WJEC Film Studies

2. CRITICAL APPROACHES
Auteur
Gender
Psychoanalytical

3. AUTEUR
Recognised in the 1950s by the writers of Cahiers du
Cinema as a master Film-maker, Hitchcock is an
example of the classic auteur, a master of mise-en-scène
with an unmistakable ‘world view’.
The ‘Hitchcock film’ contains elements of style and
distinctive marks identifiable with his presence as a
creative force who brought together a number of
elements – the graphics of Saul Bass, the music score of
Bernard Herrmann, the performances of James Stewart
and Kim Novak.

4. AUTEUR – PURE CINEMA
“When we tell a story in cinema, we should resort to
dialogue only when it’s impossible to do otherwise. I
always try first to tell a story in the cinematic way,
through a succession of shots and bits of film in
between”.
Cinéma Pur (French for "Pure Cinema") was an avant-
garde film movement begun by filmmakers, like René
Clair, who "wanted to return the medium to its elemental
origins" of "vision and movement."

5. AUTEUR – COLOUR
Hitchcock was a crossover director from the silent era
to black and white with synchronous sound to the full
use of technicolour
He produced 39 major black and white films (10 of
which were silent) and only 15 major films in colour
(only 7 prior to Vertigo).
His significant use of colour was something he carefully
considered to develop the cinematic experience and to
help visually convey the plot.

6. GERMAN EXPRESSIONISM
• Influenced by German Expressionism and Soviet
montage cinema.
• His elaborate editing techniques came from Soviet films
of the 1920s.
• He particularly acknowledged the significance of the
Kuleshov experiment, from which he derived his
fondness for the point-of-view shot and for building
sequences by cross-cutting between person seeing
and things seen.

7. AUTEUR –
PURE CINEMA: THE KULESHOV
EFFECT
• The Kuleshov effect is a film editing (montage) effect
demonstrated by Soviet filmmaker Lev Kuleshov in the
1910s and 1920s. It is a mental phenomenon by which
viewers derive more meaning from the interaction of
two sequential shots than from a single shot in
isolation.

8. AUTEUR
• Self- publicist Hitchcock was a commercial film-maker,
who sought and achieved box- office success.
• He was always happy to exploit his ‘auteur status’ as a
marketing device, through his TV series no less than
his films.
• His films are assigned to him as in the credits and
publicity material making him a ‘star’ director.
• He also ‘signed’ his films through his personal non-
speaking appearances in them.
• In Vertigo he appears outside Elster’s office.

9. AUTEUR
The film has recurring themes from Hitchcock’s other
work including:
• Guilt (Strangers on a Train);
• Voyeurism (Rear Window); and
• Taboo subject matter (Psycho).

10. AUTEUR –
PERSONAL LINKS
Vertigo’s themes can be seen as revealing a lot about
Hitchcock and the film is often considered his most
personal.
• The representation of Scottie as lonely links to
Hitchcock’s lack of childhood friends,
• Scottie’s treatment of Judy could reflect the way
Hitchcock treated actresses working on his films;
• and the guilt Scottie feels could be linked to Hitchcock’s
Catholic upbringing.

11. AUTEUR –
ARTISTIC STYLE
• Mastery of the art of film making – the inspired use of
scale models and matte painting to create the bell
tower scene are a useful example.

13. AESTHETICS
• Title sequence’s innovative use of avant-garde film ideas
in a mainstream narrative. Designed by Saul Bass
accompanied by Bernard Herrmann’s score a
combination of emotional dream imagery and abstraction
by abstract film-maker John Whitney.
• He used a special pendulum that forms “modern art in
motion” geometric oval shaped spirals called Lissajous
waves.

14. TITLE SEQUENCE
This is a film about watching. In the opening credits
the woman’s face is only partially seen, she is
looking, she and the location are unidentified. This
woman does not feature in the film, she never
appears again.

15. MOTIF
• The motif of the spiral structures
the film: in the titles, Madeleine’s
hair, the steps in the tower, the
repetition.

