If there are three parts, it is the film’s two divisions that are its structural doubles. One is the beginning of Scottie’s acrophobia, the other is (supposedly) the end of it. This gives us, separate from the two parts dealing with Madeleine/Judy, a third part, the very first scene, before the acrophobia and before Madeleine. More interestingly, if we take that scene, the scene designated in the script as the “San Francisco Roof Tops” scene, as its own part, the other two parts are more balanced; they no longer seem quite so lopsided in favor of the first “half” of the film (which is longer by twenty-five minutes than the second half), because there is no first half or second half, only first part, second part, third part. These three parts are by no means equal, but the two that had seemed curiously unequal — the only two parts of the movie, as I had previously thought — seem to be much closer to equal than before.
…
Accustom the public to divining the whole of which they are given only a part. Make people diviners. Make them desire it.
(Robert Bresson, Notes on the Cinematographer)
…
The hidden harmony is better than the visible.
(Heraclitus, Fragments)
…
In the book, D’Entre les Morts, there are only two parts. Quite literally: There is Part One, made up of six chapters, and Part Two, also made up of six chapters. The first part is about 90 pages, whereas the second part is only about 75 pages. What is it about the second part of this story that we all seem to want to avoid?
…
The spirals in Saul Bass’s title sequence, clearly meant to evoke the eye of the woman from whom they first appear to swirl out of, also quite clearly resemble a vagina.
…
How did people erase themselves like this? he wondered.
(Adam Ross, Mr. Peanut)
…
Francois Truffaut: Vertigo is taken from the Boileau-Narcejac novel D’Entre les Morts, which was especially written so that you might do a screen version of it.
Alfred Hitchcock: No, it wasn’t. The novel was out before we acquired the rights to the property.
FT: Just the same, that book was especially written for you. As a matter of fact, Boileau and Narcejac did four or five novels on that theory. When they found out that you had been interested in acquiring the rights to Diabolique, they went to work and wrote D’Entre les Morts, which Paramount bought for you.
(Francois Truffaut, Hitchcock)
…
Throughout their partnership, [Boileau and Narcejac] produced novels that were puzzles requiring close attention, each combining startling twists of plot with characters at their wit’s end, grasping at any opportunity to find meaning.
(Auiler, Vertigo)
…
Hitchcock: “[Music] makes it possible to express the unspoken. For instance, two people may be saying one thing and thinking something very different. Their looks match their words, not their thoughts. They may be talking politely and quietly, but there may be a storm coming. You cannot express the mood of the situation by word and photograph. But I think you could get at the underlying idea with the right background music.”
…
It could be said of me that in this book I have only made up a bunch of other men’s flowers, providing of my own only the string that ties them together.
(Michel de Montaigne, Essais)
…
An old thing becomes new if you detach it from what usually surrounds it.
(Bresson, Notes)
…
Research was Hitchcock’s detective work. He relished the process of ‘putting himself through it’ in preproduction, scouting out real-life settings and real-life counterparts for the characters. He compiled notes and sketches and photographs partly for authenticity. but also as a springboard for his imagination. He always tinkered with the reality.
(Patrick McGilligan, Alfred Hitchcock)
…
Are the cameras shooting the footage for The Bridge sited at Old Fort Point? The very spot Madeleine chooses to jump into the Bay from?
…
At the beginning, I think of endings.
(Kate Zambreno, Heroines)
…
The only true purpose of a good list is to convey the idea of infinity and the vertigo of the etcetera.
(Umberto Eco, Confessions of a Young Novelist)
…
How should we understand Saul Bass’s spiral descending into the woman’s eye at the end of the title sequence? A hint of who will suffer — not Scottie — from the vertigo of the title? Or is it more surprising that, instead of descending into the woman’s eye, it doesn’t emanate out from it (as it does at the beginning of the sequence)?
…
Not the work I shall produce, but the real Me I shall achieve, that is the consideration.
(D. H. Lawrence)
…
There are people who like to complete all the reading, all the research, and then, when they have read everything that there is to read, when they have attained complete mastery of the material, then and only then do they sit down to write it up. Not me. Once I know enough about a subject to begin writing about it I lose interest in it immediately.
(Geoff Dyer, Out of Sheer Rage)
…
At the urging of my agent, I had been looking for a “more personal” response to Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo for many months when, in September of 2012, Sight & Sound’s decennial poll named it the best film of all time, forty votes ahead of Citizen Kane, which had held that title for fifty years. Suddenly, there were a hundred pitches for books about Vertigo, two hundred, more. I was relieved. As I say, I had been looking for an approach already for some time and finding that nearly every frame of the film had been pumped full of meaning and carefully explained by its critics again and again. What could I have added? Now, I could instead give up, remain silent.
I had been perfectly content to watch the film over and over, to read books about the film’s production, books of film theory and literary theory that mentioned it, biographies of Hitchcock, Novak, and Stewart — I had always been more of a reader than a writer. I copied out little snippets of interesting text, more notes than I ever would have read over, all without producing a single word of my own. In the margins, I wrote comments like this one, my lame attempts at the “personal” response my agent seemed to want but which never came together as a single story. I wondered, in an email to my agent (perhaps as a way of avoiding going through all of these notes and making something whole out of them, I emailed him, telling him I couldn’t get through all of my notes, couldn’t make something whole out of them) if this collection of quotes from other books and my marginal notes might not be a more convincing and ultimately more worthwhile book than the book they were intended to produce; it wouldn’t really be a personal response to the film, but I didn’t see that as a drawback. It would be a kind of critic’s notebook, an assemblage, a commonplace book, but also an homage and an acknowledgement. My agent replied that editors would be unmoved. He told me to get back to work.