Week 26/2025

EN

“Peter Bogdanovich: Isn't Vertigo about the conflict between illusion and reality?

Alfred Hitchcock: Oh, yes. I was interested by the basic situation, because it contained so much analogy to sex. Stewart's efforts to recreate the woman were, cinematically, exactly the same as though he were trying to undress the woman, instead of dressing her. He couldn't get the other woman out of his mind. Now, in the book, they didn't reveal that she was one and the same woman until the end of the story. I shocked Sam Taylor, who worked on it, when I said, "When Stewart comes upon this brunette girl, Sam, this is the time for us to blow the whole truth." He said, "Good God, why?" I told him, if we don't what is the rest of our story until we do reveal the truth. A man has picked up a brunette and sees in her the possibilities of resemblance to the other woman. Let's put ourselves in the minds of our audience here: "So you've got a brunette and you're going to change her." What story are we telling now? A man wants to make a girl over and then, at the very end, finds out it is the same woman. Maybe he kills her, or whatever. 

Here we are, back in our old situation: surprise or suspense. And we come to our old analogy of the bomb: you and I sit talking and there's a bomb in the room. We're having a very innocuous conversation about nothing. Boring. Doesn't mean a thing. Suddenly, boom! the bomb goes off and they're shocked - for fifteen seconds. Now you change it. Play the same scene, insert the bomb, show that the bomb is placed there, establish that it's going to go off at one o'clock - it's now a quarter of one, ten of one - show a clock on the wall, back to the same scene. Now our conversation becomes very vital, by its sheer nonsense. "Look under the table! You fool!" Now they're working for ten minutes, instead of being surprised for fifteen seconds. 

Now let's go back to Vertigo. If we don't let them know, they will speculate. They will get a very blurred impression as to what is going on. "Now," I said, "one of the fatal things, Sam, in all suspense is to have a mind that is confused. Otherwise the audience won't emote. Clarify, clarify, clarify. Don't let them say, "I don't know which woman that is, who's that?" So," I said, "we are going to take the bull by the horns and put it all in a flashback, bang! right then and there - show it's one and the same woman." Then, when Stewart comes to the hotel for her, the audience says, "Little does he know." 

Second, the girl's resistance in the earlier part of the film had no reason. Now you have the reason - she doesn't want to be uncovered. That's why she doesn't want the gray suit, doesn't want to go blond - because the moment she does, she's in for it. So now you've got extra values working for you. We play on his fetish in creating this dead woman, and he is so obsessed with the pride he has in making her over. Even when she comes back from the hairdresser, the blond hair is still down. And he says, "Put your hair up." She says, "No." He says, "Please." Now what is he saying to her? "You've taken everything off except your bra and your panties, please take those off." She says, "All right." She goes into the bathroom. He's only waiting to see a nude woman come out, ready to get in bed with. That's what the scene is. Now, as soon as she comes out, he sees a ghost - he sees the other woman. That's why I played her in a green light. You see, in the earlier part - which is purely in the mind of Stewart - when he is watching this girl go from place to place, when she is really faking, behaving like a woman of the past - in order to get this slightly subtle quality of a dreamlike nature although it was bright sunshine, I [s]hot the film through a fog filter and I got a green effect - fog over bright sunshine. That's why, when she comes out of the bathroom, I played her in the green light. That's why I chose the Empire Hotel in Post Street - because it had a green neon sign outside the window. I wanted to establish that green light flashing all the time. So that when we need it, we've got it. I slid the soft, fog lens over, and as she came forward, for a moment he got the image of the past. Then as her face came up to him, I slipped the soft effect away, and he came back to reality. She had come back from the dead, and he felt it, and knew it, and probably was even bewildered - until he saw the locket – and then he knew he had been tricked.”

Peter Bogdanovich and Alfred Hitchcock in conversation1

“There are many things I love in ‘A Free Replay’: core ideas about the film’s logic condensed in a few strong formulations; a daring attempt at interpretation that is also a manifesto for the imaginary (and, perhaps, a sophisticated ruse); a deceptively meandering appearance (“notes”?) under which lies an exhaustive analytical work and a strong internal cohesion; tons of obsessive research gracefully (sometimes whimsically) threaded into the main argument; a trust in rhetoric and a taste for its pleasures; and a high degree of performativity, since Marker is constantly staging, executing and playing with the very ideas (the elliptical, the mirroring, the space-time relation, the stratagem, the replay…) that inform his discussion of Vertigo.