16. SYD FIELD’S 3 ACT
STRUCTURE
• The first act takes approximately one quarter of the
film’s runtime, and sets up the conflict. A plot point
thrusts the main character into the second act.
• This second act depicts the character’s struggle to
achieve his or her goal and takes up half of the
movie’s runtime.
• The final quarter of the film is the third act, which
features the climactic struggle in which the character
either achieves or fails to achieve the goal; the third
act then continues through the aftermath of this
climax.

18. SPIRAL NARRATIVE
• 3 acts, 2 halves, & a spiral
• Midpoint marked by Scottie failing to save
Madeleine
• Saving her would have helped him complete a
narrative circle
• He fails, and so ‘spirals’ into a psychological
breakdown
• Spiral continues when he fails again in act 3

19. MIRRORS
• Hitchcock’s recurring use of
mirrors, as in Psycho, to imply dual
identities. The clearest examples
are:
• The sequence at Ernie’s
• The flower shop/peeping tom
scene
• Scottie’s first visit to Judy’s room
• Ransohoff’s department store
scene.

20. CAMERAWORK
• Lengthy fluid camera
movements contribute to the
film appearing dreamlike at
times.

21. THE ‘VERTIGO’ EFFECT
• Ground breaking, inventive camera work. The
clearest example is the ‘Vertigo effect’, the dolly
zoom used to convey Scottie’s acrophobia.
Though invented earlier this technique was first
used in this film by camera operator Irmin
Roberts.

22. SPECTATORSHIP AND
ALIGNMENT
Hitchcock uses shot reverse shot as a way of clearly
establishing the character alignment.
These three screen grabs show us how Hitchcock uses
camerawork to align and position us very much with
Scottie's viewpoint in the first part of the film.
After Scottie has been tasked by ulster with trailing
Madeline she takes him to the museum and we have
this shot as part of an extended sequence that makes it
very clear that the camera is aligned particularly using
POV with Scottie. The shot reverse shot and framing
clearly shows Scottie watching Madeline looking at the
nosegay of flowers looking at the world in her hair and
then using very subtle mobile framing to take us from
her to look up to the picture of Carlotta and back to
Madeline

23. SCOTTIE AS VOYEUR
We are positioned as Scottie through the use of POV shots linking to
Laura Mulvey’s theory we have a very obvious sense in which we
have the ‘male as bearer of the look’ and the extent to which that's a
potent powerful and controlling look - he spectator is connected to
Scottie for empathy yet the shot shows us Scottie in a very typical
sort of peeping tom/spying sort of shot we can see him through the
crack of the door but we can also still see Madeline in the mirror.
Although clearly we the audience and spectator are being aligned
with Scottie in terms of mode of address in terms of we're looking at
him we're encouraged to think of ourselves as Scottie looking at her
the subtle use of the reverse shot still puts us as an audience in a
position where we're looking at him looking at her.

24. MOTIF
The famous recurrent motif of the kind of profile
shot that features several times throughout the film.
The use of creepy green backlighting creates a
ghostly silhouette Again, this is very much used
with shot reverse shot and of course we are Scottie
looking at this woman in the darkness particularly
an important way to suggest a sort of evoking of a
sort of dream or fantasy.

25. NARRATIVE REVEAL
Things change quite considerably this sequence - it represents a crisis of
narrative and spectator identification.
Judy’s first-person voiceover reveals our assumptions and presumptions
about the narrative have been all wrong. Judy turns around and looks at the
camera - directly addresses us -so in terms of mode of address it's a crucial
moment which breaks the fourth wall.
This undermines all of the classical narrative elements we could have
argued that have gone before - it's almost positioning the audience to say:
‘Who should I believe? Who should I follow? What's going on? I thought this
person Scotty was the defining force in the narrative and now this woman
seems to be taking over’

26. GENDER
The representation of male
sexuality with a man
confronting his impotence and
his repressed desires can be
read as a comment on pre-
feminist gender politics in the
late 1950s.

27. CONNELL’S HIERARCHY
OF MASCULINITY
Hegemonic masculinity
Complicit masculinity
Marginalized masculinity
Subordinate masculinity
Qualities include heterosexuality, whiteness,
physical strength and suppression of emotions
such as sadness.
Where a man may not fit into all the characteristics
of hegemonic masculinity but do not challenge it
either.
Follow the cultural ’norm’ but can’t fully access it
e.g. men of colour and disabled men
Display oppositional qualities. Effeminate and gay
men are examples of men who exhibit a
subordinate masculinity identity.

