Graveyard
23 04 2007Dr. Campbell, you should be absolutely thrilled, because–finally–I am going to talk about Vertigo. But just a little, for now. I figure it’s best if I deal with little chunks of the film at a time, because I want to be thorough. In fact, this entire post is going to cover just one scene. Ready?
THE GRAVEYARD SCENE:
First, let’s examine the way in which Madeleine is framed in each of the P.O.V. shots.
Notice any similarities? In nearly every single shot, she is in the exact center of the frame. What message is Hitchcock trying to communicate through this, what effect does it have on us, and what does it tell us about Scottie? In this scene, he is following her through the graveyard, so every shot of her is from his point of view. This means that Madeleine is always in the center of Scottie’s focus. This ties back to the very centrally-focused opening credits. (The Punisher discusses this very well, so I’m not going to go into it further here.) However, going through this scene, I also noticed an interesting use of both color and architecture to create certain effects. Notice the orange flowers in the 1st, 2nd, 4th, 9th, and 10th shots above. Now how about these?
Yes, it is possible that there is simply a large quantity of orange flowers in this garden. But Hitchcock didn’t have to frame his shots in this particular way; these must have been included intentionally. I’ve been sitting here for the past half hour, trying to figure out what the orange flowers represent, but maybe this is just one of those realizations that will come once I stop thinking about it, probably in the middle of my sociology class.
So there was going to be a whole lot more here, but as I got more involved in analyzing certain aspects of this film, I hit upon a spectacular idea for my final paper. I feel like I’m cutting this entry short, but I can’t let myself go any further in this direction until I do my final blog ;)
P.S. I figured out the orange. Bwahaha! Oh, and Stephanie Breijo, you’re my favorite. Thanks for lending me the DVD! (Yay, screenshots!)
[...] I’m going to pause here to introduce (gasp) a new color. Everyone else seems to have ignored this, but I think it’s an important–even essential–supplement to the red and green. In my post earlier this week, I pondered the meaning of all the orange flowers. Well, now I’ve got it! Because green represents the fear associated with love and red represents the courage, orange has to play a similar, but separate role. Let me make this very clear–I don’t believe that orange is used in this movie as an occasional substitute for red. We need to assume that Hitchcock was extremely conscious of every color choice and every shot composition choice. So what does orange represent? Desire. Desire is related to the fear and courage that are associated with love and often intermingles with them, but is also separate. Hitchcock probably felt the need to differentiate between courage and desire. The courage goes hand-in-hand with the fear, whereas desire, represented by orange, is independent of these. Scottie is watching Madeleine in the graveyard, and we are suddenly presented with shots framed by orange flowers. Also note that it is not just Madeleine appearing with these orange flowers. Scottie has his own share of flaming flowery shots. When we realize that this whole scene is a very intentional act put on by Madeleine, we also realize that she must have been watching him. So for her, too, Scottie is surrounded by orange. Hmmm. [...]
Confused!
I just read your comment about… 3 times and still i seem confused. Help me out here ?