Film Noir In Alfred Hitchcock's Film Vertigo

Hitchcock makes use of a number of techniques in Vertigo and brings them together to make a film that is considered to be one of his greatest masterpieces. Through the use of colour, lighting, camera movement, dialogue and characterisation, Hitchcock produces a film that fascinates and intrigues us.

What makes Hitchcock an Auteur is that he uses styles in his films in which in that if it was found in another movie the watchers would in a split second realize that he made it since he generally adheres to his one of a kind styles.

She is the killer in the film, yet is not the killer. Hitchcock also makes some scenes in the film sound so immense, that he is unable to describe it. As he describes something, he talks really fast, giving us an impression that it is a fast scene. He also does not finish the sentences. This makes the audience want to see what really happens in the film.

Sir Alfred Joseph Hitchcock was born on August 13, 1899 in London. He worked in engineering for a few years before he entered the film industry 1920. In 1939 he won an Oscar for his first American film, Rebecca, and therefore moved to Hollywood. He’s made over 50 movies, including Psycho, The Birds, and Vertigo. These films were the first to really introduce and combine suspense with sex and violence. This was essentially the reason that he was coined the term “Master of Suspense” because no other director had explored these themes previously (bio.com). Many of his movies allude to moments and scenarios not only from when he was growing up, but also have similarities within each other – most notably Psycho (1960) and The Birds (1963).

The 1920’s femme fatale was a dangerous, foxy, seductive and innocent looking lady. They were like damsels in distress when they approached men, but ultimately become deadly when men get entangled with them. Femme Fatale can be traced back to the old days of the Old Testament Bible. The story of Samson and Delilah is a story of a man who gets entangled with a femme fatale as she was the reason why his power was discovered, because she deceived him several times in order to know the root of his power. Ultimately, Samson fell for it. In the Maltese Falcon, Brigid O’Shaughnessy is the femme fatale. The men who trusted her ended up dead. The acts of Brigid O’Shaughnessy make her a villain. Brigid O’Shaughnessy’s character of the femme fatale fits

The silent star Dolores Costello was brought out of retirement to play Isabel Amberson. Welles also made the surprising choice of selecting contract player Tim Holt for the role of George Minafer. Holt was considered a mistake by most

As one of the most widely acclaimed and influential directors of the postwar era, Stanley Kubrick enjoyed a reputation and a standing unique among the filmmakers of his day. He had a brilliant career with relatively few films. An outsider, he worked beyond the confines of Hollywood, which he disliked, maintaining complete control of his projects and making movies according to his own ideas and time constraints. To him, filmmaking was a form of art and unlike Hollywood, not a business.

Alfred Hitchcock is arguably the greatest director of all time. Many of his films are considered standards of American cinema and inspired many of today’s directors. Even though Hitchcock is known as timeless director, he had an understanding of philosophy that was beyond his time. Hitchcock had a brilliant perception as to how the mind works and human reaction. Hitchcock’s understanding of philosophy can be seen in his film Vertigo and illustrates how many theories can be debilitating in everyday life.

The meaning of femme fatale is; “a woman who is very attractive in a mysterious way, usually leading men into danger or causing their destruction” (dictionary.cambridge.org). These women are not always leading men, per se, into danger. It is debateable whether sex appeal and charm leads men, and women as well, to want to be similar them and follow their lead. If they end up leading their followers into committing a crime, or destruction of something in their lives, then this to be a true definition of the “femme fatale”. The characters who are playing the role of being a member of the cliques do not always have the highest standards of morals.

In the film Vertigo directed by Alfred, Kim Novak who played Madeleine was seen as a person who has a peculiar behavior. For example Madeleine would spaces out from time to time. She would disappear, and start her afternoons going to a flower shop, museum, graveyard, hotel and then stops by the golden gate bridge to jump off the bay. Madeleine husband Gavin hired Scottie an ex-detective to follow his wife around because she was act too strange. Judy Barton is who Scottie thinks is the real madeleine, but she is an impersonation of Madeleine.

The femme fatale is a mysterious, seductive woman who lures men into dangerous or compromising situations, attracting

Dark Passage (Delmer Daves) is an example of film noir because it has femme fatales that lie and use sex to get what they want and hard boiled detectives that always want to know too much just like in The Big Sleep (Howard Hawks) and Chinatown (Roman Polanski). In film noir femme fatales constantly lie, whether it’s to protect themselves from going to jail or protecting their embarrassing past. Femme fatales will go to the end of the earth to keep the truth from the Hard Boiled Detective or anyone who thinks will get in their way. In the movie The Big Sleep, Vivian lies because she doesn’t want people to find out that she has killed Shawn Regan. When Vivian invites Marlowe to dinner after he has finished with Carmen’s case, Vivian pays him off. Only that her dad, who hired Marlowe didn’t instruct her to. She lied and said that he did just so Marlowe would stop looking into the Shawn Regan case. In Chinatown Evelyn Mulwray lies because she doesn’t want to tell JJ about her humiliating and mournful past. She avoids telling the truth so JJ doesn’t find out that Catherine is her sister and her daughter because her Dad, Noah Cross raped her. When JJ and Evelyn meet in the restaurant JJ asks why she isn’t upset that her husband, who is now dead, cheated on her. She then comes up with a lie that she was having many affairs as well, when in actuality none of them were.

The “femme fatale” was a common theme in the 1940’s it is a female lead who uses sensuality and mystery to seduce and manipulate the male character of the film. No American detective novel written in the thirties would be complete without the figure of the "femme fatale," a French term meaning deadly woman. A femme fatale is an irresistibly beautiful woman who uses her sexuality to seduce men and lure them into dangerous situations to serve her own selfish interests. There is a fair few of these in The Big Sleep, but none of them is quite the dynamo that Vivian turns out to be. I also believe that Carmen Sternwood could be considered a femme fatale as well.

The value of both women is repeatedly emphasized as residing in their beauty and sexuality. Film scholar Jans Wager states that “I take retro noir to present the return of the repressed and to serve as the locus of conservative politics, the return of tradition and the reassertion (with a vengeance) of patriarchy, while neo-noir, to a certain extent, features a subversive politics, an attempted revolt against tradition, and at least a partial unmooring of patriarchy.” Discussions of film noir commonly revolve around feminist debates such as Wager’s that examine the role of patriarchy in the construction of the femme fatale character. The femme fatale archetype underwent an update during the transition from film noir to neo noir. While the femme fatale of classic noir has “always been an active, calculating character,” the emergence of

When people think of Alfred Hitchcock people usually tend to think about his later work, most notably Psycho, North by