The "Vert" in Hitchcock's Vertigo: The Green Fog

Guy Maddin, Evan Johnson and Galen Johnson's recent collaboration is a one-hour film that bravely revisits Hitchcock's monstre sacré Vertigo (1958) through a found footage pastiche. As its title suggests, wafts of green fog create a recurring visual in the film in a nod to the city of San Francisco that provides the setting for Hitchock's original version (itself an adaptation of the French crime novel Among the Dead co-written by Boireau-Narcejac). This verdant trail is a unifying thread throughout a patchwork of images from diverse periods of film history, all of which are gleaned from movies and television series set in San Francisco. It is this sense of place, a tribute to the Bay Area and its aura, that provides a foundation for The Green Fog and bridges the film's temporal loops and glitches.

San Francisco's most iconic landmark, the Golden Gate Bridge, is a physical reminder of the film's time traveling effect. Seen from all angles, whether featured in color or black and white, covered in fog or brilliantly lit under a shining sun, this architectural emblem invites the viewer to traverse time periods, and as a result, cross the waters of the unconscious flowing beneath it. Like most of Hitchcock's oeuvre, Vertigo is a psychological thriller and a feast for fans of psychoanalysis, but in The Green Fog, the idea of solving the puzzle and piecing it together - be it the resolution of a real crime or a mental process of Jungian individuation, connecting and confronting memories - becomes all the more palpable through the medium of found footage. "Let mystery have it's place in you", a voice off camera urges viewers, becoming something of an anthem in The Green Fog in one of the few complete segments of text audiences hear during the film.

Viewers unaccustomed to multiple uses of found footage may find the disparities between visual styles and actors disconcerting, but this is also the underlying genius of the film. Hitchock's Vertigo is a tale of deception and mistaken identity, what better way to pay tribute to these motifs than by destabilizing the viewer through key shifts in the look of the film? Instead of a narrative reveal, the plot elements surrounding identity are emphasized through an array of actors, some of whom only make brief cameos (a nun from Sister Act is visible for a split second, a reference to the nun who startles the character of Judy [Kim Novak] in the original Vertigo), while others return at various moments throughout the The Green Fog, including Chuck Norris (whose gesticulations become quite poetic when muted!). The various segments of found footage that are woven throughout the film (sometimes the same film or television episode is sampled multiple times, but not necessarily in order) create striking parallels to anthology or episodic cinema, particularly as the film is divided into two distinct chapters. David Scott Diffrient, a specialist of anthology cinema, describes negative reactions to this genre (or meta genre) in his book Omnibus Films, stating that a common complaint is lack of coherency and consistency. Found footage and anthology cinema certainly disrupt the auteur theory by providing what Diffrient likens to a "buffet" that allows the viewer to "taste the world" (66), citing a Bakhtinian carnivalesque aesthetic that emerges. The abundance he describes in omnibus films is entirely relevant here, as The Green Fog is replete with myriad film and television sequences created by different filmmakers, representing all genres and styles of filmmaking, from 80s nostalgia to cinematic giants, including Welles' The Lady from Shanghai and Hithcock's own Vertigo.

The three directors of The Green Fog certainly play with this notion of the cinematic "buffet", honing in on our consumption of it: there are multiple incidents of mise en abyme within the film, including found footage scenes in which we observe the characters watching  a screen  onto which another example of found footage has been superimposed, only for the film within the film to become full screen soon after. This relationship is similar to the central protagonist of Hitchcock's Vertigo who finds his Madeleine again in Judy (with enough ensuing confusion to wake Walter Benjamin's ghost), as well as our own relationship to the original film (sampled for several fleeting moments in The Green Fog) and this new "copy": "as embodied subjects situated before the screen, spectators might simultaneously long for both closure and openness, finality and perpetuity while viewing an omnibus film - a seemingly self-cancelling drive that betrays our need for repeated narrative fulfillment..." (Diffrient, 66).

This fulfillment takes a turn for the poetic in The Green Fog via fragmentation (a visual reference to time and memory that may be even more potent here than Hitchcock's original treatment of the subject) and movement, which harkens to the glory days of silent cinema for its emphasis on gestures. These corporeal movements, alongside carefully composed editing cuts that build strands of fragmented images, drive the film rather than a traditional narrative plot. Nevertheless, these movement motifs certainly carry time forward and provide a distinct vehicle for the story to advance.

As the film begins, the featured characters glitch, movement hangs on the edge, so that everyone, every word, is stuck on the precipice of something. Frozen, like Vertigo's John (Jimmy Stewart) when confronted with his fear of heights, the only sounds of dialogue we hear are the opening breaths a character takes before launching into a sentence, a fulfillment we are never granted as editing cuts arrive, interrupting the flow of dialogue and creating a glitch. At times, a nanosecond of the opening syllable of a word is audible. Even rarer, a few words in a sentence are heard outside their original context, re-imagined for the Vertigo universe. Rearranged and pieced together frame by frame, these sequences remain hanging, on the cusp, and dialogue delivery remains incomplete throughout much of the film's elusive first chapter. However, the narrative structure evolves, the gaps are increasingly filled in, and finally we arrive at full dialogues delivered without interruption. This visual and aural odyssey is one we make ourselves through the filmic medium alongside the memory of John in his quest to come to terms with the double identity of Madeleine/Judy and his phobia.

It's hard not to let "mystery have it's place in you" while viewing The Green Fog, a film that triggers memories of various themes and motifs from the original Vertigo, some obvious, others less so. Because this viewer hasn't seen Hitchcock's film in several years, I may have missed certain references in this re-imagined version, but others gradually manifested through visual and auditory cues (the score created by the Kronos Quartet riffs a good deal on the original's structure and embellishments), allowing me to awaken dormant symbols and revisit major scenes from Vertigo through this new interpretation. In this vein, The Green Fog is a story about cinema, about watching, and how our own haunted minds preserve and revive moving images.