In the long lost golden days of a previous century when I

first came to the study of Talmud (which is to say, also the

study of Mishna), I found myself caught with wonder in
what felt at the time a densely communal activity. My sense
of those invisible personae whose arguments adorned the
page, all too neatly compacted in framing rectangles that
fenced in the holy scripture of the Torah, was that far from
being of necessity technical experts in diegesis and debate,
they were just voluble and eager readers who chose to speak
up and be recorded as to their considered opinions of the
moment. Rabbis all, perhaps; and yet I had known rabbis
intelligent and lofty and also rabbis less intelligent and less
lofty. What I carried away from my (all too limited) studies
was the distinct feeling that it was all right to make contri-
butions to a text out of the good will of mixed devotion,
reflection, and trust. If Hitchcocks Vertigo (its recent nomi-
nation by Sight & Sound as best film of all time entirely
notwithstanding) is no Torah; and if the manifold exegeses
that have been published upon it, including more than one
of my own, hardly constitute Mishnaic or Talmudic com-
ment, yet the Talmudic impulse will be raised in any lover
of this film, especially one, like me, whose conviction it is
that the author has not yet not yet been fully understood.
In the spirit of a continued reading of the film, then, let me
offer a few not-quite-Talmudic (but Talmudically inten-
tioned) comments about the space and place of the story,
perhaps reflecting what Yi-Fu Tuan called attachment to
place as a function of time, captured in the phrase, it takes
time to know a place (1977: 179).
If in considering certain moments in Vertigo here I might
be guilty of (or at least responsible for) reading beyond the
surface of a film, suggesting a characters thoughts or intui-
tions, wondering about the possible metaphorical overlap
between a characters speech and his geographic placement,
my guilt and embarrassment, strategically considered but
not feared, are allayed by the consideration that without
such a mode of reading, any film remains only a kaleido-
scope of sights and a stream of sounds.
I look up, I look down.
A strange little utterance that Scottie Ferguson makes while
he is perched on Midges yellow stepladder is my
beginning. The ostensible text of the moment is that, while
demonstrating to her his recovery from the horrifying inci-
dent of the collapsing gutter and making the claim in this
context that his acrophobia has basically disappeared,
Scottie remains prey to the lurking after-effects of his condi-
tion, to the degree that his boundless optimism is felt by
viewers as a hollow preparation for puncture. When he
(rather directly) collapses into Midges arms (a piet), we
are thus hardly surprised, since we have been waiting for
the syllable of the collapse all through his self-comforting
speech. And that little speech, as we may remember, is: I
look up. I look down. I look up. I look down. Stewarts
pronunciation stretches the word down to make it rhyme
with clown or frown (as contrasted with the shortening
we would hear in town and country), and curtails the word
up, as though in saying pup or sup. He lifts his eyes at
I look up, in order to signal the geophysical implications
of his language that up means not toward high concepts
or high hopes but in plain fact toward a ceiling (or sky)
above his head. This sets up the cameras shot down into the
street when he counters with I look down. I want to say a
few things about this mantra, I look up. I look down,
beyond playing with the clear Freudian implication of the
binary; the fort-da give and take of up and down used as
antonyms and antinomies, directional choices, constituents
of a see-saw experience (that rests with Scottie for the dura-
tion of the film).
First, it may well be the case that if we were in most
other urban locations in the world, I look up, I look down
would mean very little beyond what it points to on its sur-
face: a man testing his musculature and balance against
gravity by doing head tilts. But in San Francisco, ones life
every day of the year is a matter of looking up and looking
down, especially if one lives, as Scottie Ferguson does, on
Russian Hill. His quotidian reality is looking up and looking
20
Talking Space in Vertigo
down. And to experience the city as he must be experienc-
ing it, the act of looking up one street and looking down
another would hardly threaten his acrophobia. So it is that
his obvious sense that looking up and looking down might
be safe activities to perform on that stepladder is hardly
twisted or misled. Hes been able to handle looking up and
looking down (on the streets), and so he should be able to
handle it here (on the ladder), all of this neglecting, of
course, that the verticality is made emphatic (even for San
Francisco standards) by two features of the act itself: that he
is perched on a stepladder with a forward rake of almost 65
degrees; and that, on top of all this, he is in Midges apart-
ment, which is itself elevated and looks down into the street
from several storeys of height.
