TRIBUTES AND RETROSPECTIVES

Double Take

Vertigo

Alfred Hitchcock
1958 - United States - 2h08

Screenings : monday 22 - 10:30 am - Pathé - 1 - presented by Oscar Constantin - sportif thursday 25 - 4:30 pm - Pathé - 1

Scottie is afraid of heights, which is a problem in his job as a police officer. When he is held responsible for the death of one of his colleagues, he decides to leave the police force. An old acquaintance gets in touch with him to follow his wife, who he says is possessed by the spirit of an ancestor. Scottie falls for the young woman and finds himself buffeted around by events beyond his control.

Adapted from a novel written for Hitchcock by Boileau-Narcejac, and bought by Paramount in 1955 when it was barely finished, Vertigo is one of the director's most intense films on the theme of passionate love. The plot begins in an almost Faustian way, when Gavin Elster calls on Scottie, as Jean Douchet said, “the pact between Scottie and his double is now sealed” (in Alfred Hitchcock; Jean Douchet). But the figure of the double develops in an even more powerful way with Madeleine (Kim Novak) who, when she has died, provokes Scottie into modelling Judy, a young woman he meets by chance in the street, with Madeleine's physique, her clothes, the colour of her hair, her way of walking. “The evanescent “Madeleine” who threatened to evaporate returns in an all too real, all too physical “double” whose opacity and life terrify Scottie” (in Vers une esthétique du vide au cinéma; José Moure). Scottie sacrificed the love of other women for the construction, in a narcissistic gesture, of an image on which he projects his desires and which can only lead to the void. In 1958 the film disconcerted audiences and it was only with time that Vertigo became recognised at its full value as one of the most beautiful films in the history of cinema.

CAST AND CREW

Cast : James Stewart, Kim Novak, Barbara Bel Geddes, Tom Helmore, Henry Jones, Raymond Bailey, Ellen Corby
Screenplay : Alec Coppel, Samuel A. Taylor
Cinematography : Robert Burks
Editing : George Tomasini
Music : Bernard Herrmann

Production : Alfred J. Hitchcock Productions

French distributor : Park Circus