Anyway, what interested me most throughout Vertigo was the composition of certain shots. From the beginning of the film, thanks to Dr. C for pointing it out to me, there is a centrality of focus put in the middle of the frame. This becomes evident with the pupil in the eye of the unknown woman. Throughout the beginning of the film, as Scottie follows Madeleine, his destination and concentration lies in the middle of the frame. When he follows her into the museum, the entrance is in the middle. Another example is when he tries to follow Madeleine up the stairs of the tower and looks straight down. Here Hitchcock uses his created “Vertigo” technique where he zooms the camera lens in as he tracks the camera backwards. It makes the audience feel like they are falling from the screen.  Because the opening title shot focuses on the middle of the eye, that is one of the goals if not the goal of the film:  to go into the uknown that is the human soul.

Being a Kubrick fan I can’t help but relate the similarities 2001: A Space Odyssey has to this film.  Here are a few screenshots from 2001.

But hey, if I were to spend a lot of time on Vertigo and 2001 I could call that a career.  Both are thought provoking films but they’re about the same things.  Notice that HAL, the red eye, does not have that deep unknown.  It’s red and it doesn’t move around.  They tried to make it human and although it does have a more human voice, it lacks that personal quality of the eyes.  The third 2001 photo occurs during Dave’s journey beyond the infinite.  Hmmm sounds a lot like looking into someone’s soul.  Is there an end to it?  Can we really know everything about someone or even ourselves?

This theme is continued in the text of the title sequence in Veritgo.  Notice in the second Vertigo picture, that the title has a white stencil outline but a transparent center.  It’s a continuation of looking past the surface of someone or something and trying to find something deeper in it.  Almost like how the shot begins with the outer beauty of the unknown female and eventually ends up at the one eye.  The whole plot of the film is the surface of what it really is about.  That’s why so many people usually don’t like it at first.  The entire plot is merely the MacGuffin as Dr. C told us and it finally makes sense to me.

That’s just a few things that I noticed and would like to expand on in class.  I hope to God we have an extended class session on the dream sequence.  There is so much going on there!

When you photograph or more especially paint a landscape, you have to take a step back and really concentrate.  Otherwise you get a horrible photo or painting.  But sometimes you need to take a horrible photo.  It’s a different perspective.  I think that is Eben’s problem.  He said in the book he had problems painting what he saw.  It’s hard to photograph what you see inside your head.  What he was doing was the same old thing: pictures of new buildings and bridges.  Once Jennie comes along, he gets inspired to paint something new, something fresh.  But he didn’t do it for the money.  He did the sketch to remember her face and be able to look at something real rather than just his thoughts.  Jennie is part of the past and present.  Her portrait meant so much to him.  So much that he didn’t even think of selling it until the dealer brought it up.  Of course he did not refuse because he needed the money.  Her existence is helping feed that hunger Eben described in the beginning of the novel.

Landscapes are important works of art, but you can’t get the connection to it you can with portraits.  Remembering a person is more meaningful than a building.  Granted, Ansel Adams has done some amazing things.  If you aren’t familiar with his work I highly recommend looking him up.  But there’s something even more appealing in WeeGee’s photographs.  He photographed a lot of crime scenes in New York and other cities.  I also recommend looking him up but his work can be graphic.

As far as being romantic with your soul mate, why does the relationship have to become physical?  Sharing your body with someone is a major part of most intimate relationships, but there are some people who you could connect with solely (pun intended) through conversations.  This is very rare, though.  Being a soul mate by definition is a destined relationship that transcends the physical.  The physical part of a relationship is part of our biological instinct to reproduce.  Our social ideal of fidelity is one of the things that spawned the concept of a soul mate.  Jennie and Eben may have been destined for each other and God just messed up.  He tried to make up for it by bending time.  But a more interesting question to leave you with is why would God bother to cross their paths if they were not going to spend more than a few months together (in Eben’s time)?

But what makes us human?  Our intellect would be my guess.  We feel that we are the smartest creatures on Earth.  Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control is all about us being smarter than the Earth.  The lion tamer is all about appearing stronger than the lions.  The mole rat guy takes the mole rats out of their natural environment and studies them.  The topiary gardner shapes plants into shapes of animals and limits their growth to maintain shape.  And then we come to Rodney Brooks.  He tries to imitate human movement and eventually intellect.  Brooks does not try to perfect his robots, saying that he designs them to be able to fall.  Brooks studies human/animal behavior and bases his creation on them.  Because he programs robots from what he observes, it is natural for him to think of humans as a series of simple processes.  One could think of humans as an incomprehensible complex machine and I’m not offended to think of myself in that way.  Some people believe God created life and everything around it.  It is egotistical for humans to create themselves and play God, but isn’t that what makes us human also; striving to pass on our life experiences and name?  Who is to say that at some point we will not be able to replicate ourselves 100% along with free will and all.