Equally interesting, perhaps, is that I look up, I look
down is sufficiently close, both linguistically and experien-
tially, to I walk up, I walk down. The eye, perusing text or
the environment, walks through it; so looking is walking.
Scotties self-assurance looking up and down, then, is
equivalent in some ways to his self-assurance navigating the
streets of the area, which climb at a roughly 45-degree an-
gle, some a little less, some a little more. Let me walk
through this, just a little, since both Scotties comment to
Midge, persuading her that he doesnt need her help upon
the ladder, and his experience of life in his relationship with
her are interestingly implicated with his looking up and
looking down.
Scottie resides we will later in the film learn at 900
Lombard Street, at the corner of Jones. When he walks out
the door of his flat, he can turn left around the corner and be
treated to a pretty spectacular view of Alcatraz and the Bay
(northbound). But if he doesnt turn left at the corner, and
simply gazes eastward down the street, what he sees, as do
we in a nocturnal scene from his living area after he has
saved Madeleine from the Bay, and through the agency of a
transparency plate rear-projected behind the set (and photo-
graphed Saturday March 2, 1957 between 6:10 and 6:25
p.m.)
1
, is Telegraph Hill leading up to Coit Tower.
Midge Wood (Barbara Bel Geddes) has a flat in a build-
ing on Filbert Street, between Jasper and Grant Avenues.
Were she to step onto the road and look (westward) down
the street in the direction of Russian Hill, Coit Tower would
be above her and just behind her back. She is two short
blocks to the side of Scotties street, and five medium-sized
blocks away. When he looks at Telegraph Hill he can virtu-
ally see her place; when she looks at Russian Hill she can
virtually see his. The walk between the two apartments can
be accomplished easily in ten minutes or less. In short, these
two persons, who were engaged in some sort of love affair
before the story began, very likely hiked back and forth to
visit one another. As Scottie walks to visit Midge, he moves
downward past Taylor, Mason, Powell, and then Stockton
Street, and then sharply upward from Stockton to her place.
For him to navigate from his own territory to hers, then, not
only in this scene but always, is a matter, literally, of look-
ing / walking up and down, down and up.
Therefore, the instant when he collapses from that step-
ladder, when the continuously alternating experiential mo-
tion of looking up and looking down is fractured by his fear
so that he plummets into a darkness from which she hopes
to save him, is a direct metaphor of another navigational
collapse between moving down and climbing up, his step-
ping through geography and time to visit and then temporar-
ily leave Midge at her place. Looking up and down from the
21
(2) View looking eastward from outside Scotties apartment
toward Telegraph Hill. (Coit Tower is just beyond the right
edge of the photograph at the top of the hill.) This is
roughly analogous to what we see outside his window as he
drinks coffee at night (see Image 5 and Note 1). Photograph
by the author.
(3) View looking westward from outside Midges apartment
on Filbert Street toward Russian Hill. Lombard Street is
just off the right edge of the photograph. Photograph by the
author.
(1) Scotties apartment at 900 Lombard Street, August 2012.
Photograph by the author.
stepladder in Midges keenly observing presence, he is expe-
rientially also moving toward and away from Midge. He has
stepped up today, in fact, to visit her in the scene we are
watching. The end of the relationship with Midge (that has
serious implications for the movement of the story) is an-
other intercession, into the long yo-yo descent and climb of
their time together. Some dark interruption has separated
them, that, to this minute, she does not fully understand
(nor, as far as we can tell, does he).
A Bourgeois Gentilhomme
Sound and place. One of the principal reasons filmmakers
opted for studio photography in the heyday of the 1950s,
and certainly one of the strong motives that affected
Hitchcock at all times, lay in technicians ability on a closed
stage to optimise both lighting and sound recording. When
you are shooting on location, it is a nightmare to control for
local sounds, unless, of course, you shoot m.o.s. (mit out
sound) and add in all the effects later. Wind, local noises,
the variant reflectability of construction or natural materials
all make for recording headaches. As Scottie approaches
Fort Point, following Madeleine in his car, the shot we are
looking at, made from the promontory of the point with a
panning motion as the cars sweep along Marine Drive and
stop,
2
could have been taken without sound (but wasnt): I
know from Robert Harris that recovering the track for that
particular shot was one of the difficult challenges he faced
with James Katz as they did the restoration, and that the
addition into the film by them, as Scotties car slinks along,
of a gull sound was partially inspired by the poor quality of
the mag track they found. At any rate, my point in focusing
this moment and the way it was recorded is to establish that
one thing missing from the sequence, and thus possibly de-
ceiving for viewers (although Hitchcock does a lot to
minimise this possibility) is the fact that Fort Point is
notably windy.