Perhaps the most audacious part of this essay is its third section where, after a beautiful meditation devoted to ellipses and the power of imagination, Marker proposes an oneiric interpretation of Vertigo’s second half, by carefully tracing the film’s complex game of mirrors, reflections, double figures and double meanings. Afterwards comes the final section, where we are taken on a tour through 1990s San Francisco in search of the real locations where Vertigo was shot. My favourite passage is located in the midst of this section and, at the start, it seemed to me oddly placed. Today, I think it’s in the perfect spot: the tour through the city becomes Marker’s own “spectacular metaphor” for the vertigo of time, mirroring and replaying the introduction (whose initial inkling/hypothesis is both completed and extended by this passage

“One does not resurrect the dead, one does not look back at Eurydice. Scottie experiences the greatest joy a man can imagine, a second life, in exchange for the greatest tragedy, a second death. What do video games, which tell us more about our unconscious than the complete works of Lacan, offer us? Neither money nor glory, but a new game. The possibility of playing again. ‘A second chance.’ A free replay.”  

To me, this is like the sequoia tree in Vertigo: it goes simultaneously backward and forward in time; it travels deep to the roots – the myth of Orpheus and Euridyce – and expands its resonances in concentric circles, linking cinema (and Vertigo, in particular) with videogames (and, by implication, other modes of artificial/virtual life). Just to be clear: there’s no equating of cinema and video games in Marker’s proposition – to state the obvious: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce. But there is a strong idea about why myth matters and about how myth is always happening.”

Cristina Álvarez López2

• 1Peter Bogdanovich, Alfred Hitchcock, The Cinema of Alfred Hitchcock. (New York: The Museum of Modern Art Film Library, 1963).
• 2Cristina Álvarez López​​​​​​​, “Passage: Cristina Álvarez López​​​​​​​. Replaying Marker,” Sabzian, 1 June 2022.

EN

“Yes, I feel threatened. All around me, I see women writers, women painters and others on the verge of a nervous breakdown. I hear that such and such talented Arab poetess “looks wrecked” by her situation as a woman. I see another woman writer in our country, unbalanced in her social behaviour to the point of being ridiculous and pitiful. As for me, I am considered self-confident, if not brazen. I wish... The fact remains that the shadow of May Ziadeh hangs over us all. This Lebanese woman writer, born in the past century, was full of talent. She ended up crazy... She was born too early...

Did I grow up too soon? Will there be others? ‘You’re fighting too many battles at once,’ an Italian critic once told me with sadness. His head-shaking was a clear sign that this would end badly. Maybe. In the meantime, my only option is to try to carry on. What if one day there’s a general setback in the Arab world on the issue of women, as on all problems?”

Heiny Srour1

“The film broke new ground in many ways. Aesthetically, it was the first time that popular songs were used as commentary. It was the first film in the Middle East that gave a voice to those ‘without a voice’ through the use of synch sound, thanks to the innovation of cameraman Michel Humeau, who was the first to use a solar battery to power a 10kg synchronous camera that he carried in person. A dangerous solar battery, because it attracted airplanes... The same goes for the dedication of sound engineer Jean-Louis Ughetto whose Nagra weighed 12kg. They crossed 800 km on foot under military threat. It was the first time in Arab cinema that a director left the comfort of the studios to lead a crew under the bombardments. Plus, it was a woman! The film’s production broke new ground, too, by using donations from Arab workers and students, help in kind from militant English and European filmmakers, and help in kind from Arab activists to finance it. In particular from the Iraqi Student Society in England, which was the real co-producer of the film. Progressive Iraqis went to Birmingham, Sheffield and Cardiff every weekend to do political work with the South Yemeni workers. They also collected donations for the film. They gave me a roof over my head for three years while I was looking for funds and editing (without an editing table!). They wrote the commentary and introduced me to the British filmmakers of Cinema Action. Guy and Monique Hennebelle from the French CinémAction magazine gave me bed and board for more than three months while I was working in the lab. And Guy was a paralytic, with young children and an old mother-in-law in his care. Nonetheless, a great sadness remains, the fact that I was only able to fulfil half of my dream of militant cinema in the Latin American sense of the word. Hundreds of thousands of Argentinian workers watched Fernando Solanas’s The Hour of the Furnaces in secret, risking arrest by the police and imprisonment. They deprived themselves of cigarettes for a month in order to pay for their tickets to the clandestine screenings. My film The Hour of Liberation is needed in places of despair: prisons, refugee camps and homes for battered women, rather than preaching to converted intellectuals. So in my distribution contracts, I always include a clause that stipulates that my film must be offered, free of charge, to the refugees and the deprived, and this entirely at my expense, without any financial loss for the distributor.

But, in the Arab world, militant cinema must be served on a silver platter to the well-off. Even worse, former well-to-do members of the Bahrain Liberation Front (which has split from the Front) have pirated the film and are giving it to millionaires in Bahrain and rich people around the world, despite their full awareness of my precarious financial situation. Such is the case of Abdulnabi Alekry who wrote – don’t laugh – a book on Human Rights. He knows, therefore, that his recurrent thefts are a blatant violation of a number of articles of the Declaration of Human Rights. I have been telling him for years that his dishonesty desecrates the memory of the men and women who died in Dhofar before reaching the springtime of their lives. These martyrs never heard of cinema or copyright. But they knew they were giving their lives for a better world. And a world in which the needy are robbed in order to brag in front of the rich, is a world worse off. A world in which progressive culture is murdered by economic censorship is a world much worse off. The great laws of History are always reflected in small incidents: after the repeated thefts by Abdulnabi Alekry, we’ve had Mosul, Nimrud, Palmyra, Daesh, Netanyahu and Trump. But this moral decay is not inevitable: each one of us can help to turn the tide. That is where our freedom lies.”

