"Some bald assertion by an ignorant and badly educated Frenchman": Technology, Film Criticism, and the "Restoration" of Vertigo (1996)

Now it has been re-released for a second time, nearly 40 years after it was made, and it still retains all its old power and beauty, however much critics may quibble about the remixing of the soundtrack or the regrading of the print.¹

This remark, written by the well-known British critic Peter Wollen, was in response to a big-budget, highly publicized, and widely distributed rerelease of Vertigo (USA, 1957, dir. Alfred Hitchcock), which took place in the autumn of 1996 and spring of 1997. This occasion marked the convergence of two worlds. The academic and critical establishment related to the film industry has always taken an intense interest in Hitchcock, verging at times on idolatry. He is seen as a key figure in debates on the nature of authorship in cinema, in the evolution of European and American film styles, and in relation to psychoanalysis and spectatorship. Hitchcock in general and Vertigo in particular have been the subject of numerous monographs, articles, and university courses, most of them produced by people with a background in humanities academia, education, and journalism. It was thus inevitable that this establishment would take a particular interest in the rerelease, as evidenced by a plethora of articles such as the one quoted above. The Vertigo rerelease also had a special significance for the film archive community. As readers of this journal are acutely aware, the overwhelming majority of archival preservation and restoration work takes place behind the scenes and is seen only by a small group of archivists, media industry researchers, and individuals. Vertigo was a different case altogether: Hitchcock's name ensured wide exposure, and in this case the word "restoration" was an explicit element in the marketing campaign. Wollen, therefore, was forced into the position of having to defend the humanities academic's characteristic disinterest in all matters technical.

His remark reveals much about how film studies as an academic discipline tends to approach the technical elements that constitute the material specificity of film as a medium. For Wollen, the "power and beauty" of Vertigo derives from the literary and stylistic elements relating to Hitchcock's adaptation of Boileau and Narcejac's 1955 novel and excludes any of the technical aspects of the film and its "restoration." By dismissing the technical issues raised specifically by the rerelease of Vertigo (let alone those relating to the film's initial production), Wollen is not just suggesting that they are unimportant; they are deliberately excluded from his reading of the film. In conclusion, he notes that "the cinema, after all, is an art of ghosts, projections of light and shadow, which seem while we watch them to have the substance of real beings."² It ("the cinema" in general and Vertigo in particular) "seems" to represent certain things, to retain power and beauty in a way that might almost be undermined by any serious examination as to how that representation physically takes place.

Thus the role played by technical processes in creating the film Wollen is analyzing is reduced to vague, abstract notions of "ghosts" and "projections of light and shadow" and thus deemed unworthy of further inquiry. While this is an extreme position, it is, I think, symptomatic of the fact that technology has traditionally been sidelined by film scholarship. This in itself indicates the extent to which academic film studies has evolved out of humanities scholarship, to the exclusion of other, vitally important forms of understanding. Cinema, radio, television, and (more recently) computer-based moving image media are cultural forms that quite simply could not exist without a complex range of interrelated technologies. Music and language can be created and communicated using nothing more than speech and human memory (although in practice, printing, book technology, and the design and manufacture of musical instruments have been a crucial factor in the development of both), and the only technology required for a dramatic performance consists of the performer(s), a space, and an audience. Even the most rudimentary film requires mechanical, optical, film stock, laboratory, and exhibition...