The wind coming in through the Golden Gate is power-
ful and chilly, practically vocal, and a demanding force.
Madeleine has not chosen a bucolic and tranquil spot for
her attempted suicide. She has chosen a tempestuous hell.
Scottie, therefore, is being not only chivalrous but also self-
sacrificing when he jumps into the water to save her, since
this is really no place anyone wants to jump for happy rea-
sons. Had the shots involving her jumping been taken with
live sound, the wind sound would have been loud and force-
ful enough to obstruct them (and would have detracted from
our crisp, even meditative vision of her plunge). Could
Aeolus, hovering in this place, not have reached out a
curling finger to snatch her into the Bay? (Readers may
wish to know that a Frost fence is in place now to prevent
copycats from sharing Madeleines experience.)
It is worthwhile to consider the personality and qualities
of Scottie, as made manifest in this scene through his em-
placement in such a forbidding setting, in comparison with
what we see and learn about him in the scenes that immedi-
ately follow. At his apartment, he is shown to be, if not a
wealthy man then at least a very comfortable one, who can
dry himself at a charming hearth and serve coffee in a hand-
some cashmere sweater that indicates both that he has some
money and that he doesnt mind indulging himself in com-
forts. The custard yellow blanket on his bed is no cheap
blanket, and it is possible to conclude that he has decorated
his place with sensitivity and taste. Thus, he is a man of
feeling and quality, whose manners are notably graceful and
whose calmness of bearing points to class, style, self-
assurance, and a caring state of mind. At Fort Point, by con-
trast, he was, to put it bluntly, rugged (the man we never
saw Jeff Jeffries having a chance to be in Rear Window
[Hitchcock, 1954]).
This combination of rugged derring-do and civilised
temperateness need not be understood as a production by
Mr. James Stewart working out of himself (an example of
the doctrine of natural expression [see Goffman, 1976]).
We get the contrast because of the settings into which he is
put and their cultural meaning conceptually prior to the
actions he undertakes there. Fort Point is a rough spot be-
fore Scottie jumps into the water and seems rugged; the
apartment is a civilised spot before he serves coffee there
(in china) and seems gemutlich. The (former) policeman is a
poet. (The poet was a policeman.)
What is it that helps us see Fort Point as dangerous,
when the sound track has been mollified and the scenes
there shot in glorious, vivifying sunlight? It has all the vis-
ual charm that blue swells and sunny vistas can provide.
And the answer to this riddle, I think, lies in that single,
terribly iconic shot, the one image that has become known
around the world as an index for this entire film, not Jimmy
Stewarts anxious face superimposed on the vortex from the
dream sequence but the Golden Gate Bridge yawning out-
ward from behind us, spanning the watery gap all the way to
we know not what land of hope and promise on the other
side. Beneath it is a vast penumbra, a canopy of
22
(4) The Golden Gate Bridge (1937) seen from Fort Point.
The channel of the Golden Gate is notably blustery, and the
winds move with real force and chill. The fog visible in this
photograph (taken August 2012) is far from abnormal in
this spot; so the Vertigo crew would have to have found an
ideal time for foglessly making the shots that have come to
emblematise the film. Photograph by the author.