28. LAURA MULVEY
• Laura Mulvey‘s Visual Pleasure and Narrative
Cinema (1975) examined the representation of
sexual difference as active male/passive female,
with women displayed as erotic objects for the
characters within the lm and the spectator.
Mulvey suggested that the use of subjective
camera from the male protagonist’s point of view
results in the spectator identifying with the male.

29. FEMALE EMPOWERMENT
Scottie is undermined by his weakness and
fascination with the mystery of Madeleine.
Judy confession places the spectator in a
position of knowledge, spectator changes
identification because of this.

30. ORPHEUS AND
EURYDICE
• Vertigo has many links to several Greek and
Roman myths.
• Perhaps the most obvious mythological
influence on the film is the Greek myth of
Orpheus and Eurydice, in which the musician
Orpheus loses his wife, Eurydice to death and
ventures into the underworld to rescue her,
only to lose her again.

31. SCOTTIE AS ORPHEUS
• Firstly, Scottie's (Orpheus) character
attempts to save Madeleine, (the Eurydice
character), from drowning in the San
Francisco Bay. He succeeds, only to lose her
in a “suicide” off the bell tower.

32. MADELINE’S
RECREATION
• Scottie then gets a second chance to save
Madeleine from death, this time by recreating Judy
in Madeleine's image. He achieves this
resurrection, but then loses her again when she
plunges from the bell tower.
• And just as in the Orpheus myth it is Orpheus's
fault—his failure to follow the instruction not to look
back at his beloved as he leads her out of Hades—
that he loses Eurydice again, so in Vertigo it is
Scottie's flaws that lead to his losses: his
acrophobia causes him to lose Madeleine and it is
his insistence on recreating a dead woman that

33. VOYEURISM
One of Hitchcock’s major themes—particularly in his 1950’s
works—is voyeurism.
Vertigo can be seen as a long romantic poem to voyeurism that
leads the viewer through lengthy specific sequences of silent
pursuit, and through a much darker and broader story of one
man’s pursuit—to unthinkable extremes—of his chosen romantic
ideal. Scottie watches Madeleine and we watch Scottie watch
Madeleine.
Indeed one way Hitchcock establishes his voyeurism theme is
through the use of eyes and swirls—from the opening sequence,
to Madeleine’s hairstyle, to the expressive eyes of the main
characters…

34. MANIPULATION
Not only are we, the audience manipulated, but some of the main themes are clearly
obsession and control by manipulation and fabrication of reality:
Scottie is manipulated by his friend Gavin, who also manipulates the Judy who in turn
manipulates Scottie.
When the deception is complete and Scottie believes that the woman he loves has died,
he is lost until he sees a girl who resembles her.
He then does to her what had been done to him – he manipulates her, denies her her
own identity and makes her over until she is the simulacrum of a woman who never was.
When he discovers how he had been fooled by a theatrical illusion, he hisses, “Did he
train you? Did he rehearse you? Did he tell you what to do and what to say?” –
apparently not realizing that he is furious and indignant about the very behavior he has
been exhibiting.
Hitchcock uses mirrors and mirror images to reinforce the idea of manipulation and
confusion over what is real and what is not.
Madeleine: It's as though I were walking down a long corridor that once was mirrored,
and fragments of that mirror still hang there. . . .
Scottie: The small scenes, the fragments of the mirror. . . . Do you remember those?

35. FANTASY AND MANIPULATION
• Consider the scenario, though, from Judy’s
perspective:
• She’s picked up by one significantly older man, Elster,
who gives her a new persona (Madeleine) and then
involves her in the original Madeleine’s murder.
• Elster promises her a deeper attachment, only to dump
her unceremoniously after the deed is done.
• Then Judy finds the process repeated with Scottie—
yet, despite his earnestness, his behavior is doubly
humiliating, as it carries an implicit rejection of Judy’s
own self in favor of the fantasy of Madeleine.
• Judy, like so many of us, is so desperate for approval
and love that she allows all of this to happen, ultimately
leading to her death.

36. JACQUES LACAN
Lacan speculated that: