Chris Marker, 1921-2012

‘Power and free­dom.’ Coupled togeth­er, these two words are repeated three times in Vertigo. First, at the twelfth minute by Gavin Elster (‘free­dom’ under­lined by a move to close-up) who, look­ing at a pic­ture of Old San Francisco, expressed his nos­tal­gia to Scottie (‘San Francisco, has changed. The things that spelled San Francisco to me are dis­ap­pear­ing fast’), a nos­tal­gia for a time when men—some men at least—had ‘power and free­dom.’ Second, at the thirty-fifth minute, in the book­store, where ‘Pop’ Liebel explains how Carlotta Valdes’s rich lov­er threw her out yet kept her child: ‘Men could do that in those days. They had the power and the free­dom…’ And finally at the hun­dred and twenty-fifth minute—and fifty-first second to be precise—but in reverse order (which is logic­al, giv­en we are now in the second part, on the oth­er side of the mir­ror) by Scottie him­self when, real­iz­ing the work­ings of the trap laid by the now free and power­ful Elster, he says, a few seconds before Judy’s fall—which, for him, will be Madeleine’s seconds death—‘with all his wife’s money and all that free­dom and power…’. Just try telling me these are coincidences.

Such pre­cise signs must have a mean­ing. Could it be psy­cho­lo­gic­al, an explan­a­tion of the crim­in­al’s motives? If so, the effort seems a little wasted on what is, after all, asec­ond­ary char­ac­ter. The stra­tegic tri­ad gave me the first ink­ling of a pos­sible read­ing of Vertigo. The ver­tigo the film deals with isn’t to do with space or fall­ing; it is a clear, under­stand­able and spec­tac­u­lar meta­phor for yet anoth­er kind of ver­tigo, much more dif­fi­cult to represent—the ver­tigo of time. Elster’s ‘per­fect’ crime almost achieves the impossible: rein­vent­ing a time when men and women and San fran­cisco were dif­fer­ent to what they are now. And its per­fec­tion, as with all per­fec­tion in Hitchcock, exists in dual­ity. Scottie will absorb the folly of time with which Elster infuses him through Madeleine/Judy. but where Elster reduces the fantasy to mediocre mani­fest­a­tions (wealth, power, etc.), Scottie trans­mutes it into its most uto­pi­an form: he over­comes the most irre­par­able dam­age caused by time and resur­rects a love that is dead. The entire second part of the film, on the oth­er side of the mir­ror, is noth­ing but a mad, mani­ac­al attempt to deny time, to recre­ate through trivi­al yet neces­sary signs (like the signs of a liturgy: clothes, make-up, hair) the woman whose laoss he has nev­er been able to accept. His own feel­ings of respons­ib­il­ity and guilt for this loss are mere Christian Band-Aids dress­ing a meta­phys­ic­al wound of much great­er depth. Were one to quote the Scriptures, Corinthians I (an epistle one of Bergman’s char­ac­ters uses to define love) would apply: “Death, where is your victory?”

—Chris Marker, “A Free Replay: Notes on Vertigo,” from The Positif Collection, reprin­ted in Projections 4 1/2, Faber and Faber, 1995

James Stewart and Kim Novak in Vertigo, Alfred Hitchcock, 1957