On a clear day you can see forever. Madeleine under the
Golden Gate.
unpredictability, the underside of high technology, the secret
zone where the bolts are screwed in. Before us, and covered
by the bridge, is the vast waterway that leads outward to
China. And here, abrupt and concrete it seems the last
gravitationally supportive foothold in America is the quai
beside the fort. The bridge has been foretold in Midges
studio (as she speaks of the principal of the cantilever and
how it will work in a new bra), and so instantly, when we
see it here, we know it as a monument to engineering gen-
ius, a form of what David Nye calls the technological sub-
lime (1994). It fills us with admiration, but equally with
terror, since the vast extent of the bridge instantly puts us in
mind of the thought that it can (and thus ultimately will)
collapse. Fall into the water and be drowned, disappear for-
ever, indeed, tumble upon our heads. Madeleine is choosing
to visit and depart from a spot underneath the spans. What
if the cables snap? (Impossible? Why impossible?)
So the roughening soundtrack isnt needed, in any
event. The optical of the bridge will provide exactly the
sense of danger that is needed. And when he throws himself
into the water to save her there there of all possible places
Scottie becomes a man of steel. He has her in his arms in
the green cold water. Then after a fade, he is wearing a
sweater of that same color, now a bourgeois gentilhomme,
cautious, polite, polished.
Mission Time
I suggest in An Eye for Hitchcock that a realization of his-
tory and its persistence, is vertiginous (2004: 247) and also
that a descent past the surface that is laid upon a structure
that is hidden is one of the deep themes of this film (244).
What this means to approach is the display of the archaic
intermingling with the contemporary, the sense we have that
we are looking down into the well of history past the evoca-
tive lip that is our present experience. A conjunction in one
shot between an unknown woman dressed like the dead
Madeleine (Lee Patrick) outside the Brocklebank and a
modern skyscraper behind her punches out this temporal rift
for us (246). Scottie is looking to find the past again; in
short, to travel back to it, and thus down in history.
An incomparable aid toward a fuller understanding of
Vertigo is some knowledge of Californian history, one par-
ticularly generous source being Carey McWilliamss nota-
ble Southern California Country (which does not deal only
with the south). The mission tradition, he warns, came
around 1888 to have a great commercial value (1946: 23),
but it has cultural significance independently of that. The
missions, Franciscan constructions, were associated with
Indian settlement. The padres built where the Indians were
established in greatest numbers (22). The Californian mis-
sion, then we are exposed to two of the ten that existed in
northern California invoked at once Christianising, pre-
Christian (even pre-Columbian) pagan culture, and the deep
mystery of the topological past. To stand in one of the mis-
sions is to have a keen sense of a California outside of, prior
to, and mythically beyond what is configured by, say, the
Golden Gate Bridge or Coit Tower (1933). By invoking the
deep history of the place, the mission setting calls up the
fact that California was made a state in 1851, two years
after the Gold Rush; that as of 1822 there was already for-
mal discussion about severing northern from southern
Californian culture; that while Los Angeles and the southern
districts below the Tehachapi range werent settled until
thirty years after the Gold Rush, their inhabitants were
older people who came from Eastern and Middle Western
regions thirty years more mature than the regions from
which forty-niners had set forth for the gold fields [of the
north] (16). By 1880, writes McWilliams, the settlers of
Northern California had come to think of themselves as
native sons and believed they had a special mandate to rule
the state (16). They adopted the habit of referring to San
Francisco as The City(16). We hear an echo of this in
Henry Joness intonation at the inquest, as he introduces the
police captain from that great City to the North.
But again, once the mission legends became commer-
cialised, and associated with real estate ballyhoo (24), the
23
(5) Comforts. Scottie Ferguson at home. The plate of nocturnal Telegraph Hill behind his back was shot in the late night of
March 1, 1957, and the foreground action in Scotties apartment was filmed on Paramounts Stage 5, Monday October 21,
1957 commencing at 9 a.m.
Mission Indian was created and invested with the senti-
ments of a New England schoolmarm (24), invoking both
sacred and profane connotations. It is necessary only to rei-
magine the contemporised Franciscan mission as part of a
cultural construction to realise that the trick of connecting
the unseen character Carlotta Valdes to mission settlements
is a way of hinting at her constructedness just as much as it
is a way of using her name to invoke the deep past. We
come to the point where any mention of the word Carlotta
immediately causes a vertiginous sensation.
I should add, to be faithful to McWilliams and to the
truths of mission history, that the Franciscans were not
exactly benevolent. The chain of Missions along the coast,
he writes, might best be described as a series of picturesque
charnel houses, and further, with the best intentions in the
world, the Franciscan padres eliminated Indians with the
effectiveness of Nazis operating concentration camps (29).
