The document discusses Hitchcock's film Vertigo in the context of the auteur theory of authorship. It argues that Vertigo exemplifies Hitchcock's personal directorial style through its suspenseful elements, characterization, and use of techniques like camerawork and editing. However, it also notes that defining an auteur's personal style and identifying their most representative works is complex, as different critics may interpret style differently or focus on different aspects of a film.

1. Hitchcock as an Auteur - Vertigo
Like with many other celebrated directors, it can be argued that
Hitchcock had a certain inimitable style that was carried throughout
the bulk of his cinematic enterprise. Vertigo, in this regard, situates
Hitchcock at his element, and as far as bold assertions go, this film
can be considered Hitchcock‟s masterpiece (as opposed to the so-
called „quintessential‟ Hitchcock film, Psycho). In situating Vertigo in
the context of the auteur theory of authorship we can safely say
that Hitchcock left his print, that is his distinctive personal style,
both in terms of stylistic and diegetic aspects. With this notion in
mind proponents of the classical version of the auteur theory have
consistently represented this director as a principal exemplar of their theory. Indeed, Hitchcock‟s approach
has been defined in such strict terms that it has spawned an adjective rooted in the author‟s name and
supplied a film making methodology that any aspiring director is familiar with either in emulation or
criticism (in most cases the former). Above and beyond this assertion, it is all too easy to equate the
position the protagonist of Vertigo, who has an obsessive-compulsive relationship with the recreation of a
peculiar object of love, with that of Hitchcock‟s personal obsession with a similar subject in his personal life.
The auteur theory, together with psychoanalytic interpretations could account for Scotty‟s behavior and
motivation with that of the director‟s own personal psychological infatuations, and to a large degree, it
would be correct in assuming that both are commensurate. Yet such conclusions, although interesting, are
secondary to the question of whether auteur theory is essential to making them.
Auteur theories stem from the notion of a "personal style", and not necessarily only on the part of the
director. But if this is the grand revelation that we are faced with, we have attained nothing more that a
vague truism in view of the fact that directors, or for that matter any other participant in a film production,
can only be defined in terms of his personal style, this being a cumulative collection of the auteur‟s personal
experiences, opinions, history, talent and so forth. Furthermore, the capacity in which this personal style is
imprinted in the cinematic work can be seen as a reflection of that very same phenomenon, that is the
attribute of having a forceful personal style. And if a director does not seem to have consistent style, we can
come to the conclusion that this itself is his personal style or, similarly, if the director appropriates the styles
of his collaborators or some other auteur, we can again claim this as his personal style, a style of imitation.
Traditionally, auteur theorists have ranked directors on the forcefulness of the imposition of their style.
Nevertheless, because we can come to the conclusions that are outlined above, the criterion of visible
imposition of style can be challenged in its effectiveness of identifying auteurs. Consequently, directors who
were thought to have a weak personal style have recently been triumphed as true auteurs, specifically in
their capacity to subtlety impose their personal style on a work.
Once these gates were open to directors who were not
traditionally known as auteurs, it became clear that virtually any
director, screenwriter, or for that matter almost any person
involved in a movie‟s production, could potentially fall under
the aegis of the auteur theory. Auteur as personality has largely
been replaced with auteur as critical construct precisely
because of such concerns.

2. One of the more problematic aspects of auteur theory is the question as to what constitutes personal style:
form or content, story or theme, genre or acting? The next question in this
process is to determine what specific aspects of Hitchcock‟s movies reflect that
personal style, and which movies can be deemed to be the apogee of this style.
We know there has to be something recurrent in an auteur‟s work for it to be
branded as "personal style", but the limitations of what that something is have
been challenged, and effectively open to a wide range of interpretation. In the
case of Vertigo, there is a plethora of "classical" Hitchcock qualities that the
movie embodies but it may be helpful to focus on suspense and terror as
expressed both in diegetic and stylistic elements. Vertigo can be seen as
Hitchcock at his very best with well-defined characters, a haunting mystery and
the use of colour imagery and soft focus photography to set an evocative
mood. However, the main appeal of Vertigo, the fact that it can be approached
in many ways, is also its main weakness in terms of auteur theory. As detractors
point out, it is a traditional love story, a straight detective story, a character study of an obsessed man, a
supernatural thriller, and a surreal dream (in diegesis alone). Suggesting that one facet within the story
supercedes another becomes a contentious enterprise, and suggesting that the diegesis supercedes editing
or cinematography is even more debatable. When we view the film holistically, in terms of personal style,
we see that all these elements, rather than being juxtaposed and separate, are instead meshed in counter-
dependant relationships. Plucking out certain aspects of a movie and exemplifying them as the „personal
style of Hitchcock‟ hardly becomes an impartial endeavor. And because the methodology in the gathering
of such criteria is undefined and because the process of identifying the most salient elements is non-
standardized, it becomes debatable which films actually occupy the position of "best film" in a director‟s
repertoire. We are left with a foggy notion of what "personal style" constitutes, with most critics being more
adept at pointing out examples rather than concepts within the corpus of a director. And in the case of
Vertigo, claiming that it is Hitchcock‟s masterpiece, or what we may term as the prime exemplar of his
"personal style", it becomes clear that proposing an explanation for this claim will be a complex, extensive
and debatable task.
Hitchcock used a full array of cinematic and editing techniques, including unusual camera angles, classic
Hollywood montage, and carefully placed non-diegetic inserts. The "feeling" of vertigo, for example, is
achieved through a combination of camera techniques: physically moving the camera away from the stairs
while simultaneously zooming the lens in on them. The idea here is to create a sense of dizziness and
confusion, but in this case the technique does not actually provide for such an effect in most spectators.
The viewer of the film does not actually feel vertigo, but nevertheless still identifies with the author‟s
intention and appreciates the author‟s use of artifice in that intention. A similar situation occurs in Scotty‟s
nightmare sequence where the superimposition of Scotty‟s head on rotating psychedelic colors in the
background is meant to signify his nightmare experience. Although these effects may seem crude by
today‟s special effects standards the idea behind them is not to replicate a nightmare in the sense of an
illusion on the part of the viewer. In fact, one cannot experience a nightmare while being conscious at all.
Instead, the spectator recognizes this cinematic technique as an attempt to represent an effect that cannot
be experienced through the medium of cinema. In this regard it is fairly clear that Hitchcock is not trying to
create an illusion for the viewer in the strictest sense. The effects are by no means transparent, and in fact
they are meant to stick out from the otherwise spatial-realist style that the rest of the film depends on. If
Hitchcock was genuinely trying to replicate these two phenomena, we can safely say that he failed. And

