Palettes of Sight and Sound: The Auteurist Aesthetic in Vertigo and The Magnificent Ambersons - Essay Example

? Palettes of Sight and Sound: The Auteurist Aesthetic in ‘Vertigo’ and ‘The Magnificent Ambersons’ Location Name 1 Palettes of Sight and Sound: The Auteurist Aesthetic in ‘Vertigo’ and ‘The Magnificent Ambersons’ Alfred Hitchcock and Orson Welles imprinted their films with profoundly distinctive styles that had a seminal influence on the auteur school of formalism. Both have influenced generations of filmmakers with the idea that film can be as expressive as painting or literature. Hitchcock’s Vertigo and Welles’ The Magnificent Ambersons are notable examples of how a director can affect a film’s style and tone. Welles’ painter’s sensibility and Hitchcock’s feel for shape, angles and architecture make Ambersons and Vertigo two of the most unique and artistically enriching films the genre has to offer. ‘Vertigo’ – Alfred Hitchcock No director has combined the formalist elements to create an impression of intangible mystery quite like Alfred Hitchcock. Music, lighting, mise-en-scene, even graphic elements and special effects all combine to create extraordinarily atmospheric effects that merge the best of the film noir, mystery and horror traditions. Vertigo is considered by many the apex of the Hitchcock canon, a masterpiece of mood and ambience that eschews traditional elements of narrative and suspense two-thirds through the film in favor of impressionistic representations of vulnerability and death (Cook, 1981). Hitchcock’s predilection for symmetry in form as well as function hovers over the story. “A kindred symmetry of formal elements leading finally to dissonance and dissolution is enacted in Vertigo’s narrative line: in the way its action doubles back upon itself, constructing and deconstructing its own discourse on matters of similarity and Name 2 difference, innocence and guilt, past and present, illusion and reality” (Gottlieb and Brookhouse, 2002). Hitchcock meshes a characteristically taut storyline with suggestive imagery that evokes what Gottlieb and Brookhouse call an “uncanny feel,” the manifestation of a story that hangs just on the edge of believability (2002). Scottie moves within a darkened world, ensnared in a web of diabolical deceit that appears to have no rhyme or reason until revealed late in the story. Scottie is a helpless victim of his own vulnerability as well as the machinations of Gavin Elster and his doppelganger female accomplice. The persistent themes of height and of falling reinforce Scottie’s vulnerability and the impression that he is a hapless dupe, a feature that is entirely within the tradition of Hitchcock’s wrongly oppressed or unjustly accused protagonists. Vertigo’s power lies in the feeling of the unknown manifesting itself in the life of a uniquely prone “hero.” In one of the film’s most eerie scenes, Hitchcock takes us to the Redwood forest, symbolic of a mysterious and distant past that lies beyond our ability to fully comprehend. Here, Madeline appears to disappear, wraithlike, leaving us to wonder for a moment if she was simply a product of our imaginations, or of Scottie’s. The ominous music and dark setting leave us feeling, if only briefly, that the story may be completely illusory as we lose sight of Madeline. Hitchcock’s unique visual form immerses us in something that we seem to recognize and yet remains something we can never truly know. Vertigo pulls us into a world of longing and fear even in seemingly innocuous scenes, such as that in which Elster convinces Scottie to follow his wife. A wealthy shipping tycoon, Elster holds confers with Scottie amid a web of industrial buildings and machines, a spider Name 3 spinning a web he knows will tempt and easily ensnare Scottie. Vertigo evinces Hitchcock’s fascination with architecture and the geometric quality of buildings, and with the ways in which shapes and angles can augment dramatic effect. The old house (McKittrick Hotel) to which Madeline leads Scottie establishes that Scottie has been led astray in what has become, for him, a ghost city. The looming presence of skyscrapers and the Golden Gate Bridge add by subtraction, seeming to recede into the background, a dim reminder of the lost time in which Scottie is now adrift, moving as though he was oblivious amid tangible examples of the present. The film’s most memorable architectural presence is the mission tower through which “architecture is presented as something vertiginous – something that Hitchcock perfectly visualized in the famous Vertigo tower scene by means of a combination of a zoom in and a track back resulting in a dizzying effect that relies on the strong architectural spatial cues of the staircase seen from the vantage point of the character” (Jacobs, 2007). Lighting is essential to Hitchcock’s evocation of the pseudo-reality that infuses Vertigo. There is an ominous haziness that overhangs the story like a distant storm cloud. “The entire film, its bright San Francisco locations given a gauzy veil of unreality…is steeped in portentous melancholy” (Braund, 2006). Key scenes and characters are infused with lighting and effects that distort reality and reflect Scottie’s struggle to maintain his sanity. When we first see Madeline in the cemetery, she is wreathed in a faint, greenish aura, an effect that photographer Robert Burks uses to great effect and repeats