"A Month of VERTIGO," TCM and...Synchronicity

Sans Soleil

This blog was consumed by Vertigo all through January and half of February. I thought I'd moved on, was looking forward to Mad Men on Sunday nights - and then I opened the March issue of TCM's Now Playing guide.

One of my Vertigo guest bloggers, Dan Auiler, author of the definitive Vertigo: the Making of a Hitchcock Classic, considered two films by French filmmaker Chris Marker in his piece, Vertigo for Life: La Jetee  (1962) and Sans Soleil (1983). I read of Marker with interest; I was completely unfamiliar with his work, but Dan's references to his films and the links of each to Hitchcock's Vertigo piqued my interest and I put both on my "to watch" list. I did not have to wait for very long...

This Sunday night (for some, the wee hours of Monday morning), March 4, Turner Classic Movies will air both films, Sans Soleil at 2:15 am Eastern/11:15 pm Pacific, and La Jetee at 4:00 am Eastern/1:00am Pacific.

La Jetee

Chris Marker, born in 1921 and still with us today, studied philosophy with Jean-Paul Sartre in the 1930s and was part of the French Resistance during World War II. He is best known for the two films mentioned as well as A Grin Without a Cat (1977) and the 1985 documentary, AK, on Akira Kurosawa. Marker is classified among France's Left Bank (Rive Gauche) filmmakers, a group contemporary to but considered distinct from the French New Wave. Others in the Left Bank cluster include Alain Resnais (Hiroshima mon amour, Last Year at Marienbad, Mon oncle d'Amerique), Agnes Varda (Le Bonheur, Vagabond) and others - like Varda's husband Jacques Demy (Lola, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, The Young Girls of Rochefort).

La Jetee, composed primarily of cinematically showcased still photos, has been called a Science Fiction masterpiece (even at a short 28 minutes) and has inspired or provided the basis for several later films. Of these, the most familiar to and popular with American audiences is Terry Gilliam's 1995 hit, 12 Monkeys, starring Bruce Willis, Brad Pitt and Christopher Plummer.

Sans Soleil reflects on time and memory and features several locales around the world - including the San Francisco Bay Area where locations shown in Hitchcock's Vertigo are revisited. Sans Soleil is said to recall Vertigo's structure and themes.

Between Vertigo, the Oscars and Mad Men, I'll be making time to discover Chris Marker this weekend...

Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo

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Vertigo for Life

by guest contributor Dan Auiler

A month of Vertigo is light sentence. Most of us who encounter this film end up serving life sentences. Our lives, our thoughts become trapped in the vortex of the strong currents this film produces. Vertigo's meaning and importance in film have become so varied and vital that choosing one tendril spinning out from one of John Whitney's Lissajous diagrams is challenging - but keeping that line of thought from swirling back into the film's center and tossing you out on some other surprising shore is just about impossible.

The film has become something I can seldom approach head-on, in a straight line. For example, the original idea for this blog post was to look at Vertigo and the films of Chris Marker. But even on the way to introducing the idea, we encounter John Whitney. John Whitney was the groundbreaking computer animation filmmaker who not only invented computer controlled animation, but hand-machined the devices himself out of surplus Air Force engines. It was on one of these devices that Whitney created the opening spiral designs that Saul Bass used for the title sequence.



And now, aiming still at Chris Marker, detoured out of essence to a brief John Whitney nod, we encounter another 20th century giant, Saul Bass. The very look of the last hundred years, let alone the way movies open, have been impacted by the vision and design abilities of Saul Bass.

Selecting Saul Bass, John Whitney - these are obvious choices today. In 1957, these guys were not household names even to filmmakers. One of Hitchcock's remarkable abilities was his choice in collaborators. Other posts this month have outlined the other key components of the design team for Vertigo. Bernard Herrmann, Edith Head, Samuel Taylor - again, hindsight provokes us to ask how the film could fail.

La Jetee (1962)

Now I'm far from Chris Marker. But I thought you would appreciate the detour. Marker has also been a life-long devotee of Vertigo. His break-out short film La Jetee references the film's famous tree sequence; La Jetee is a further examination of the aspects of time, obsession and our movable points in time. (here is the complete text to La Jetee: La Jetee by Chris Marker)

Marker, in a later work of opposite dimensions, San Soleil, tours San Francisco and Vertigo's film locations, marking in film at least the first of the pilgrims to visit Lombard Street, Fort Point, the Legion of Honor art museum, San Juan Bautista. Vertigo aficionados feel compelled to make this pilgrimage. It was my first trip after college. I'm not sure why this was so vital - but I am not alone. (There are several paid tours of the film sites available)
 

Filmmaker Chris Marker

Vertigo and its production history led me to discover Marker. His reference to the film in his own was the starting point. Now I'm fascinated by his total mess-with-your-head understanding (or non-understanding) of time. The English version of San Soleil begins with these lines from TX Eliot's Ash Wednesday:

"Because I know that time is always time
and place is always and only place
And what is actual is actual only for one time
and only for one place."

What then is the time and place for Vertigo? This is a profound question in the structure of the film. It is an even more profound question for us, the film's fans.

What is the time and place of this film in our lives? For me, it has been the gateway, the worm hole, the central vortex around which all of Hitchcock's films and subsequently my own psychic life turn.
 
Use Vertigo as a starting point and then lose yourself as a wanderer. My latest encounter on the Vertigo trail is the three-part video essay curated here at the Museum of Moving Image. This is accessible but heady stuff.

There are other "better" films even in the Hitchcock canon, but Vertigo is perhaps the most profound pop film. Everyone chooses which films lie closest to their own heart, their own story. Vertigo is that film for me.

~

Dan Auiler is the best-selling author of Vertigo: The Making of a Hitchcock Classic (St. Martin's Press 1998, Kindle 2011) and Hitchcock's Notebooks (HarperCollins 1999). In addition to his writing, he has taught for more than 20 years in the Los Angeles area. 

Dan is considered one of the foremost authorities on Alfred Hitchcock and has made appearances on CNN and other major networks as an expert on Hitchcock, Billy Wilder and general film history.

It was after reading Dan's painstakingly researched and thoroughly insightful book on Vertigo that The Lady Eve was inspired to undertake A Month of VERTIGO. Dan's blog is Vertigo Falls.

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