A Film Canon

The greatest achievement of classical Hollywood, this extraordinary study in "acute melancholia" fuses the spectator and wanderer's shared fascination with the elusive moment at which the present vanishes, only to diffuse it into the vertiginous cusps of the San Francisco cityscape; a series of "portals to the past" that gradually spiral out to encompass familial, local, national, and biological history, all of which possess private detective 'Scotty' (James Stewart), as he investigates 'Madeleine's (Kim Novak) possession by 'Carlotta', an apocryphal historical figure, and distant relative. Where Rear Window and The Man Who Knew Too Much equated looking with watching and surveilling, Vertigo equates it with remembering - most beautifully in the two silent sequences, scored by Bernard Herrmann, in which Scotty first trails Madeleine and her surrogate, Judy - producing a pervasive, hyperbolic nostalgia that lays the foundation for neo-noir, as well as clarifying that genre as a sustained, fetishistic eulogy for Technicolor, and the studio system itself; a mnemosexual manifesto, its object of desire the vanishing, isolated frame.