Vertigo, also known as Vertigo, is a film directed by Alfred Hitchcock in 1958 by Alfred Hitchcock. A masterpiece on self-reflection and self-disclosure. The film perfectly integrates various indescribable borderline mental illnesses and ritualized behaviors into the storyline. Starring James Stewart, Kim Novak, Barbara Bel Geddes. Vertigo is widely regarded as one of the greatest films of all time. In 2008, exactly 50 years after its release, the American Film Institute named it the greatest suspense film of the century.
The film tells a story of love and conspiracy intertwined. Scottie, who was a detective detective, suffered from acrophobia and severe dizziness due to an accident, so he was idle at home. Then, his old friend Elsto asked him to do one thing for him - to follow his wife Madeleine. But Elsto is not suspecting that his wife is having an affair with others, but is worried that his wife will kill herself because of insanity. So Scotty, out of old friends and curiosity about Madeleine, started his own "voyeur" operation.
In this "cat and mouse" game, Scotty gradually fell in love with Madeleine, and Madeleine's fall from the sky hit him hard and fell into a mental state of malaise, until he had One day, I met Judy, a restaurant waiter, on the street, but Judy was an ordinary young girl. She was not as elegant and noble as Madeleine, and she wore colorful clothes and liked novelty things. Scottie was obsessed with Madeleine, so he forcibly transformed Judy into another Madeleine according to his will. After finding out that this was a conspiracy, Scotty angrily took Judy to the tower where Madeleine died again. The high disease was cured.
As a film combining thriller and suspense, suspense is naturally the main component of this film. The so-called suspense mainly means that directors and screenwriters use the audience's concerns and expectations about the development of the story and the fate of the characters to set up unresolved contradictions in the play, thereby attracting the attention of the audience and eagerly looking forward to the solution. The audience's attention and interest induce the audience to quickly enter the plot, so that the audience can enjoy the aesthetic pleasure in the reception. The success factor of Hitchcock's films lies in the skillful use of suspense, an important element of the plot, as he himself said: "The field of suspense is entirely my own."
So he has his own take on suspense: "We were chatting on the train and there was probably a bomb under the table. Our conversation was normal, nothing special happened. Suddenly 'boom'! It exploded. The audience saw it. For shock, but before the explosion, what the audience saw was nothing more than a very ordinary, uninteresting scene. Now for the suspense. There was indeed a bomb under the table, and the audience knew that it was probably because the audience had already Saw an anarchist put the bomb under the table. The audience knew the bomb was going to go off at one point, and now there's only a quarter of an hour left - there's a clock in the set. What was an inconsequential conversation suddenly All of a sudden it's interesting because the audience is involved in the scene. The audience is eager to tell the talker on the screen: 'Stop chatting, there's a bomb under the table, it's going to explode soon.' In the first case above, The audience can only experience the shock within 15 seconds of the explosion. In the second case, we give the audience a full 15 minutes of suspense." In short, Hitchcock's concept of suspense is that suspense is to provide the audience with Some information is not known to the people in the play; the people in the play do not know many things, but the audience does, so every time the audience guesses how the ending will be, the tension of the dramatic effect is created.
The material for Vertigo was found by Hitchcock from the works of two French thriller novelists, Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac. At one point, Hitchcock described his creative process to Claude Chabrol in an unexpectedly candid way: "You know, plot is second to me, I know what story to tell before I make a movie, one It's just a rough impression, a formal thing at first, and then I think about the plot and polish them into what I have in my head." In the film, he crosses over "all-knowing narrative" and "limited narrative" to help The film builds suspense.
The structure of this film can be roughly divided into two parts. The first part is a combination of omniscient narrative and limiting narrative. From the beginning of the film, in the way of omniscient narration, it is described that Scotty suffered from acrophobia in the process of arresting a prisoner, paving the way for future plots - precisely because of this, Elsto will find Scotty comes to lay out his wife-killing plan. After Scotty presents his investigation of Madeleine, Hitchcock uses a large number of subjective lenses to begin the film's limited perspective and limited narrative, which is Hitchcock's most direct way to control the information the audience knows.
The use of the subjective lens creates a subjective effect: what the audience sees is what the character sees, so the audience knows as much as the character. At this time, the audience will have a strong sense of substitution, integrate their whole body into the film, imagine that they are Scotty, and gradually restore the whole picture of this mysterious woman in the voyeur. With the deepening of the investigation, Scotty has a lot of doubts, the reason for this doubt is the suspense created by Hitchcock in the way of subjective lens: "The function of the subjective lens in the narrative is to limit what we see he sees. What he sees includes what he knows." So not only will the character feel confused about things beyond the character's knowledge, but even the audience will be confused along with the character, creating a suspenseful effect.