when Judy emerges from the bathroom dressed as Madeline. We are left to wonder whether we are looking through the eyes of a man still in the throes of a crippling delusion. Name 4 Hitchcock was the master of the deep focus shot, in which reality is distorted, the scene stretching out spectacularly in the blink of an eye. His use of this effect in the tower scene, in which the symbol of Scottie’s vertigo seems to elongate infinitely, suggests that the beleaguered detective’s condition may have no end (Wood, 2007). At this moment it seems that “Scottie will never reach his destination. Scottie’s vertigo stretches to breaking point the thread linking his present desire to its future realization” (Ibid). When Scottie finally realizes he has overcome his vertigo, it is a moment of hollow victory. He remains trapped by the past and by his warped and unrequited love. The spiral tower is emblematic of Hitchcock’s use of iconic architecture. The dream-like visual effect of scenes and lighting is wedded to desire, in which Scottie reaches out for something that keeps receding from view and touch. The interplay between the two main characters, Scottie and Madeline/Judy, is a game of chase that plays out amid an ethereal, nightmare landscape. As Scottie tracks an evidently troubled young woman, his interest turns to obsession and sexual longing, the chase becoming more fevered, even desperate. The film’s visual strangeness drives the plot, a near-total lack of dialogue enhancing the mystery and Scottie and Madeline/Judy’s psycho-sexual drama. One can only imagine what is going on in Scottie’s head as he follows his subject from the hotel, to the museum, along the coast and finally to her false suicide attempt in San Francisco Bay. The impression of a situation spiraling out of control is ever-present: “the idea of an object of allure that is forever out of reach, suggests not the circle whose end joins its beginning but the vortex of a spiral whose ends perpetually never connect” (Wood, 2007). Name 5 ‘The Magnificent Ambersons’ – Orson Welles Booth Tarkington’s 1918 novel about the decline of a way of life was more than simply rich source material for Orson Welles’ second major film project. In his biography, Joseph McBride writes that Welles claimed his father, Richard Welles, was a friend of Tarkington’s, which no doubt inspired the younger Welles to style the character of inventor Eugene Morgan after his own father, himself an inventor of sorts (2006). Fresh from the sturm und drang that accompanied the release of Citizen Kane, Welles found a rich opportunity to employ his unique and inventive style, much of it learned from his collaboration with legendary photographer Gregg Toland. The interplay between lighting and depth of shot in the film’s internal scenes, particularly the ballroom scene, create a bittersweet sense of loss. “It is an unabashedly nostalgic film whose mise en scene is carefully calculated to create a sense of longing for the past” (Cook, 1981). Despite the fact that Ambersons was significantly altered in post-production, from a cinematographic standpoint it surely ranks as one of the most visually arresting films ever made. Contrasting lighting, deep-focus movement and Welles’ signature tracking shots imbue the film with a uniquely effective combination of movement and mood. As with Vertigo, mood and atmosphere are the artistic hallmarks of Welles’ rendering of Tarkington’s paean to 19th century American life. The film’s composition and use of decor is also remarkable in its recalling of the genteel ways in which people once interacted during social occasions. “The heads form very frequently the points of an equilateral triangle, (a) gesture towards period formalism” (Higham, 1970). Through this and other innovations Welles, the master storyteller, captures the essence of Tarkington’s story, which prophetically warns that Name 6 progress comes at the expense of civilization. Ambersons evinces a warm, nostalgic glow, using it as a backdrop for increasingly prevalent reminders that the world of the Ambersons is being trampled by technology in the guise of automobiles and urban sprawl. In one of the film’s early scenes, a deceptively unremarkable streetcar ride “leisurely traces a journey by George and his inamorata by carriage…has its meaning; it shows us the ugly telephone poles that are beginning to sprout in the growing city – ironical black figures of doom beyond the old-fashioned ride itself” (Ibid). Welles’ formalistic style lends such visual impositions an alien quality, as though they had been implanted by some sinister, unseen hand. Welles sets the tone for his film at the very beginning, which blends sprightly, upbeat, waltz-like music with a voiceover narration. The line “through all the years that saw their midland town spread and darken into a city” (Welles, 1942) is an arresting counterpoint to the whimsical opening scene, in which a woman hurries out of her house to a horse-drawn streetcar, waiting patiently outside as she straightens her hat and issues orders for dinner. “The image is deliberately two-dimensional and rather artificial, adding to our sense of detachment from the world it depicts” (Rasmussen, 2006). The pointed incongruity of the opening scene tells us that here is a whimsical yet subtle tale. Welles reinforces this impression, using melodrama in such a way that, by the time we realize the nostalgia