Film concert evening: Vertigo by Alfred Hitchcock

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To mark the 4th edition of its festival, on August 18^th, the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande will take over the lawn at Genève-Plage for a cinematic evening dedicated to Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo.

Hitchcock’s style

Alfred Hitchcock (1899-1980) is renowned for his distinctive film-making approach, which combines psychological intrigue, suspense, and tension. His ability to capture the audience's emotional attention and keep them riveted to their seats throughout his films is remarkable. Hitchcock's meticulous attention to detail, intelligent storytelling techniques and innovative camera work distinguish him as one of the greatest directors of all time.

A motion picture masterpiece

Released in 1958, Vertigo is a psychological thriller characterised by its technical innovations,  captivating narrative, rich character development and stunning visual presentation. Despite receiving a mixed response upon release, the film is now considered one of Hitchcock's most accomplished works and one of the greatest films ever.

Vertigo tackles the topics of love and desire, as well as the thin line between reality and illusion, through the story of John 'Scottie' Ferguson (James Stewart), a detective suffering from vertigo who finds himself in a labyrinth of mystery and obsession when he is hired to follow a woman named Madeleine Elster (Kim Novak).

The film explores the characters’ psychological complexities and uses visual storytelling to convey their inner turmoil. Vertigo owes its intense emotional depth to Alfred Hitchcock's skilful direction and to excellent performances by the actors. The subjective camera and the haunting musical score by the legendary Bernard Herrmann accentuate the sense of vertigo and acrophobia experienced by the main character.

Hitchcock’s cameo

One of the hallmarks of Hitchcock's films are his cameos. These brief appearances in his own pictures are fun to spot for the audience and add a personal touch to his work. In Vertigo, about 10 minutes into the film, Hitchcock can be seen from behind, wearing a grey suit and walking past a building.

Bernard Herrmann: From Citizen Kane to Taxi Driver

For four decades, Bernard Herrmann revolutionised film music by imposing his own harmonic and rhythmic vocabulary. Instead of lush melodies, he composed short, original, even experimental figures, repeated obsessively and perfectly matching the style of the images on screen.

After writing scores for Orson Welles' radio broadcasts, including the famous 1938 adaptation of The War of the Worlds, Bernard Herrmann continued his collaboration with the director on his first two films, Citizen Kane (1941) and The Magnificent Ambersons (1942).

He collaborated with William Dieterle on the films The Devil and Daniel Webster (1941), for which he won an Oscar, and Portrait of Jennie (1949), which gave him the opportunity to explore the sounds of the theremin. He also contributed to the soundtracks of Joseph L. Mankiewicz's The Ghost and Mrs. Muir (1947) and Robert Wise's The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), which allowed him to experiment further with two theremins, pianos and a brass section.

Herrmann went on to compose the music for a series of fantasy and science fiction films. These included Journey to the Center of the Earth (1959) and films by the master of stop-motion animation Ray Harryhausen: The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (1958), The 3 Worlds of Gulliver (1960), Mysterious Island (1961), and Jason and the Argonauts (1963).

He wrote one of his most beautiful compositions for Fahrenheit 451 (1966) by director François Truffaut, for whom he also composed the score for La mariée était en noir (The Bride Wore Black) (1968). In the early seventies, the New Hollywood generation took an interest in the composer's work. Brian De Palma asked him to write the soundtrack for Sisters (1973) and Obsession (1976). His last score, singular and inspired, was for Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver (1976). He died on the evening of the last recording day.

Collaboration with Hitchcock

Bernard Herrmann's name is closely associated with that of Alfred Hitchcock, for whom he wrote nine scores and produced some of his most memorable works. The relationship between the director and the composer was unique and productive, with Hitchcock giving Herrmann great creative control over the soundscapes of his films.

Before Vertigo, the two men had collaborated on The Trouble with Harry (1955), The Wrong Man (1956) and The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956). They went on to work together on the classics North by Northwest (1959), Psycho (1960), and Marnie (1963). Herrmann abruptly ended his partnership with Hitchcock when the director rejected his score for Torn Curtain (1966) on the advice of Universal Studios, which wanted a more jazz and pop-influenced score.

Vertigo soundtrack

Although Herrmann's first three scores for Hitchcock were not the most significant of his career, Vertigo marked a new starting point for the collaboration between the composer and the filmmaker. Hitchcock, having finally grasped the emotional charge that Herrmann could inject into his films, gave Herrmann ample scope to express his creativity.

The plot of Vertigo fired Herrmann's imagination and gave free rein to his lyricism, as it corresponded fully to his romantic sensibility. The film's score is a testament to his talent as a composer and his ability to enhance the narrative through music.

Herrmann always conducted his own works personally, but due to a musicians' strike in the United States, the music for Vertigo was recorded in England and Austria by the Sinfonia of London Orchestra, conducted by Muir Mathieson. Herrmann, who considered Vertigo one of his best compositions, deeply regretted not being able to conduct it.

Fusion between images and music

Both a cinematic and a musical masterpiece, Vertigo weaves a suffocating atmosphere that results as much from the lighting and filters used by Hitchcock as from Herrmann's score. The images are heightened by the music and the music by the images.

Herrmann employs a series of innovative techniques to increase the tension and heighten the atmosphere of Vertigo. The lush orchestration, combining strings, woodwind and brass, creates a rich, immersive sound, supported by the incorporation of the theremin, whose eerie, unsettling effect is perfectly suited to the narrative.

As the film begins, the music spins along Saul Bass's hypnotic spirals superimposed on Kim Novak's eyes: endless circles of major and minor thirds interspersed with quivering dissonances. Matching the narrative, the music literally makes the audience dizzy: it spirals round and round, never finding an acceptable resolution, never finding the appeasement of an ending.

The score's haunting, dreamlike and mysterious main theme captures the very essence of the psychological drama. Throughout the film, the composer skilfully plays with the theme and its variations. He lines them up, superimposes them, readapts them and interweaves them with an intense emotional fury that reinforces the impact of the decisive scenes and draws the audience deep into the characters' psyches.

The sinister two-note motif that imitates the foghorns on San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge is directly connected to the film, in which the horns can distinctly be heard sounding at Fort Point, where a crucial incident involving Kim Novak's character takes place.

Reinforcing the themes of obsession and emotional turmoil, Herrmann's score reaches its peak in the iconic scene at Mission San Juan Bautista.

Vertigo's music considerably enriches the images it accompanies, but even without them the score retains its full force. It has found a life of its own outside the film, and can be heard as such, if not as a coherent narrative, at least as a succession of spellbinding fragments.

A defining achievement in the history of film music

Bernard Herrmann's work on Vertigo had a profound influence on film composers for decades. His innovative use of music as a psychological tool paved the way for its integration as a narrative element. Many contemporary composers cite Vertigo's score as a source of inspiration.

Critically acclaimed at the time of the film's release, Herrmann's score was not nominated for an Oscar. Nevertheless, it remains one of the most famous film scores in cinema history.

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Photo credit :  Emmanuel Doffou