Vertigo Context

Influences:
1920s art-film movement-  Film critics and film studies scholars typically define an art film 

as possessing "formal qualities that mark them as different from mainstream Hollywood 

films", which can include, among other elements, a sense of social realism, an emphasis on 

the authorial expressiveness of the director, and a focus on the thoughts, dreams, or 

motivations of characters as opposed to the unfolding of a clear, goal-driven story. 


German Expressionist movement: Method of expressing the inner life of characters through 

unusual camera angles, moody lighting and exaggerated mise en scene.

Soviet Montage cinema: Soviet montage theory is an approach to understanding and 

creating cinema that relies heavily upon editing, hence Hitchcock's elaborate editing 

techniques came from soviet films from the 1920s.

The Kuleshov experiment: The Kuleshov effect is a film editing 

(montage) effect demonstrated by Soviet filmmaker Lev Kuleshov in the 1910s and 1920s. 

It is a mental phenomenon by which viewers derive more meaning from the interaction of 

two sequential shots than from a single shot in isolation. Hitchcock obtained a fondness of the Point - of - view shot  and crosscutting between the person seeing something in a scene, and the things seen, through this source.


1950s/1960s issues:



World war 2 left american society full of anxiety, discomfort and uncertainty:

-Revelations   (surprising and previously unknown fact ) of Germany’s extermination of the Jews and the explosion of two atomic bombs over Japan shook the culture and confirmed how easily myths of civility order could fail

•Late 1950s – Americans deeply troubled by so many social shifts:

Families- linking in with gender:

The 1950s was a time when social norms regarding the family began to change. The birth rate increased due to a rising standard of living and low inflation. With the establishment of the Federal Housing Administration, families were able to take out mortgages and buy homes in record numbers. This resulted in families increasingly moving from cities and rural areas to suburbs. Another change to the family occurred when women began to work outside of the home. During the 1950s, the amount of employed women rose by 18 percent.

The Civil Rights Movement:

The most significant social change during the 1950s was desegregation (the ending of a policy of racial segregation) which was a direct result of the civil rights movement. 

This paved the way for equal access to education and employment. 

Taxes made a steady rise as the government created 

budgets to expand social welfare programs such as housing 

assistance and food stamps.

Reductions in the government's spending resulted in a mild recession lasting from 1953 to 1954. However, the unemployment rate only briefly rose to 6 percent during the height of this recession.

Vastly approaching the atomic age, may have caused anxiety in the public

The communist scare, evoked paranoia in society, people 

were scared that communists would gain power and take 

over society

Gender Politics

The 1950s is often viewed as a period of conformity, when both men and women observed strict gender roles and complied with society’s expectations. However, even though certain gender roles and norms were socially enforced, the 1950s was not as conformist as is sometimes portrayed, and discontent with the status quo bubbled just beneath the surface of the placid peacetime society. Although women were expected to identify primarily as wives and mothers and to eschew work outside of the home, women continued to make up a significant proportion of the postwar labor force. Moreover, the 1950s witnessed significant changes in patterns of sexual behavior, which would ultimately lead to the “sexual revolution” of the 1960s, this may have been anticipated by Hitchcock in the film- Vertigo. •Vertigo acts out the struggle for socially recognised gender roles, mostly through a battle for sexual domination between Scottie & Madeleine/Judy

•During WWII women came flooding into the workforce, but were reinserted into their former passive routines following men’s return from battle

•Movies, magazines and newspapers once again extolled the importance of motherhood 

-Vertigo supports the idea of the submissive domestic female through the character of Madelaine
-Vertigo deals with many concerns through the creation of a deeply repressed man, contained by his fears and driven by his obsessions

•Scottie is the timid 1950s man, reduced in stature and capability and can therefore be scene as a metaphor of all the 1950s middle-class, middle-aged men, undone by forces over which he has lost control

•Vertigo is one of the most potent investigations of heterosexual panic undertaken in 1950s film.