The mortality rates for Indians associated with the missions
were very high, and between the mid-eighteenth and late
nineteenth centuries the decline in the Indian population
was itself vertiginous: From a total of 30,000 in 1769, the
number of Indians in Southern California declined to ap-
proximately 1,260 by 1910 (29). As soon as they were
living in Mission compounds, lethargy and inaction seemed
to possess them (30). As a cinematic invocation, then, the
mission calls into play old California and the old times (as
evinced also in Pop Leibels tale); fading, dessication, and
decay (the missions are adobe structures, planted round with
roses and cacti, by and large); falling population figures and
the tumble into death; and also bally-hoo.
At San Juan Bautista, Madeleine and Scottie play with a
mock horse and carriage that allow them to engage in the
interactional game of pretending they are living a century
before. The structure of the mission itself is discernably old,
while at the same time being sturdy. The arches and colon-
nade, for example, suggest very strongly something built by
human hands long dead but vigorously surviving into the
contemporary world: in short, the presence here and now of
spiritual material from a dead past.
There is every reason for assuming that in 1957, when
this film was being shot there, Mission San Juan Bautista
roughly a hundred miles south of San Francisco was being
operated as a tourist venue just as it is today. The stables,
filled with mid-nineteenth-century carriages and early
automobiles, were literally a museum of the cultural past.
Carlotta Valdes is a figure out of a museum, then, and in
being fixated upon her Madeleine (as I persist in calling her)
is a fascinated tourist as well as a clairvoyante and addict.
(It may interest a reader or two to learn that the grass
sward that centers the mission compound and across
which Scottie races to catch Madeleine and later Judy
remains now precisely as it was during the filming, the
grass lush and full and deep dark green. The footprints of
Madeline, Judy, and Scottie can just barely be distinguished
if that is your true desire from those of the many nuns
who flocked to ring the bells when there was a tower there.
[There were indeed bell towers, one even in the early twen-
tieth century, although, as is well known, at the time of
principal photography no tower existed and what we see in
the film is a matte composition.])
Mission Dolores, officially the Misin San Francisco de
Asis, and founded five days before the Declaration of Inde-
pendence near the small nearby stream, Arroyo de Nuestra
Seora de los Dolores, hosted burials until the 1890s in its
diminutive cemetery, many of those interred, the Missions
publicity materials aver, being people who died in the dec-
ades following the Gold Rush, when San Francisco was a
rapidly growing City which experienced much illness and
24
(6) The horse mock-up used in Vertigo, still waiting pa-
tiently in the blacksmiths barn at Mission San Juan Bau-
tista. Photograph by the author.
(7) The colonnade at Mission San Juan Bautista, August
2012. Madeleine and Judy both rushed through the door-
way at right to climb the tower. Photograph by the author.
(8) Historical photograph on display at Mission San Juan
Bautista, showing the bell tower that existed earlier in the
twentieth century. The matte construction shows a higher
tower for the film.
many early deaths. While the chapel, entered by Madeleine
and then by her follower Scottie has considerable charm it
also reeks of age (being inside the oldest building in the city
at this time). The production performed some door tricks
here (perfectly typical, for movie makers), since the exit
from the altar to the right, that both protagonists use, does
not actually lead into the cemetery (as the diegesis sug-
gests). The Missions situation on Dolores Avenue at 16
th

Street places it in direct abutment with residential buildings
running from Chula Lane to 17
th
Street and immediately
adjacent to one side of the cemetery. But because in the film
there is such lush vegetation for Madeleine and Scottie to
walk around and hide behind, the cemetery seems isolated
from the city as a whole, and has the quality of floating in a
kind of metaphysical island. This isolation assists
Madeleine in her belief in the compelling power of Carlotta
(who is buried there was she one of those who experi-
enced much illness, given her deplorable treatment by that
man who built for her that great house in the Western addi-
tion?) It assists us too, as we ourselves fall into the chasm
that is belief through identification with the characters visit-
ing the grave.
(For those wishing to visit Mission Dolores, Carlotta
Valdes has been disinterred and is now buried in the Internet
Movie Database.)