Heiny Srour2

Guy Hennebelle and Monique Martineau Hennebelle: What is your view on the direction that Arab cinema should take?

Heiny Srour: To answer this question, we must first define the historical period we are going through and the political tasks falling to every Arab person, whether or not a filmmaker. Today, the Arab world is going through a period of democratic national revolution. Our main enemy is imperialism and its local allies: the comprador bourgeoisie and feudalism. The basis of this Arab revolution consists of the poor masses, both the working class and the peasants. The avant-garde is, of course, the working class. Right now, its allies are the petty bourgeoisie and the national bourgeoisie. If we want to identify the main element, if we want to hit the target with our camera gun, we must focus our efforts against the main enemy and give voice to the main basis of the revolution: the poor masses. The allies of the revolution (petty bourgeoisie and national bourgeoisie) do not deserve to be more than just allies. All the more so because the wealthy have been the objects and subjects of art in all its expressions for thousands of years. This has been the case in cinema since it was invented. Consequently, content-wise, the enemy of the people is any cinema made by the neutral for the use of the rich and the less rich who want to keep their hands clean, their eyes closed and their ears deaf.

Our enemy is any cinema that does not speak of national and social oppression in all its forms, including female oppression, and does not denounce it.

Our enemy is a cinema that does not speak of the plundering of our national resources, of poverty and suffering.

Our enemy is any cinema that turns its back on historical emergencies, taking refuge in a mythical past through a contemplative approach that is nothing but a flight from the present.

Our enemy is any cinema that deals with so-called universal problems without giving them a social and national dimension. For example, one cannot speak of love “innocently”: it is not the same in a society where women are equal to men or in a society where she is his slave, his beast of luxury or his beast of burden.

So much for the content. As for the form, our enemy is any esoteric cinema reserved for elites and the idle.

Our enemy is any vulgar cinema, any simplistic and triumphalist cinema, because it lapses into demagogy.

Our enemy is any cinema that suffers the moral terrorism of the perfect and finished work of art. Any cinema that does not seek new forms to express new content. Any cinema settled in the intellectual comfort of the aesthetic canon established by and for the wealthy. Any cinema that uses the iconography, symbolism and moral values of the other side.

For we cannot treat our responsibilities as filmmakers with disdain and ignore the tremendous impact of images and sounds. The imperialists, for their part, do not undervalue this. They are currently putting our entire civilization in mortal danger. We must arm ourselves with intolerance against the enemies of freedom.

Our principle is: whoever is not with us is against us. Our practice: ideology must guide the camera.

Heiny Srour in conversation with Guy Hennebelle and Monique Martineau Hennebelle3

• 1Heiny Srour, “Woman, Arab and... Filmmaker,” Sabzian, 28 April 2021. Originally published as ‘Femme, Arabe et... cinéaste’ in the book Paroles... elles tournent! by the collective Des femmes de Musidora (Paris: Éditions des femmes, 1976).
• 2Olivier Hadouchi, “‘My loyalty is always with the oppressed. Whether in Africa, the Middle East or Vietnam’,” Sabzian, 28 April, 2021.
• 3Guy Hennebelle and Monique Martineau Hennebelle, “The Hour of Liberation,” Sabzian, 28 April 2021. Originally published as ‘L’heure de la libération a sonné’ in Cahiers du Cinéma, 253 (October 1974).

EN

“Even during shooting, it’s important to me to keep my eyes open for that which enters from outside: to seek out coincidence and to confront the story with it. Shooting is the moment in which to experience, to find out what is possible at this moment, in this place, with these people, with this story; for bringing together all the ingredients. Sometimes it’s a matter of intentionally subjecting oneself to a situation that is as real as possible or even one that is unplanned, uncertain – like a sparring partner of one’s imagination. An encounter with the story and everyone involved. And then you’ve got to catch the ball. The moment generates an inspiration. Realism separates itself from the melodramatic or fairy-talelike, resisting them with an unwieldy rawness. Roughness and laconism. In this context, even the physicality of actors and places plays a role: Their ‘being’, things one can’t invent, as reminders of reality – that which isn’t ‘by design’. Atmosphere – another resistance to the melodramatic – in a good sense banalizes the melodramatic.”

Valeska Grisebach1

• 1Valeska Grisebach, “Sehnsucht Presseheft,” (Berlin: Hoehne Presse, 2006), 18.