One could argue that you can’t program free will.  I say no one would want to program free will.  We don’t even have free will.  We have social inhibitions and intellectual restraints.  To program those sets of rules into a robot, could they not function like a regular member of society?  And if we have defined things that are real as things that act as they should, would these robots who act like members of society should not appear as real and sane?

If we eventually find a way to program robots with free will, how would they act?  We don’t act that way.  Would that make them more “human” than us?  Scary stuff.

CUT to shot of a man balancing a large object on his forehead.  (NOTE: mood music may be a little overwhelming but none the less effective)

So what exactly is fast, cheap, and out of control?  Life?  In the grand scheme of things, yes.  One generation of people survive for about 85 years and a new one comes in.  That’s a tiny part of the billions of years the Earth has existed.  Cheap is a little more difficult to justify in a literal sense.  Out of control is obvious because we have very little control of what goes on around us.  At least, we feel we are in control but not nearly as much as we think.  This mindset relates to the idea of being your own God.  Controlling what goes on around you is an important part of life.  It’s difficult to be comfortable with the fact that you are being affected by your surroundings and not the other way around.

Of all of the films we have watched, I liked this one the best.  Morris seemed to have a lot of fun with the camera, almost a little too much, and had some of the most interesting characters.  I actually paid attention to a man wearing a butterfly tie who talked about naked mole rats!

What prompted him to say that? That’s what I think whenever I see someone in Morris’s films “ramble” on. Of course, Morris edits the film to make it seem like they’re rambling. He seems to purposefully cut out his part of the dialogue in the interview he is conducting. But the rambling isn’t rambling when you really listen to what they’re saying. Morris enjoys playiing with the audience’s assumptions and by doing so, seems to teach us a lesson. The audience realizes that people say things for a reason. We may not understand what that is, but it is important enough to that person that they’ll knowingly say it to a camera. Are these people trying to teach us something? They are sharing their life experiences with us and just brushing it off as craziness would be immature.

Dr. Campbell told us that Morris loves to just shoot and shoot. I wonder if he shoots his films knowing how he will construct them later. Morris has the ability to listen to people and really get inside their heads. He might even know what they’re talking about more than they do. Not only that, but he is able to relate other people’s stories. His ability to edit seemingly random footage into a thought-provoking film requires unimaginable patience.

The things that make a “good” film are hard to list.  There are those films that we have a campy feeling for (Schwarzenegger and Bronson anybody?), but some films excel at some things that others do not.  This is not just limited to the plot.  Citizen Kane is widely known as the greatest film of all time.  Do film buffs watch it constantly?  I doubt it.  The story is great, but it’s a somewhat “slow” film.  A good film is just like a good book.  You look at how the story is constructed in a book don’t you?  You do the same thing with film.  If the filmmaker is doing sophisticated things with the film (lighting, sound, composition, color, etc.) and you recognize them as such, then that film could be considered “good.”  If it’s your first time analyzing film, you don’t recognize these things when you’re in the theater.  Eventually you will though and you feel so much more a part of the film.  A lot of it is still skeptical, but there are some guildlines as to what makes a good film.  Coherence and originality are two things to think about when watching a film.  What I like to focus on when watching a film is the temporal and spatial relations of each shot.  Basically where are things and when do they show up.  You can really find out some interesting things about the filmmaking if you pay attention to these.  Remember:  every shot, sound, movement, title, EVERYTHING has been done on purpose.  Treat it that way and you’ll do fine with your analysis.

My point is that comparing a film to a book is unfair to the filmmaker and the novelist.  The “faithfulness” of the 1949 film version of Little Women would require many class periods to discuss and opinions would rarely be changed.  It’s almost like we’re comparing the film to our personal judgement of the book, rather than the book itself.  Let me clarify by referring to the “beautiful woman” problem brought up in class.  If Renoir didn’t give us a character that said the woman was beautiful, the audience would be left to decide whether she was or not.  If people found she wasn’t, they would feel justified in saying Renoir was unfaithful to the novel.

Writing about adaptations is a tricky business that I take very seriously, especially novel-to-film adaptations.  You cannot be close-minded when doing so.  You must take in the limitations put on both mediums and then make up your mind about the fidelity of the film to the novel.  People will read a novel differently than you, especially if they live in different time periods.