Issues of the Three Hitchcock Films

Vertigo supposes the story of a San Francisco detective named Ferguson who discovers his acrophobia when a police colleague falls during a rooftop chase of a suspect. The condition to the psychosomatic illness of lightheadedness, forcing Ferguson to harmonise from guide and to take on a case interest a woman (Madeleine) who believes herself to be possessed by a dead woman and has become suicidal.

The film reveals that Ferguson has been involved in a murder plot concocted by his friend. Confronting his fears, Ferguson forces the woman who has deceived him to tell the truth and she then falls to her death from the tower which symbolic representationizes the vertigo experienced by Ferguson (Spoto, 265-266).

According to Auiler (190-191), the film employed Hitchcock's modernistic subroutine of sharp camera angles, dramatic lighting, rapid-fire editing, and the Vista reverie film process. Vista Vision presents a superior feeling of image which is seen as important for most effects work that requires rear screen and traveling matte shots (Auiler, 212).

Auiler (155) states that Hitchcock used the symbol of an eye and a spiral to achieve the state of unsettledness associated with vertigo and to establish a mood of mystery. Juxtaposing images of eyes with moving images of lifelike beauty in mathematical precision was a central effect in Vertigo.

Robin Wood (95) contends that in Vertigo, the use of backward tracking shots and frequent forward tracking shots underscores the printing of vertigo.

Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.

As in the opposite two films under discussion herein, Hitchcock used back-projection for both close-ups and strength shots. Wood (118-119) says that these shots have the effect of giving an air of irreality to Melanie's situation, of isolating her from the backgrounds, of stressing her artificiality by making it stand out obtrusively from natural scenery. The Birds' use of fairly jagged camera angles in various sequences underscores Hitchcock's theme - that freedom is illusory at lift out and that all human beings are possessed of some reference and level of guilt which renders them vulnerable to external attacks (Wood, 128).

Auiler, Dan. Vertigo: The qualification of a Hitchcock Classic.

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