When one stands in this cemetery it is impossible not to
feel the security and repose that are produced in the
observation that the place has, for all its smallness, an ex-
quisitely Greek proportion, cut here and there by small,
gnarled olive trees or Lombardy poplars. The stone grave
markers that ornament the shots each make the pronounce-
ment of old time captured in a present moment, the long
lasting drawing-forth of an ironic acknowledgment of life in
death.
As to the building itself: there is a pair of high bell tow-
ers with considerable decorative stonework, this detail of
the setting being yet another indicator for the viewer who
watches Scottie park his car (on 16
th
Street) and walk, not
up the Missions steps and through its gaudy basilica doors
but, into a modest side door (at which he pauses for empha-
sis). He is trailing a person who has been in this place be-
fore, who doesnt use the formal entrance but goes in by the
back (informal, familial) way, as it were. Its beautiful to see
how Hitchcock uses a tiny gestural effect like this having
Novak and then Stewart use the undecorated, simple door-
way next to the formal and elaborately decorated main en-
trance to convey extradiegetic information that is relevant
to our knowledge of the characters here and now but not
something he needs to set out through dedicated dialogue or
action.
Hitchcock is in this way making his setting speak. As he
does with the other settings I have discussed, he animates
the places in which his characters find themselves, this in
such a manner as to cast light upon characters knowledge,
motives, or past, which are visually inaccessible as such.
The settings in this film thus do not merely contain the ac-
tion, bound it, and give it gravity, they are active them-
selves.
On Display
Gavin and Madeleine Elster reside at the Brocklebank, 1000
Mason Street, on Nob Hill. Just a tiny comment about
Madeleines exit from this elegant building on the first
morning when Scottie tails her (curling his way down to the
florist, Podesta Baldocchi, and elsewhere). We will learn
from the story that in her movement this morning, she is
taking him for a ride, as the saying goes; leading him on;
25
(10) The 16
th
Street side entrance of the Mission Dolores
(with cemetery behind the dark vegetation at upper left).
Photograph by the author.
(11) A view of Mission Dolores from the corner of 16
th

Street and Dolores, showing the entrance Madeleine and
Scottie use, behind two other possible ways in, including
the ornate doorways at right off-camera. Photograph by
the author.
(9) The cemetery in the Mission Dolores, with a view of the
door from which Scottie emerges to make his way there.
Photograph by the author.
directing him, consciously and with intent. But at the
moment she drives out, Hitchcock actually shows this intent
explicitly, as we shall see. The Brocklebank courtyard is
exited by way of a drive between two lamp-crowned stone
pillars at the precise northeast corner of Sacramento and
Mason Streets. Driving away, one has at least three possible
choices, two of which are considerably the more direct.
Madeleine could head more or less straight forward, and
follow Sacramento street westward toward, or past,
Cushman. Or she could swing a very hard right (a sharp turn
but a much shorter distance) and drive down Mason Street
in the general northerly direction of Telegraph Hill. (She
cannot do a hard left and proceed down Sacramento Street
to Powell because Sacramento is one-way uphill.) The third
choice the one she makes is to veer left onto Mason
Street and drive past Scottie in his parked car across the
road (directly in front of the Pacific Union Club, a bastion
of old San Francisco money [such as Gavin Elster wishes he
had, but also such as the man who collected, abused, and
dismissed Carlotta Valdes actually did have]) until she gets
to the corner of California Street (where there is some con-
struction in progress) and can turn left and descend the hill.
Her actual navigation is hardly diegetically pertinent as
she heads toward the florist, because she does not take an
actually direct route (as can be seen with a careful study of
Kraft and Leventhals Footsteps in the Fog [2002], which
outlines her moves shot by shot). So to get from her apart-
ment to the florist, any of these three vehicular moves
would have sufficed for the cinematography; yet she
chooses to give Scottie a very good look at her in the
drivers seat, and to do this, she takes what is in some ways
the least direct path away from home.
Hitchcock isnt merely putting Madeleine into a car on a
street and having her drive. At this juncture, he is thinking
through very carefully where she is, where Scottie is, what
options are open to her and what she would be signaling
to us and to him by choosing each of them. Further, for
Hitchcock, Madeleine is not driving in San Francisco. She
is driving in the San Francisco of his screen, which is a
perduringly rectangular space no matter where anyone
wants to go. The camera, whose position she must pass for
the diegesis to continue, is a fixture of the cinematic city.
