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∙ 132 ∙ Highlighting Hitchcock’s Vertigo with magic marker ■ Dear Slavica, Two moments in your Stories of Desire and Power: Six Tales for Men knocked me out. The first—“he controlled every detail, flat shoes, white stockings, retro white panties”—(my italics) may release more information than I care to acknowledge, other than remembering one of Groucho Marx’s numberless moments of genius when he said he waited six years before he read Lolita, so she’d be eighteen. The second sentence made me think of your love of Vertigo, and of the project you invited me to contribute to now many years ago—“you thought that if you penetrate my intimacy you could possess me.” My italics are meant to mark the fact that your phrase, gracefully unidiomatic in English, nonetheless started me gathering such thoughts as I might have on Vertigo, a weird masterpiece. Vertigo has no greater lover than Chris Marker. For forty years he has professed his undying love in words and images. Two of his major films, La Jetée (1962) and Sans Soleil (1982) both contain moments of thoughtful homage. The sections in both that fascinate me are the moment in Muir Woods when Madeleine in a trance (she is possessed by her great grandmother ) traces, in extreme close-up, the index and middle finger of her black-gloved hand moving across the concentric rings, her/Carlotta’s unacknowledged life:“Somewhere in here I was born,and there I died.It was only a moment for you, you took no notice.” In an issue of Semiotext(e): Oasis, Marker allowed the editors to fragmentarily excerpt much of Sans Soleil’s soundtrack—all except the extended passage in which Sandor Krasna, the film’s letter writer, makes his pilgrimage to various locations Hitchcock used in Vertigo—telling Alexandra Stewart, the woman who narrates this film, that he had seen Vertigo nineteen times before embarking on his journeys, highlighting hitchcock’s VERTIGO with magic marker ∙ 133 and that it is the only film he knows that is about memory—or, as he adds, opening his thoughts about the film,“about insane memory.” But in a French film magazine, called (what else?) Vertigo 20, Marker reproduces in French the part of the soundtrack in which Sandor writes to Alexandra his narrative impression of the moment in Muir Woods when Kim Novak/Madeleine stands entranced before the cross-section of the coastal redwood. Finally, in Projections 41/2, published in 1996, he writes an essay on the film as a whole, beginning with the three times that the phrase “freedom and power”recurs, placing each of them within the exact running time of the film. The first time is when Scotty is looking at a print of old San Francisco in Gavin Elster’s office, and Elster, musing on the disappearance of the old days, tells Scotty, “the hardheaded Scot,” that in those days men had the freedom and the power to do what they wished. Marker marks this moment as firmly in the running time as Hitchcock marks the sequoia with the ascending horizontal arc of arrows that point to historical events. The first occurrence of the phrase is in the twelfth minute.The second occurrence is in the thirty-fifth minute, when Pop Liebel tells Scotty and Midge the story of Carlotta Valdes, and says, as he tells about the rich man seizing her child and casting Carlotta off,“men had the freedom and the power to do that in those days”—the freedom and the power to throw women away. And the third and final time is, as Marker writes, “at the hundred and twenty-fifth minute—and fifty-first second to be precise—but in reverse order (which is only logical, given we are now in the second part, on the other side of the mirror). . . .” What elicits such a desire for accuracy among Vertigo’s lovers is that they wish to know everything about their beloved, a desire for complete knowledge that Stanley Cavell has called a“terrible”one.And surely here we come full circle, back to your work that led you to this weird masterpiece of a film,your own performance as documented in Geschischten von Verlangen und Macht—desire and power, close enough, but this time translated out of the running times of your performances and immortalized, stopped dead (like the cross-section of the redwood?), in the form of your book. I don’t want to get too carried away...

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