the camera, in a point-of view

shot, zooms to a similar hand corsage in the lap of Carlotta.

Scottie sees the swirl of Madeleine's hair and again the camera

zooms to the swirl of hair in the portrait. This reappropriation of

vision in a Hitchcockian metaphysical interior as in a de Chirican,

only deepens its illusory and enigmatic nature.

Equilibrium

The film's established patterns of design and behavior are

continually treated in the ensuing half-dozen or so scenes. Each

scene references most if not all of Vertigo's accumulating

47

paradigms: interiors and exteriors, leading and following, ascents

and descents, entering and exiting, shadows and selves.

However, in each there is a temporary sense of equilibrium.

Space is not as compacted, nor as vast. The metaphysically

-invigorating presence of Madeleine is gone.

She vanishes from the old McKittrick Hotel whose dark wood

and rich hues recall the interior of Gavin's office.49 Scottie's

realization of her sudden disappearance is registered from the

McKittrick's upstairs window--strongly prefiguring her

subsequent disappearances and his subsequent shocks;. however

here, his double take to the hotel's attendant, while undoubtedly

mystified, is still somewhat comic. Moments later, cresting the

street in front of Madeleine's Nob Hill residence, Scottie's

squinting second look at her parked car reassures him because it

displays the diagnostic corsage comfortably resting on the dash.

Things have been restored to balance. The world is as it appears.

These 'double takes' and 'second looks' disclose no metaphysical

49 The similar look of their interiors may help to recall Gavin's office where the deception begins; additionally, the name McKittrick itself slyly alludes to Gavin's stratagems to deceive Scottie. He does so no more eerily nor effectively than here. But a McKittrick is a lot like a MacGuffin. Gavin's murderous deception is not central to Hitchcock; it is Scottie's obsession with seeing what is and is not there which imbues the metaphysical heart of Vertigo.

48

insights. There are no Schopenhauerian 'phantoms' or 'dream

pictures'; the world yields no Nietzschean 'concealed realities';

and Hitchcock has forestalled the de Chirican mode of image

making.

Midge herself is comfortably poised: seated on the shelf,

feet resting on the footstool, in front of the center window of her

studio. This is not even the multi-leveled stepstool from which

Scottie swooned during his view into the abyss; rather it is the

single-step stool which Scottie, in his rather puerile attempts to

overcome his vertigo, mastered quite easily. Midge faces inward

toward us. In her pose, there is not the remotest suggestion of

the enigmatic pictorial figures we have discussed. Although

angled much like Madeleine was before the Carlotta portrait,

Midge exhibits a fascination with things far from the realm of

possessing spirits. She is polishing a shoe. Soon, Scottie's

mystical pursuit of Madeleine is replaced by his comical trailing

after Midge on their hurried way to investigate the rational realm

of Carlotta's history.

A slight destabilizing effect resumes in the Argosy Book

Shop. In fact an inversion of the established patterns occurs:

49

Midge follows Pop Liebl down from the shop's loft; she also runs

after Scottie as he exits. An intriguing and subtly graduated

physical darkening occurs in the course of the shop owner's

recitation on the tragic life story of Carlotta Valdes.

Once again, as in the scene in front of Madeleine's

apartment, Scottie's car crests the hill after he drives Midge

home from the book shop. Before they part, a departure Scottie

urges, Midge swiftly solves at least the premise of the mystery·

behind Elster and the possession of his wife by the "mad"

Carlotta. She just as quickly dismisses it as unreasonable.

Midge's bringing up the subject of Madeleine does not simply

coincide with the reappearance of metaphysical space, as much as

it resurrects it. Through the back window of Scottie's car, the

western span of the Bay Bridge looms. Atop its central tower a

light blinks at revelatory moments of their exchange. A barge

glides, from ·left to right, slowly to the wharf. Upon Midge's

leaving, Scottie leans into the center of the frame, the brim of

his hat effectively contiguous with the distant bridge's tower.

From the glove compartment he pulls the museum's guide book and

finds the image of Carlotta. Superimposed is his vision, the

50

profile of Madeleine. In the watery space of the bay beyond the

car's back window, another barge moves slowly to port. Through

dimension and iconography, de Chirican mystery has returned.

Spatiality and Iconography

Space and imagery are once again, via the mise en scene,

conveyances of Scottie's interiority. Since the film's first

vertiginous shots his psychological and emotional states have

been expressed through these devices. After a lengthy

conversation with Gavin at his club, so Scottie begins his second

pursuit of Madeleine which returns both to the Palace of the

Legion of Honor. Once more Hitchcock's establishing shot is taken

from outside the singly-arched colonnade. The shot's orientation,

previously squared, is now angled obliquely. In addition to

incorporating the ever-present green car, this marvelous

50 Both the foreground and the deeper space of this interior recall Gavin 's office and the McKittrick. Through the use of devices within the mise en scene the two increasingly appear as doubles for the other.

51

cinematic image (Fig. 3.24 )51 includes two huge equestrian

statues standing on massive plinths. While providing the

composition with balance, their silhouettes nevertheless

disconcert us through their simultaneous conveyance of

depthlessness and bulk. Instead of merely recalling de Chirico or

evoking his artistic spirit, these statuary are more like direct

cinematic transcriptions of the half-seen horse and rider in The

Rose Tower (Fig. 3.4) and of the similar figures, fully visible and

seemingly astride the horizon, in The Departure of the Poet (Fig.

3.25: 1914, Private Collection). As in those two de Chirico's

(similarly as with nearly all of the townscapes of this period),

Hitchcock's composition is marked by defined and dark shadows,

whose painterly qualities approach a kind of visual saturation.

