Gabriel Blackwell - Madeleine E.

I discovered this quotation while watching “Meshes of the Afternoon” on YouTube; below the video itself was the usual embarrassing thread of commentary from the site’s “users” but also this quote, from Deren: “The task of cinema or any other art form is not to translate hidden messages of the unconscious soul into art but to experiment with the effects contemporary technical devices have on nerves, minds, or souls.”

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The disturbing figure in “Meshes of the Afternoon,” the black-cloaked, mirror-faced figure that the woman (Deren) chases three times, is not nearly so disturbing as the woman (again, Deren) herself, appearing in one particularly jarring scene with mirror-ball eyes bulging out of her sockets. But isn’t that a nun’s habit the mirror-faced figure is wearing? Bass, it seems to me, may not have been the only one quoting Deren in Vertigo .

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We say the eye is the window of the soul, but what if there is no soul behind the eye, what if the eye is a crack through which we can perceive just the abyss of a netherworld?

(Zizek, The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema )

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Psychologists distinguish between remembering something — which is to recall a piece of information along with contextual details, such as where, when and how one learned it — and knowing something, which is feeling that something is true without remembering how one learned the information.

(Ferris Jabr, “The Reading Brain in the Digital Age”)

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People suffering nervous breakdowns often do a lot of research, to find explanations for what they are undergoing. The research, of course, fails.

(Philip K. Dick, VALIS )

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When told the script for what would become 1940’s Foreign Correspondent wasn’t “logical,” Hitchcock is supposed to have replied: “I’m not interested in logic, I’m interested in effect. If the audience ever thinks about logic, it’s on their way home after the show, and by that time, you see, they’ve paid for their tickets.”

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Chaos is merely order waiting to be deciphered.

(Jose Saramago, The Double )

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At the end of a television show about a photo of an unidentified man falling from the World Trade Center’s north tower on September 11th, the mother of the man the filmmakers have identified as the man in the photo says, “I hope we’re not trying to figure out who he is, and more trying to figure out who we are, through watching that.”

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I had been given a job at a small college about fifty miles south of Portland as a visiting Assistant Professor of Creative Writing, a seemingly prestigious but actually precarious position, and one I had won through what I had to feel was a kind of mistaken identity. I had published a book called Critique of Pure Reason , a collection of essays and fictions that never attracted even a single review; the hiring committee, tasked with full teaching loads and their own research, had no doubt hired me on the strength of its title and a few laudatory words from one of my future colleagues, a kind man who had not read the book either.

The appointment was for three years, but, because I’d begun in the spring rather than the fall, and because the college issued contracts on an annual basis, I was told, it was theoretically renewable for up to three and a half years. Instead, the college reversed direction and declined to renew my contract after just two and a half years. (Could it be that they’d found me out? Read the book?) Though I was never notified of the fact, it became clear that I would be out of a job at the beginning of the summer, and that whatever else I would be doing that fall I would not be returning to the college. I was, as a result, finding it difficult to focus on the book I was supposed to be working on, a study of the film Vertigo . Because of the nature of the academic year, though (I would have had the next three months off in any case, and would be paid as though I were working), I felt the burden of this new uncertainty as a rearrangement or duplication of my seasons rather than a milestone or a capstone or even just a disappointment: my summer had, in an instant, had another summer tacked on to its end, had suddenly become a sentence without a period. Looking for a job in that moment seemed somehow like eating a second lunch today because you had been told that, a week from now, you would have to miss lunch.

I had planned to make some progress on the book with my summer (despite not having a strong sense of what that would mean other than reading whatever came to hand and taking notes), but I now found I could not, no matter how much time I devoted to it. My anxiety about the thing, I think, stemmed from feeling no quickening, no critical mass or momentum as the project entered its own summer. When I came upon something that seemed worth copying out into my notes, I did so. But days — whole weeks, even — would pass without adding a single word to the manuscript. Once I had begun, I thought, I could finish, but I could not begin. I had no idea what was in the notes I was taking, and though I added these notes to the end of the document, I found my narrative stuck before the beginning of the film proper, in a sequence that, if the story had never become a film and been left a novel, would never have existed at all — it did not need to because it was not part of the narrative’s present action, and because all of the information it communicates is neatly summarized in the scene immediately following it, in Midge’s apartment.

This short introduction or prologue seems to stand outside of the Vertigo of most people’s memories: Who remembers the chase on the rooftops, really, or even the title sequence? Saul Bass’s Vertigo was not Saul Bass’s North by Northwest , and Bernhard Herrmann’s Vertigo , while undoubtedly memorable, was still not Bernhard Herrmann’s Psycho . People who remember at all remember a spiral — the one from the poster — or a warbling melody — repeated throughout — not the close-ups of the woman’s face or the careful ebb and crescendo of that opening theme. For most people, not even the moment when Scottie hangs from the gutter is part of their memory of the movie — it begins instead in Midge’s apartment, with its vague echoes of the more famous set of Jeff’s Village apartment in Rear Window (Jimmy Stewart’s presence, perhaps, and the fact that both of his characters are convalescent; that looming window and the world visible through it; the desexualized female). And just before the moment that scene opened, my book seemed to have closed. I could not manage to press on.

Though conscious I would be out of a job — was already out of a job — I was not careful with my money and could not stay at home with my notes. While my wife was at work, I took the bus to Powell’s and bought books I would not read, just for something to do. I went to the café around the corner from our apartment for coffee rather than making it myself. I went to the movies, even when there was nothing I particularly wanted to see. I took long drives out to the coast and back. I went to Pittock Mansion and the reservoir at Mount Tabor. I had no place to be and no reason to be any place.

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Hitchcock: “We must bear in mind that, fundamentally, there’s no such thing as color; in fact, there’s no such thing as a face, because until the light hits it, it is nonexistent. After all, one of the first things I learned in the School of Art was that there is no such thing as a line; there’s only the light and the shade.”

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Writers who worked on Vertigo :

Pierre Boileau (original story)

Thomas Narcejac (original story)

Norman Denny (Hitchcock’s English translator of D’Entre les Morts )