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There is nothing more in being born twice than once. Every thing in this world is the effect of resurrection.
(Voltaire, Princess of Babylon)
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I think what a person normally goes to the cinema for is time, whether for time wasted, time lost, or time that is yet to be gained.
(Andrei Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time)
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Ingrid Bergman: “To irritate us, he would say, ‘Well, all my fun is over now that you actors are here.’ Because all his fun had been in the preparation, the writing, the camera setups, the fantasy of his mind, he regarded us as intruders to his fantasy. But he was always very controlled. He never lost his temper or screamed at anyone. And yet he always got what he wanted.”
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Hitchcock: “There is a great confusion between the words ‘mystery’ and ‘suspense.’ The two things are absolutely miles apart. Mystery is an intellectual process, like in a ‘whodunit.’ But suspense is essentially an emotional process. You can only get the suspense element going by giving the audience information. I daresay you have seen many films which have mysterious goings-on. You don’t know what is going on, why the man is doing this or that. You are about a third of the way through the film before you realize what it is all about. To me that is absolutely wasted footage, because there is no emotion to it.
There is no emotion from the audience. The mystery form has no particular appeal to me, because it is merely a fact of mystifying an audience, which I don’t think is enough.”
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[INT. Palace of the Legion of Honor (DAY)]
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I am. I. a sea of. alone.
Being Hitchcock’s last words to Suzanne Gauthier.
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A book, even a fragmentary one, has a center which attracts it. This center is not fixed, but is displaced by the pressure of the book and circumstances of its composition. Yet it is also a fixed center which, if it is genuine, displaces itself, while remaining the same and becoming always more central, more hidden, more uncertain and imperious. He who writes the book writes it out of desire for this center and out of ignorance. The feeling of having touched it can very well be only the illusion of having reached it.
(Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature)
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“What we all dread most,” said the priest in a low voice, “is a maze with no centre.”
(G. K. Chesterton, “The Head of Caesar”)
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My agent wanted the book done. In order to finish it, I needed to go to San Francisco. Hitchcock had seen San Francisco and thought, “I must make a movie here.” He rejected Maxwell Anderson’s script because it would not have accommodated many of the images Hitchcock had conceived on that first visit. Even though the majority of the filming had taken place on a soundstage in Los Angeles, there was something about the city that was vital to the production. Now, there was something about it that was vital to my book.
My girlfriend objected that I had lived in San Francisco for years. Did I really need to go back now, less than a week after we had moved in together? She had just found out she was pregnant. We needed to save money, be careful. I invited her to come with me. I told her it would be good. I needed a subject, a foreground for my research; without her there, I would not be able to see the scenes I was writing as I needed to see them. Alone, the city was the city, an environment to be navigated; with her there, it would become a setting, a place where things happened. She wasn’t convinced. I told her to imagine a canvas without any paint on it, or paint without a canvas. This is what I remember saying, those words, though the analogy is obviously flawed. She was not my subject, Vertigo was. Thinking about it now, I realize what I was saying was I needed a medium to work in. This is another way of saying that I would be lying if I said I didn’t know where things began to go wrong. I needed her there. It wouldn’t work otherwise.
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The characteristic subject of [Hitchcock’s] art, often taken to be suspense, is more accurately anxiety.
(Taylor, Hitch)
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One does not create by adding, but by taking away. To develop is another matter. (Not to spread out.)
(Bresson, Notes)
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How much time passes between “Madeleine’s” faked death (Madeleine’s real death) and Judy’s unmasking? It takes minutes onscreen, but we’re meant to believe that. months have gone by? Later, we’re told it has been a year since San Juan Bautista, long enough for Midge to give up hope in Scottie, and for Scottie to begin to recover some equilibrium. How long does that take? For some people, it can take years. For some people, there is no healing some wounds.
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We are in fact by this time [immediately following Madeleine’s supposed suicide] so thoroughly identified with Scottie that we share his shock, and the resulting sense of bewildered desolation, in the most direct way, just as we share his sense of helplessness, even of responsibility. We are stunned, the bottom is knocked out of the world, we cannot at all see where the film is going, what possible sequel this event can have: all is chaos.
(Wood, Hitchcock’s Films)
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The body is imaginary, and we bow to the tyranny of a phantom. Love is a privileged perception, the most total and lucid not only of the unreality of the world but of our own unreality: not only do we traverse a realm of shadows; we ourselves are shadows.
(Octavio Paz, Alternating Current)
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[EXT. Podesta Baldocchi (LATE AFTERNOON)]
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“SOMEWHERE. SOMEHOW he’d loved her and let her slip through his fingers. He had seen her die. And now here she was looking into his eyes again. ”
Tagline for Vertigo ad
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When a fantasy object, something imagined, an object from inner space, enters our ordinary reality, the texture of reality is twisted, distorted. This is how desire inscribes itself into reality, by distorting it.
(Zizek, The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema)
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Two persons, looking each other in the eye, see not their eyes but their looks.
(Bresson, Notes)
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There are multiple doppelgangers for Judy: not only Madeleine (played by Novak’s stunt double), but also the woman Scottie mistakes for Madeleine (a third actress), the assistant at Ransohoff’s (platinum blonde, and apparently the same size), and the actress that plays Carlotta in the dream sequence. Do any of these women get a screen credit?
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Judy, walking with her friends or coworkers, stops outside of Podesta Baldocchi. Where were they going? To Podesta Baldocchi? She doesn’t live above it. She doesn’t go in to buy flowers. None of her friends do, either. She comes to a stop just in front of Scottie, standing in front of an assortment of arrangements they’ve both seen multiple times, in “Portrait of Carlotta.” It’s meant to look like an accident, but how can it be?