In such shots, Hitchcock's iconography departs from de

Chirico's through his deployment of his actors. The director

works his miniscule cinematic figures into Vertigo's interlocked

themes of leading and pursuing. In de Chirico the tiny human

figures are almost always seen in proximity, or else, quite to the

contrary, they are occasionally found in distinct and utter

51 For Hitchcock it is also a remarkably long take. Its screen duration, between the dissolves, is fully ten seconds.

52

isolation and solitude. Yet here, in the representation52 of

Figure 3.24, the gravitational pull of Madeleine from the

composition's far left upon Scottie on its far right is as palpable

as the mutual orbits of so many shadowy pairs peopling

vastnesses throughout de Chirico's early oeuvre.

Perhaps Vertigo's best expression of the isolated

de Chirican character occurs in the Old Fort Point sequence.

Madeleine arrives at this landmark near the end of Scottie's

second pursuit. Her enigmatic solitude is even more realized here

than it was in the Bocklinesque rendering of her at Mission

Dolores. By way of her silhouetted figure and through the

wondrous juxtaposition of its visual components, the Old Fort

P·oint shot (Fig. 3.26) calls forth one of de Chirico's best known

paintings, Mystery and Melancholy of a Street (Fig. 3.27: 1914,

Private Collection). The shadowy figures are the most obvious

connecting devices, but the works also share larger compositional

elements which imbue each with an ironically nostalgic

atmosphere of dread. Both exhibit the two vehicles parked

52 I am inclined to title these shots from Vertigo. However, in keeping with their de Chirican spirit, one cannot simply apply prosaic appelations upon them. To call this The Pursuit of Madeleine would meet only its most perfunctory needs. Playing the metaphysical game that de Chirico and Apollonaire played so long ago, I like to call this particular work The Dare of the Sovereign.

53

against the shadowed walls, with the van's open doors recalling

images and notions forebodingly resonant throughout Vertigo;

each constructs a similar recessional alignment from their

composition's left to its center, the painting's arcade and the

film's bridge both identically angled; both feature broad central

passageways, the street in de Chirico and the flowing water in

Hitchcock. Within the respective mise en scene, the enigmatic

figures move.

Madeleine's behavior troubles Scottie as the action of the

little girl with the hoop puzzles us. The girl, her long hair blown

behind, runs obliviously to the right up the tilted plane of the

glaring street toward the piazza's ominous shadow. Madeleine,

her scarf fluttering in the Golden Gate's seaward breeze, drifts to

the left along the quay and disappears behind the obscuring edge

of the old fort's dark wall. Each work seems to suspend its own

medium's distinct ontology and adopt that of the other: de

Chirico advancing toward cinema and Hitchcock recalling painting.

However, I think it misguided to extend this thinking too far in

one direction. That is to assert that painting is a static medium

and film a dynamic one, and out of that reduction to postulate

54

that through Hitchcock's cinematic methods an invigoration

occurs so that a visual art like de Chirico's no longer exists in a

condition of perpetual abeyance. This amounts to adopting a

Keatsian stance toward the fixed realm of a~t, a celebration and a

resentment of its immutable nature. To do . this, in fact, would

ultimately cede to film something akin to this same wrongly-

perceived status of art as ossified.

There is something more to it. The ontological relationship

is much more complex, and it runs deeper. A physical and a

psychological dramaturgy drive them both, and a balance of

dynamism and suspension pervade each. The self-adumbrated girl

with the hoop is a corporeal phantom--effectively an absent

presence. The long-shadowed torso, be it cast by a statue or a

vital being, emits a powerful force incommensurate with its real

presence which is not directly seen. Jointly, their obscured non-

realities exert a gravitational attraction that creates a sense of

what Anne Hollander means by the proto-cinematic "psychic

movement" in art.S3

Madeleine's movement and disappearance is made possible,

53 Throughout her study, Moving Pictures, Anne Hollander emphasizes the point about psychic movement.

55

of course, through what is generally perceived as cinema's

defining ontological feature, the film's motion itself. However,

during Scottie's vision of her she too is a ghostly animation, the

only moving figure in the mise en scene rendering those

aforementioned compositional elements a metaphysical stillness.

Presented thus, she is the film's simultaneous presence and

absence, befitting where the film is headed on its narrative path.

The fact that the same filmic image depicts her as both present

and absent is crucial. She disappears into the composition--not

from the screen. It is her own motion and not the film's necessary

ones of montage or camera movement which displaces her. The

shot, as a work, remains intact. Needless to say, Hitchcock's

. conventional cutaway to Scottie, verifying his vision, lessens its

impact and its de Chirican spirit. We realize that this "second"

look at her is consistent with that "doubled" nature of the film's

theme, but a single long take of Madeleine's slow walk along the

water's edge would have enhanced our apperceptions of the image,

so wonderfully envisioned by Hitchcock and brilliantly shot by

56 .

Robert Burks.S4

The Emerging Towers

An ingenious conflation of the film's visual motifs occurs

in the doorway shots at Scottie's apartment the day after his

rescue of Madeleine and her subsequent running off. She has

returned to his Lombard Street apartment via a tortuous route

from her Nob Hill townhome. The spiraling descent comprises

Scottie's third pursuit of her. Their mutual rearrival at a

doorway recalls the dramatic interplays in the flower shop and at

Mission Dolores, connecting as well to the film's numerous other

doorway emergences. Obviously, it also anticipates the extended

use of this same image pattern through the remainder of the film

to its final shot.

But here the drama is less charged than in Scottie's covert

54 A considerable amount of credit for the visual brilliance of this film is due Hitchcock's longtime collaborator, cinematographer Ro