Vertigo
Vertigo (1958)
Directed by Alfred Hitchcock
Known as the Master of Suspense, Alfred Hitchcock invites superlatives. He’s among the driest, darkest, and drollest of directors. Chances are, “florid” doesn’t come to mind when discussing the director’s work, yet in Vertigo, Hitchcock gives us achingly beautiful flower scenes. My favorite of these, unfolding in a flower shop, opens with a camera wipe that transforms the flower setting into a dream stage on par with any Vincente Minnelli spectacle. Classical Hollywood never looked so good, and throughout the film, the extended tracking shots grant us time to savor breathtaking shots of the Bay Area landscape. As the obscure object of Jimmy Stewart’s desire, the flower stands in for male obsession but also female identification.
Appropriately for a film that engages the persistence of the past within the present, Vertigo enjoys a robust afterlife. There exists a cottage industry of contemporary artists inspired by Vertigo, from Les LeVeque (4 Vertigo, 2000) to Chris Marker (Sans Soleil, 1983) to Abelardo Morell (Flowers for Lisa, 2017). Of these, Morell’s Flowers for Lisa #76—After Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo—highlights Hitchcock’s flowers as a point of fixation more than 50 years after the film’s release.
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