The Vertigo within and without Sun

Senses of Cinema – Notes on Sans Soleil
13

“He is dead and gone, lady.  He is dead and gone . . ..”  The camera slowly moving across an electronic matrix board.  Is this the soprano voice, the crystalline voice, of Arielle Dombasle, whose face we see, under her mop of blonde hair?  Hamlet, Act IV, Scene 5.  “He” had wondered about Vertigo, and time.  The titles portraying continually receding fields of time.  “His” visit to Podesta Baldocchi (the tiles hadn’t changed—but now, reader, be warned, the flower shop is no more as it was then).  Trailing Madeleine:  in truth this is about “power and freedom, melancholy and dazzlement.”  Coasting by the Top of the Mark (“so carefully coded that you could miss it”), and thinking that the “vertigo of space and reality stands for the vertigo of time.”  Yes, surely, and why not?  “He” visited the cemetery at Mission Dolores, and followed Madeleine to the Museum of the Legion of Honour.  (I also did these things.  I think I may have found her.)  Falsely, he notes the cut sequoia in Muir Woods—it’s so evocative, why should he not be lured?  (The scene was shot in Big Basin; and the cut tree was made by Henry Bumstead.)  But “he” is in love with the film, and is thus entranced.  Cavell is slightly troubled:  “This invitation to obsession—must I decide whether it is fetishistic attachment, or honest labor?—is something I have sometimes felt I must ward off.” (19) The painted horse at San Juan Bautista—Hitchcock “had invented nothing; it was all there” (and it is still there, still with a painted eye that is Madeleine’s, according to “him”).  At the Golden Gate, Scottie had “saved Madeline from death before casting her back to death; or was it the other way round?”  “He” says explicitly that he has seen Vertigo nineteen times, and is speaking to those who have done so as well.  I do not know what numeral to apply to the times I have seen it.  (I suspect I have not really seen it yet.)  I write somewhere in my book An Eye for Hitchcock that in this film, the present is always standing upon, and thus vertiginously perched atop, the past, and that the fall in time is always available for us.  I mean to imply there something that the correspondent in San soleil, meditating feverishly upon Vertigo, does not quite bring himself to say to the lonely and satisfied woman who is recounting all this to us, namely, that history is vertical; that as time goes by we descend; so that we realize we had begun upon a high promontory so that—as George Bernard Shaw put it—our catapult would be all the more dramatic.