“I always say Fellini inspired me. I love being in Fellini’s worlds. And Billy Wilder and Stanley Kubrick and Alfred Hitchcock. To revisit those certain films and go in that world is just—It’s a world that didn’t exist and now it exists. There are some people that are—I always say that they don’t like so much abstraction. They don’t like to feel lost. They like to know always, always, always what’s going on. And when they don’t feel that, they feel a little crazy. And they don’t like that. Other people—and I’m one of them—I love to go into a world, be taken into a world and get lost in there and feel-think my way and have these experiences that I know… I know that feeling, but I don’t know how to put it into words. I know that feeling and it’s magical that this cinema brought it out. This is what I love.” — David Lynch

Sight & Sound Critics’ Poll 2012

1. Vertigo (dir. Alfred Hitchcock)
2. Citizen Kane (dir. Orson Welles)
3. Tokyo Story (dir. Yasujiro Ozu)
4. The Rules of the Game (dir. Jean Renoir)
5. Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (dir. F.W. Murnau)
6. 2001: A Space Odyssey (dir. Stanley Kubrick)
7. The Searchers (dir. John Ford)
8. Man with a Movie Camera (dir. Dziga Vertov)
9. The Passion of Joan of Arc (dir. Carl Th. Dreyer)
10. 8½ (dir. Federico Fellini)

And the loser is – Citizen Kane. After 50 years at the top of the Sight & Sound poll, Orson Welles’s debut film has been convincingly ousted by Alfred Hitchcock’s 45th feature Vertigo – and by a whopping 34 votes, compared with the mere five that separated them a decade ago. So what does it mean? Given that Kane actually clocked over three times as many votes this year as it did last time, it hasn’t exactly been snubbed by the vastly larger number of voters taking part in this new poll, which has spread its net far wider than any of its six predecessors. [More…, x]

Saul Bass: The Origins of the Vertiginous Forms in Vertigo

I was browsing through the remainder bin in a Third Avenue bookshop. I leafed through a book and was stunned by some beautiful images. They were by Lissajous, a French mathematician of the late 1800s.

From a Swiss scientist’s later description of these images and how they were made, I was able to reconstruct a device used by Lissajous to create them. It consisted of a recording pendulum with an attached and smaller free-swinging eccentric pendulum which introduced variables into the motion of the recording pendulum. The recording device was a tiny brush with an ink reservoir and a stop cock regulator. Very tricky to operate. But when it worked the images were extraordinary. Watching them grow as the pendulum swung, not knowing what their final form would be, was a magical experience. I made a batch. Sat on them for years. And then Hitchcock asked me to work on “Vertigo.” Click!

I did not invent them, they had already existed, but were not fully recognized for their aesthetic potential since they were mainly seen as scientific expressions. You could say I was obsessed with them for a while — that I had fallen in love with them — so I knew what Hitch was driving at. [x]

2or3thingsiknowaboutfilm:

Prelude from “Vertigo”, handwritten by composer Bernard Herrmann.

Kim Novak and Alfred Hitchcock on the set of Vertigo.

On the set of Vertigo

“Somewhere in here I was born, and there I died. It was only a moment for you, you took no notice.”

Vertigo // dir. Alfred Hitchcock