Scottie, by the way, while he is parked very conveniently
for having an unobtrusive gawk at the Brocklebank and any
beautiful woman who steps out of it, could also have parked
on Sacramento Street heading west (that is, left of the frame
in image 13) or Mason Street heading north. Hed have had
to strain his neck, but he does already (it would be im-
proper, and very blatant, of him to park inside the
Brocklebank courtyard.) He has chosen a spot (Hitchcock
has chosen a spot for him) that makes his easiest move a
simple pulling out into traffic and heading straight ahead
down Mason Street. He has, in effect, shown her the way he
hopes she will go; and she has shown him that she knows he
has shown her and is willing to comply. Its perfectly coy,
an act of seduction on both sides from the very start.
(This is not difficult to understand from Scotties point of
view, since we shared it the night before when he saw her
for the first time at Ernies: a vision that compelled adora-
tion and attachment, under any circumstance.)
Giving the Finger
To conclude these brief intrusions, a remark about what
happens in Gallery 6 of the Palace of the Legion of Honor,
as Scottie finds Madeleine on a bench there gazing at the
portrait of Carlotta.
3
Having entered the room, he hides by
proceeding along the right-hand wall (rather than moving
behind her, seated tranquilly as she appears to be). Since it
is Hitchcocks desire even as much as showing us
Madeleine and the canvas she is looking at to indicate
Scottie and the intensity of his regard for Madeleine, there
is a shot showing him moving along that wall; therefore we
have an excellent and unavoidable opportunity of seeing the
two paintings that are behind his back (and hanging today
next door in Gallery 7). One is the Portrait of a Gentleman
(1710; gifted to the museum in 1929) by Nicolas de
Largillire (1656-1746). With an expression of dismay or
irritation, as though we have interrupted his solitary pleas-
ure with our gaze, and a sumptuous white periwig puffed up
like a geyser and then cascading over his shoulders like a
resting sheep, he clasps a red velvet cloak with one hand
and with the other - opened and pudgy, the fingers delicate
and small - points leftward (without enthusiasm) as though
saying, Nota bene.
26
(13) View looking northward down Mason Street. Scottie is
parked, as it were, behind the back of the photographer who
took this shot. If her purpose were only to descend Nob Hill,
Madeleine did not have to drive past him, or make it easy
for him to follow her. Photograph by the author.
(12) The courtyard of the Brocklebank, corner of Mason
and Sacramento Streets, Nob Hill. Photograph by the
author.
The pointing gesture was somewhat typical of
Largillires portraiture, if not also of early eighteenth-
century decorative style more generally. Adjacent to this
canvas is Architecture (1752-3) by Charles-Andr (Carle)
Vanloo (1705-1765), from Allegories of the Arts, showing
three little boys ogling an architects drawing of the front
faade of the Palais de Belleville. The Vanloo allegories,
painted for Madame de Pompadour to decorate the Salon de
Compagnie at her Chteau de Bellevue (near Meudon),
were popular, and often replicated, images, Architecture
appearing, for example, on a 1757-8 Nol Hardivilliers
snuffbox, a 1756 tienne Fessard engraving, a painted ver-
sion in which the drawing on display is of the Chteau
dOrly, and so on (Rosenberg and Stewart, 1987: 292-306).
The eldest of the three boys, dressed in vivid royal blue, is
at left (the children wear costumes of the most extravagant
fancy, some in Louis XIV coats trimmed with ribbon, others
in Renaissance costume with slashed velvet sleeves, lace
ruffs, and feathered caps [306]), and with a gesture not dis-
similar to Largillires Gentlemans, points to the drawing
intentfully while his two mates stare, both at him and at it,
in rapture. The Allegories contain four such paintings, with
the same boys (Their physical features are not sufficiently
varied and seem to have come from the same model [cited
in Rosenberg and Stewart, 1987: 305]), one showing Paint-
ing, one Sculpture, one Music, and this fourth. All four are
in the Legions collection, but Architecture is the one we see
in Vertigo. The little boy points to the rendering of the
Palais, and next to the canvas the older Gentleman points
away, toward screen left. If we gaze off in the direction he is
indicating, we find, first, Madeleine, and then the image that
has attracted her gaze.
