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A British Royal Commission in 1904 warned that “Evidence as to identity based upon personal impressions is, unless supported by other facts, an unsafe basis for the verdict of a jury.”
(Schwartz, Culture)
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The more real-life echoes a crime story had for Hitchcock, the bigger his pool of references, the greater his enthusiasm.
(Patrick McGilligan, Alfred Hitchcock: A Life in Darkness and Light)
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[D]ifference implies the negative, and allows itself to lead to contradiction, only to the extent that its subordination to the identical is maintained. The primacy of identity, however conceived, defines the world of representation. But modern thought is born of the failure of representation, of the loss of identities, and of the discovery of all the forces that act under the representation of the identical. The modern world is one of simulacra.
(Deleuze, Difference and Repetition)
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A man known all over the world who had delusions that strangers were staring at him — how in this case could reality be sorted out from fantasy? What was the frame of reference which would distinguish them one from the other?
(Philip K. Dick, Dr Bloodmoney)
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[EXT. Cypress Point or Point Lobos (DAY)]
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There is a moment in the scene the script designates as taking place at “Cypress Point or Point Lobos” (the location at that point still unchosen; filming eventually took place at Cypress Point) where both music and waves are so loud it is possible to believe there are lines of dialogue we cannot hear, a moment in which, for the first and last time, Madeleine and Scottie share a private moment together.
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Cypress Point and Point Lobos are on opposite sides of Carmel Bay — Cypress Point to the north, on 17-Mile Drive, and Point Lobos to the south, a nature preserve.
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As with many of the exteriors in Vertigo, the one at Cypress Point was only partly shot on location. The close-ups were done in a studio. For continuity’s sake, the same tree the production used on set — a prop — was carted out to Cypress Point for the location shots. And not only the tree is artificiaclass="underline" When Madeleine turns and runs down the slope, she ceases to be Madeleine; that is, she ceases to be Kim Novak playing Judy Barton playing Madeleine (playing Carlotta). Once her back is turned, she has been replaced by a stunt double, another actress now standing in for Kim Novak playing Judy playing Madeleine playing Carlotta. Perhaps most of all in scenes like this one, Hitchcock’s famous bias against Method acting can be seen as charity, a gift to an actress who would have been driven insane trying to inhabit the many layers the script called for. Stewart, in this scene, is (stunt) doubled, too — it is not Scottie running after not-Madeleine.
The one time we see the real Madeleine (“real,” though, really in quotes, even when it is not — in this case, what’s meant is something like: “the actress Alfred Hitchcock chose to play Madeleine Elster,” as opposed to “the actress Alfred Hitchcock chose to play Judy Barton playing Madeleine Elster”), what we see is, almost without a doubt, the double of the woman who, in the film, has been hired to play her, a double standing in for a double, in the process, playing herself; falling past the window, this stunt double called in to double for Kim Novak playing Madeleine is playing Madeleine Elster. We later see her in the letter-writing flashback sequence in the tower, slumped in Gavin Elster’s arms. The actress hired to play Madeleine in Hitchcock’s Vertigo is thus not the same as the actress hired to play Madeleine in Hitchcock’s Vertigo.
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Scottie: You know the Chinese say that once you’ve saved a person’s life, you’re responsible for it forever, so I’m committed. I have to know.
Madeleine: There’s so little that I know. It’s as though I’m walking down a long corridor that once was mirrored and fragments of that mirror still hang there. And when I come to the end of that corridor, there’s nothing but darkness and I know that when I walk into the darkness, I’ll die.
(01:02:23)
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I would rather have someone tell me about an exhibition than see it with my own eyes.
(Edouard Levé, Autoportrait)
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Before the airport and the airplane, before I lost my wallet, and before I saw the other man, I visited SFMOMA. I had been to the museum once before, but the permanent collection — all of it, two entire floors of the museum — had been blocked off. The elevators didn’t stop on those floors. We were only allowed to visit the top floor. There was a special exhibit there, a selection of works from the permanent collection. It almost sounded like a joke. My wife was with me; our tickets were half-price, because of the closure.
This time, alone, I skipped most of the permanent collection. There was a Jay DeFeo retrospective on; I had no desire to see it, but I walked past and was drawn in by her painting, The Rose. The Rose had its own shallow room within the room, intended to reproduce the effect of the recessed bay window in which DeFeo had composed the painting. To the left of the frame of this room was the painting’s identifying placard, which explained that the painting, begun in 1958 and finished in 1966, had had to be moved in 1965, when the rent on DeFeo’s Berkeley studio went up. It went to Pasadena, where it was then completed. In Bruce Conner’s film The White Rose (the title of the painting at that time; it was also called Deathrose at one point), we see the studio before the move. It looks like an abandoned building. There are plants but no furniture. It is dark. There is a very low stool, crusted with paint, sitting in front of the painting, dead center. In the black and white of the film, the paint on the stool looks like bird droppings. I stood where the stool would have been, transfixed by the deformations of the thick paint where it reached for the floor.
After walking through a few other rooms, thinking about The Rose, I returned to look at the painting again. I read the placard again, though I had read it less than an hour before. Everything that is is a record of its process, I thought; this description of The Rose in front of me had more to do with where it had been composed and when than with what The Rose itself was struggling to be. Had the curator lacked imagination, or was it our language that lacked imagination? I looked again at the radiating folds of paint, like rock chipped away by the wind and the rain. Each one recorded the time that had passed while DeFeo worked on The Rose. All the placards around me were lists: a title, an artist, a place, and a time. The best the curator could do was log the facts. Facts are a set of coordinates, in space and in time. Causation, motivation, character — all the rest is fiction.