Memory's map: The Bay city and Vertigo

Turn of the century map of San Francisco

The map will guide you (just click the caption) to the latest entry in A Month of Vertigo at The Lady Eve's Reel Life. Of course, maps are importantly present as decoration and as essential elements of the plot in Vertigo. For example, the most famous map in the film, is the time map sketched on the cross-section of the redwood. 

This is the map that Scottie and Madeleine struggle with at the moment but also later in the film.  Their internal struggle becomes the films and subsequently our reality: Where are we in time and why is it you took no notice so long ago?  Will you mark the time this round of the trunk?  Will you remember--or will we be at tower's arch, losing and lost, unable to grasp, yet somehow all so familiar and this familiarity takes the pain from this loss and sends unlimited echoes of her scream--and your remembering, once more, a moment too late. 


Michael Nazarewycz' engaging piece on the setting of Vertigo is good starting place for understanding the genius and wisdom on Hitch's choice for the film's setting.  Hitch gives us a map, we follow him closely, but in the end the journey has been not one of space but of time and emotion.  And those maps, the map that Scottie follows in the unraveling half of the film are the one for which there are no printers, no tree cuts and no paths.