Here, then, is the same intensive use of cinematic setting
for expressive purposes. But Hitchcock makes an elegant
flourish, actually portraying characters making flourishes. I
am pointing with my settings, is his tacit claim; but here,
openly and beautifully, he points to pointing just at the
moment when Scottie, watching Madeleine, will point with
his attention to the pointers of her hair and the bouquet she
bought (both also to be found in the painting). His gaze is
pointing at her; her gaze is pointing at Carlotta; Carlottas
gaze is pointing across the room at the two canvases on the
wall, in which characters ostensibly and articulately point. If
we follow all these pointings around and around (mimicking
the transit of a movie camera), they of course make us spin,
until we are inside the vortex that was offered to our (then)
disinterested gaze as the opening credits crawled.
Murray Pomerance
With thanks to Melissa E. Buron and William Rothman.
Murray Pomerance is Professor in the Department of
Sociology and Director of the Media Studies Working
Group, at Ryerson University, Toronto. His books on film
include An Eye for Hitchcock (Rutgers, 2004), Johnny Depp
Starts Here (Rutgers, 2005) Michelangelo Red Antonioni
Blue: Eight Reflections on Cinema (California, 2010), The
Eyes Have It: Cinema and the Reality Effect (Rutgers, 2013)
and Alfred Hitchcock's America (Polity, 2013).
Murray Pomerance, 2013
Movie: A Journal of Film Criticism, 4.
27
(16) Charles-Andr (Carle) Vanloo, Architecture (1752-3)
from Allegories of the Arts
(14) Nicolas de Largillire, Portrait of a Gentleman (1710)
Works Cited
Goffman, Erving (1976) Gender Display, Gender Adver-
tisements. New York: Harper & Row, 1-9.
Kraft, Jeff and Aaron Leventhal (2002) Footsteps in the
Fog: Alfred Hitchcocks San Francisco. Santa Monica:
Santa Monica Press.
McWilliams, Carey (1946) Southern California Country:
An Island on the Land. New York: Duell, Sloan & Pearce.
Nye, David E. (1994) American Technological Sublime.
Cambridge Mass.: M. I. T. Press.
Pomerance, Murray (2004) An Eye for Hitchcock. New
Brunswick N.J.: Rutgers University Press.
Rosenberg, Pierre and Marion C. Stewart (1987) French
Paintings 1500-1825. San Francisco: The Fine Arts Muse-
ums of San Francisco.
Script Supervisor Notes on Transparency Plates for Vertigo.
Alfred Hitchcock Collection, File 1001. Beverly Hills:
Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts
and Sciences.
Tuan, Yi-Fu (1977) Space and Place. Minneapolis: Univer-
sity of Minnesota Press.
28
1
The transparency plates of Telegraph Hill used for rear projection
in this scene, shot at 18 frames per second, were photographed
Thursday, February 28, 1957 between 4:28 and 4:31 p.m., and
March 1 and 2 (Script supervisor notes). As to the nocturnal scene
shown in Image 5, since there is no action or movement seen
through Scotties window behind him one might have assumed that
the production would have used a stereo (a rear-projected still
transparency image) rather than a plate (a rear-projected film
strip), but the Special Effects Photography Department at Para-
mount was at the time as conservative and meticulous in technique
as Hitchcocks own team; and since they were producing plates for
daytime backgrounds around the same location at any rate, there
was no inconvenience in shooting nighttime shots as well. The
sense of tranquility achieved in this plate is thus a naturalised or
actual one, showing several seconds of undisturbed urban continu-
ity.
2
For researching this detail, and for considerable generosity in
showing me the delights of San Francisco, I am deeply indebted to
Doug and Catherine McFarland.
3
Painted, he told me in a 1995 interview, by Henry Bumstead. The
publicity program for Vertigo at the Legion of Honor, a special
fiftieth anniversary screening on July 10, 2008 (supplied to me
graciously by Melissa E. Buron) specifies that the painting was
made by John Ferren (who did the dream sequence). At this writ-
ing, the actual painting cannot be located, but there is substantial
reason to believe it was painted in Italy, not America.