Vertigo

Frost's Descent has passed and the Beginning of Winter is a little over a week away — the stretch of the year with the longest shadows, when the sun sits low and four in the afternoon already looks like dusk.

Both films today are about memory, and they run in opposite directions. Vertigo is a man seized by his memory: he returns again and again to the same crossing, the same bell tower, the same back of the same woman, trying to do one thing over. Waltz with Bashir is a man abandoned by his memory: he knows he was in Lebanon in 1982 and cannot recall a single frame of it, so he goes from friend to friend asking what happened.

One is a 1958 American colour widescreen film; the other a 2008 Israeli animation. One pushes colour to its limit; the other is almost entirely yellow and brown. Fifty years apart, they ask the same question: when memory fails, what is left to confirm what you did?

Vertigo goes first. It is the better-looking of the two, and the colder.

旧金山。一场屋顶追捕，一名警探悬在檐口，脚下是几十米的空。同事伸手去拉他，没拉住。事后调查认定他没有过失，他还是递了辞呈——他得了眩晕症，只要高度超过某个界限，整个世界就开始旋转、拉伸。

他叫 John "Scottie" Ferguson。此后他试着用一件钢制胸衣把自己慢慢练回去，没什么用。

然后是 Gavin Elster，大学同学，如今是船运公司的老板。Elster 请他吃晚饭，说了一件很荒唐的事：妻子 Madeleine 最近常常一个人出门，去美术馆在一幅十九世纪女人的肖像前坐很久，去墓地在一座碑前站着，去老旅馆开一间房又退掉。事后她说不清自己去过哪里。Elster 怀疑她被一个死去的人附了身，想请 Scottie 跟着她，看看她究竟在做什么。

Scottie 答应了。他跟着她穿过旧金山的街、金门公园、海边的悬崖。有一天，她跳进了海湾。

To understand its standing you have to know how badly it was received.

Released on 9 May 1958, it was called "too long and slow" by Variety for what it dismissed as "basically only a psychological murder mystery"; the Los Angeles Times found the plot "too long to unfold" and bogged down in a maze of detail; John McCarten in The New Yorker said Hitchcock had "never before indulged in such farfetched nonsense." One survey of the British press found that of 28 reviews, six were favourably inclined with reservations, nine were very mixed, and thirteen almost wholly negative. It barely broke even, earning $3.2 million in North American rentals against a $2.48 million cost.

The one critic who saw it immediately was in Paris. Éric Rohmer, writing in Cahiers du Cinéma, argued that precisely because the form is pure, beautiful, rigorous, astonishingly rich and free, Hitchcock's films — with Vertigo at their head — are about ideas.

Then came half a century of revision. In the Sight & Sound decennial poll it entered at 7th in 1982, rose to 4th in 1992 and 2nd in 2002, and in 2012 took first place, displacing Citizen Kane after fifty years at the top. In 2022 it placed second, behind Jeanne Dielman — which this archive also holds. In 1989 it was one of the first 25 films chosen for the US National Film Registry. Rotten Tomatoes stands at 93%; Metacritic at 100, one of only fourteen films to hold that score.

It is also a technical watershed: the first film to use the dolly zoom, an in-camera effect that turns Scottie's acrophobia into something the audience feels in the body. The tower shaft could not be built at full scale, so the shot was made with a model and the camera turned on its side. It was shot in VistaVision and printed in Technicolor, and it remains Hitchcock's most exacting work in colour. The score is Bernard Herrmann's, the titles and poster Saul Bass's — the three of them together are the part that has never been successfully imitated.