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Post by Doghouse6 on Apr 3, 2019 22:53:01 GMT
Vertigo (1958): "Scottie (James Stewart) and "Madeleine" (Kim Novak) Although Stewart and Novak have several "meetings" in the film that could be called introductory in one way or another, this is the moment of their first encounter, and as an illustration of what I think of as "the language of film," it's a masterpiece of what Hitchcock called "montage." The action is simple as can be: as a man sits at a bar, a woman passes behind him and pauses, then leaves. Yet the editing imbues this brief moment with an abundance of emotion as "Scottie" falls under the spell of "Madeleine," but tricks viewers into feeling they've seen something they haven't: once she enters his immediate sphere, he never looks directly at her, nor she at him, but through cross-cutting and subtle shifts of framing, a connection is visually established between the two that has deeper meaning than any first-time viewer could predict. In the video below, the scene is shown in its entirety, beginning at about the one-minute mark, and then dissected by Bruce Isaacs of The University Of Sydney.
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