is meant to be disarming, we’ve been made searingly aware that Ambersons is a full-on tragedy, told as though it were a Greek tragedy couched in the softness of a children’s fable. Technology and progress are key elements of the story, and they combine to form a motif that recurs in Welles’ films. In Ambersons, he is faithful to the spirit of Tarkington’s story, Name 7 challenging the very American tendency to equate technological advancement with progress. Eugene Morgan’s “horseless carriage” is depicted in comical ways, frequently breaking down and requiring the passengers to push it out of snow banks and ditches. George, the young scion of the Amberson family, a stolid opponent of the automobile and all it (and Morgan) represents, gets a face full of exhaust smoke as he struggles to free Morgan’s contraption from the snow, a humorous yet poignant image of the degradation that frequently accompanies unavoidable social change. Welles’ tendency to both playfully embrace and degrade his subjects in this way is not native to Ambersons (he uses it to remarkable effect in Citizen Kane), but it does accord with the film’s dual nature, which is to recall fondly the bucolic past while portraying its sure and abject destruction. Welles’ use of dissolves and scene transitions in Ambersons mimic the functioning of memory and “the mind’s effortless and often deceptive blending of separate, distant memories, whether personal (private recollections) or collective (public myths)” (Rasmussen, 2006). Ambersons shows us the comfortable permanence of a bygone era. Carefree summer scenes dissolve into images of people in heavy topcoats and children playing in the snow, followed by a transition to the Amberson’s Summer ball, their great mansion festooned with lanterns and filled with guests in long dresses and tuxedos (Ibid). The first third of the film is a wealth of photographic virtuosity that establishes not only mood but conveys powerfully the expectation among the town’s denizens that the middle-American lifestyle they naively take for granted will somehow never leave them. Welles had intended to explode this conceit in the film’s original version, which included a final scene in which Eugene Morgan visits Aunt Fanny, now living in Name 8 a boarding house that had once been her home – none other than Amberson Mansion itself. That the loss of this important scene, which was part of the 60 minutes cut from the film, did not detract significantly from Amberson’s brilliance is a tribute to Welles’ formalist conception and vision and his genius as a writer. Period dress is also used to establish mood and setting in Ambersons, an element as important as the grand decor and architecture that pervades the story. Before setting out to court Isabel Amberson, Eugene Morgan tries out the latest styles in front of a full-length oval mirror. He models the latest bowler hats and high-top boots, sartorial status symbols for the nouveau riche. Welles “models” Morgan, offering him up as representative of America’s newly prosperous middle class. Morgan’s financial/entrepreneurial success is part of a tidal change in America’s social landscape, a dubious evolution which will eventually force families like the Ambersons into irrelevance, relegating them to the status of extinct “old money” and people whose names are remembered only on street signs and in library archives. Ultimately, Ambersons (and Citizen Kane) are fables that reflect nostalgia for a lost childhood, or a deep-seated longing for a more innocent time. Welles succeeds at expressing this angst through his use of the long take, deep focus and an almost carnival idealization of American life (Carringer, 1993). It is interesting to note that, as a child, Welles was lauded as a gifted cartoonist/illustrator and became a professional painter before turning to cinema. His sweeping representations of Americana are clearly the result of a director with an artist’s eye for visual style, much as Hitchcock’s sense of shape, angle and architecture informed the most memorable visual elements of Vertigo and his other great films. Name 9 Bibliography Braund, Simon. (2006). “Empire Essay: ‘Vertigo.’” Empire. Web. http://www.empireonline.com/reviews/reviewcomplete.asp?FID=134556 Carringer, Robert L. (1993). The Magnificent Ambersons: A Reconstruction. University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA. 7. Cook, David A. (1981). A History of Narrative Film. W.W. Norton and Company, New York. 302, 367. Gottlieb, Sidney and Brookhouse, Christopher. (2002). Framing Hitchcock: Selected Essays from the Hitchcock Annual. Wayne State University Press, Detroit, MI. 251, 258. Higham, Charles. (1970). The Films of Orson Welles. University of California Press, Berkeley, CA. 55. Hitchcock, Alfred. (1958). (Director). Vertigo. [Motion Picture]. United States: Paramount Pictures-Universal Pictures. Jacobs, Steven. (2007). The Wrong House: The Architecture of Alfred Hitchcock. 010 Publishers, Rotterdam, NK. 28. McBride, Joseph. (2006). Orson Welles. Da Capo Press, New York. 54. Rasmussen, Randy L. (2006). Orson Welles: Six Films Analyzed, Scene by Scene. McFarland and Company, Jefferson, NC. 62. Name 10 Welles, Orson. (1942.) (Director). The Magnificent Ambersons. [Motion Picture]. United States: RKO Radio Pictures. Wood, Robin. “Camera Movement in ‘Vertigo.’” The Alfred Hitchcock Scholars. The MacGuffin. February 2007. Read More