Soon his intrigue is replaced by obsession and his dreams by nightmares, as he edges towards discovering a dark, terrible secret. As WWII rages around him, Flavières is drawn into an obsessive cat-and-mouse chase across Paris. Madeleine has been behaving strangely, and her husband wants answers - answers that she isn't willing to give him. Vertigo would mark filmmakers' imagination: Brian De Palma, Dario Argento and Chantal Akerman figure among the heirs of this film which paved the way for the modern cinema.Book Synopsis An irresistible gift edition of the classic French noir novel that inspired Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo In World War II-era Paris, a troubled-ex policeman is entangled in a web of deceit and lies when he investigates a woman's strange behavior Flavières doesn't really want to investigate his old's friend's wife, but he doesn't feel he has much of a choice. The colour of the woman's hair is the sign of female identity or duality: brunette and blonde constitute here two facets of the same woman. It reveals the female nape in the shadowing scenes where "investigation and conquest blend together" (5).
This work crystallises motifs and themes linked to the artistic representation of the hair: the famous coiled chignon of Kim Novak – who thus enters the ranks of the "Hitchcock blondes" – is at once fetichistic, erotic and deadly. In Vertigo's intrigue there resonates the myth of Pygmalion, whose desire gives birth to the woman he sculpted (2) and Bruges-la-Morte, in which Rodenbach depicts the melancholy of a widower who crisscrosses the town, obsessed by "that hair of a fluid and textual yellow" (3).Īccording to Alain Bergala, curator of the exhibition Brune/Blonde, Vertigo is no doubt the most beautiful monument in film to feminine hair in the history of the cinema" (4). "What interested me most was the efforts James Stewart made to recreate a woman from the image of a dead woman", Hitchcock declared to François Truffaut (1). When he meets the brunette and ordinary Judy (also Kim Novak), it is Madeleine he is seeking to bring back to life.
Soon falling for this mysterious blonde, Scottie cannot prevent her from killing herself. Scottie Ferguson (James Stewart), a former inspector, is charged with shadowing the elegant Madeleine (Kim Novak), who was said to identify with a suicidal ancestor (Carlotta). In 1957, Alfred Hitchcock (1899-1980) made his 49th film: Vertigo, inspired by the novel by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac D'entre les morts.
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