With this doubt, the audience and Scotty entered the second part of the film at the same time. This part mainly uses omniscient narrative. In the original novel, at the beginning of the second half, Scotty meets a Judy who looks almost exactly like Madeleine except for the hair color. It is not until the end that the reader and Scotty discover at the same time that Judy is madeleine. But Hitchcock made a lot of changes and different treatments. At the beginning of the second part, Hitchcock made the audience suddenly realize through a flashback of Judy, and exposed Judy's true face. It turned out that everything was It's a conspiracy, and both Judy and Scotty are just pawns in Elsto's plan to kill his wife. The breadth of information provided by the plot is widened, and the audience knows more than the characters know to create suspense. Audiences have dialed in the truth, but Scottie remains in the dark.
The change of the two narrative methods deepens the suspense of the whole film step by step, and also reflects the director's extraordinary control over the audience's cognitive psychology. Through his unique suspense setting, Hitchcock makes the audience have a strong sense of curiosity and substitution for the film. When the audience knows the dangerous situation in which the client is in, they will inevitably have anxiety and worry about the safety of the client. At this time, the audience turns from a bystander to a participant in the plot, and unconsciously becomes curious about the final reaction of the protagonist in the film. This is the problem of "character identification" that often occurs in the film.
According to Lacan's "mirror" theory, when a child faces a mirror, there will be a "one-time assimilation" process from "ideal self" to "mirror self", and the child will go from "mirror self" to "social self" There will also be a "secondary assimilation" process, in which children will obtain their own name and position through identification with the opposite-sex parent, forming a self with a complete personality. The mirror and the movie screen that the child faces are regarded as similarities. French film scientist Bosch believes that the audience faces the screen in a dark cinema, and there is a process of "assimilation" similar to that of a child facing a mirror. As one of the characters, so as to unknowingly into the film's storyline.
In this film, Scotty is undoubtedly the object that most viewers will unconsciously identify with. First of all, more than 50% of the first part uses Scotty's subjective point of view, so the audience can't help but fall into this subjective point of view during the viewing process; secondly, Scotty's police image, and his performance He came out tough, witty and passionate, quite heroic, so the audience will also have feelings of admiration or sympathy for him, so as to identify with him psychologically - this is also the reason why Hollywood genre films can endure. .
Based on this, the audience is still very concerned about Scotty's final reaction, which is a continued identification of the character. This final outcome is also the final end of our subjective psychological balance and role-playing. When Duke Scott pulled Judy back into the attic and questioned her about everything, Judy finally fell from the building in panic, and Scott was finally relieved. Our mentality that has been playing his role is actually also We were really relieved, so after watching the whole movie, our tense nerves were completely released, and we felt a kind of invigorating and dripping mentally, and it also played a role in emotional catharsis.
So in the eyes of film critic Peter Warren, Vertigo is an extremely personal film. "'Personalisation' here does not mean that it is only significant to its creator, but that it presupposes the 'viewer' who is 'isolated', the one who is alone with the film. Unlike Alfred Vertigo, Hitchcock's other work, has no social events; it doesn't expect to get the audience laughing or screaming like the director's other films (Alfred Hitchcock doesn't express their will).
The intention of the film is private and low-key, and it doesn't look like a movie that goes to theaters and makes a box office. Alfred Hitchcock felt that the ideal audience for the film would be the person sitting alone in the screening room—or himself, but at the same time everyone who watches alone and feels deeply "self-sufficient." Only a 'lonely' viewer can truly and intimately understand the power of the film's ghostly 'phantoms' - as Kim Novak (played separately as Madeleine and Judy) in the film. "
The illusion of this film is mainly caused by vertigo, and the vertigo lens in this film is actually Hitchcock's innovation in imaging: in order to express Scotty's vertigo, the focal length of the lens is pulled forward. At the same time the camera is moved backwards, creating a disorienting vertigo. For example, in Scotty chasing Madeleine, looking down at the spiral staircase of the tower, the endless stairs circled around Scotty's eyes, giving him enormous mental pressure.
It is said that Hitchcock made a model to assist the shooting when shooting this shot, and the film is committed to slow and accurate grasping in the effect of creating vertigo, rather than the rapid rotation that one would expect, so hope Chicock successfully conveyed his point of view to the audience. Moreover, this method of describing the fear of heights has become a classic lens with a high rate of imitation, and has been repeatedly used by later people.
In the handling of Scotty's nightmare, Hitchcock once again draws on expressionism to show the characters' inner fears in the form of bizarre comics, such as the blue and white spiral picture at the beginning and Scotty's experience. The restlessness after Madeleine's death, the shades and colors of light and shadow subtly render the atmosphere. And the sound also adds a lot of color to the film. Whether it is the opening song or Madeleine's "suicide", and the ending of the film, the soundtrack and sound effects can be described as haunting, and they reach a climax step by step, promoting emotional outbursts.
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