Critical Quotes for Vertigo

1. “[Vertigo] is more akin to the butterfly garden in which we all wave our own nets. Every-

one’s catch will be different, and different each time.” - Saamadder2. “American cinema’s supreme treatment of romantic obsession” - Rubin3. “Mixture of logically incredible and personally believable” - Wollen4. “Everything in cinema is a visual statement and the images are its language” - Hitch-

cock edited by Gottlieb5. “Part of [Hitchcock’s] greatness is the fact that he was all of his characters in a film, and

he was also the camera” - Taylor, screenwriter6. “Undermining spectator’s stability and evoking conflicting responses to the action” - Ru-

bin7. “Using the camera as an audience surrogate, you could say that [Hitchcock] wanted

the audience to actually be a character in the film” - Gunz8. “The film is explicitly about how men, out of their own anxieties and for their own con-

venience, create mythic images of women” - Rubin 9. “I do care about the pieces of film and the photography and the soundtrack and all of

the technical ingredients that make the audience scream” - Hitchcock, interview with Truffaut

10. “A broken victim of his own obsessions and demons” (Scottie) - Wollen11. “To gaze implies more than to look at - it signifies a psychological relationship of

power” - Schroeder12. “[Madeleine] represents both the object of supreme value for which Scottie would wish

to live and the appeal of death itself” - Maxfield13. “Scottie is forever traversing the city, going downhill all the time as he goes deeper and

deeper into himself. It's as if Hitchcock is using San Francisco as a psychological map”

- Coulter14.“Vertigo is the conflict between the fear of falling and the desire to fall” - Rushdie15.“Hitchcock shows us that the beautiful woman has power beyond that of mere mortals;

she is capable of altering man's mind, so that he becomes obsessed with her” -

LaVallee