3. because he most probably was not trying to do that we can therefore suppose that he had no intention of
putting the spectator under some kind of illusion, namely the illusion of vertigo or a nightmare. However
this fact does not preclude other parts of the film from being evaluated with the illusion thesis. It merely
substantiates the notion that Hitchcock, as director, sought the audience‟s recognition of Scotty‟s vertigo
through formalistic cinematic representation rather than inducing an illusion of vertigo in each spectator.
Vertigo gives us the impression that nothing on the screen had arrived there by chance; this is especially
evident in the meticulous set up of plot. At certain points, the viewer is guided through key story fragments
by the use of camera techniques. The equating of Madeleine‟s bouquet and the bouquet of the painting
that she is looking at is a prime example. Hitchcock wants us to identify with Scotty, and with Scotty‟s
reasoning, so he moves the focus of the camera from one object to the other as to replicate Scotty‟s own
recognition. These elements of the movie are in a certain sense "overdone", or overemphasized. By so
blatantly pointing out the connection between these two objects one is bound to think that Hitchcock takes
the spectator for a fool for whom these two similarities have to be shown in excruciating detail so that he
understands what is going on. It is only near the end of the plot that one realizes this guidance was really
not guidance but deception. We are forced to tie together the previous elements of the plot, the ones that
were so apparently pointed out to us, and we realize that they all make sense. But not in the sense we
believed when Hitchcock first directed us to them. Through the eventual revealing of diegesis and his
layering of our exposure to this revealing of key story sequences, Hitchcock is playing a clever game of
deception the audience can only appreciate at the end. The viewer is fooled and the revelation of this
subterfuge inevitably brings a pleasure to the viewer. This deception is pleasurable precisely because it is
private and because it is subtle. Instead of being humiliated because of our gullibility, we are surprised at
the complex and devious way that Hitchcock‟s presented the story through plot. We appreciate the framing
of the plot as a skillful way of inducing false beliefs about the truth in the fiction.
Auxiliary to this phenomenon is the question of how film creates the feeling of suspense and tension. This
can be partly answered through a similar argument that relies on the combination of film form and the
positioning of diegetic sequences that withhold story information. One of Vertigo‟s most ingenious
instantiation of this is a story sequence that would be more crude, and less enthralling, if it was included in
the plot. When Scotty pulls out Madeleine, who is unconscious, from the water, the next scene we see is her
nude in the apartment, her clothes hanging to dry. We make a story conclusion that Scotty must have
undressed her, and considering his pronounced infatuation with her, we can imagine how his desires for her
must have been restrained (or were they?) when she was naked and unconscious before him. If Hitchcock
had shown us this assumed story sequence we would not have the same emotional response because the
indirect relationship with diegetic elements would not be present. Since the onus of conclusion is with the

4. spectator this scene is contrived in the greatest sense. We are given the result and the circumstances, but it
is our imagination that fills in the gaps, with each of us painting the story with different levels of perversion.
The film, instead of being a purely passive enterprise, is now a more dynamic entity that thrusts upon the
spectator an undeniable responsibility, namely that of imagination.
Finally, the use of characters in fictional movies brings out several complex issues that are under much
debate. The character of Madeleine Elster, played by the actress Kim Novak, eventually assumes the role of
Judy Barton. As a possible implication of such a setup, the audience, by understanding the deceptive
relation of Madeleine to Judy, acquires an understanding of the relation between Novak and the two
fictional characters. At one point we realize that Novak was playing Judy who was in turn playing
Madeleine. The so-called reality of this movie, that is the truth of the fiction, may approximate the process
that we delve into when we accept the fiction of a movie experience in general. We must, at certain points
of our cinematic experience, assume that Novak is not really playing herself, namely the real life individual
named Kim Novak. She is the character of Madeleine, and only in that capacity can we empathize with her
qua the story. If we do not take this epistemological step, we would be hard pressed in understanding her
actions as a character in the movie. Therefore, just as we feel for Madeleine‟s compulsions at the beginning
of the movie, we also feel for fictional characters as a whole, and this requires psychological epoché to the
one of our thinking that Judy is not Madeleine. This epistemic relationship is by no means consciously
accessible to us throughout the experience; it is only available upon reflection. And in examining our state
during the film we are lead to assume that it is one of more than just representation, unless we can account
for such peculiar epistemic „bracketing of information‟ with fictional characters solely through the process of
representation. Precisely because we enjoy a movie only by such „bracketing information‟, for the lack of a
better term, can we enjoy it.
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