Context of Vertigo
Alfred Hitchcock
Alfred Hitchcock was born to middle-class parents in London, England, fittingly on Friday the thirteenth of August 1899. When he was twenty-one, he took a job at Paramount Studios in London as a writer and illustrator of silent-movie title cards, which led to work as an art director and finally to a position as a director. He acquired the honorary title “Master of Suspense” while working on a radio adaptation of his film The Lodger for RKO in 1940. Hitchcock married his assistant, film editor Alma Reville, with whom he collaborated on all his work. The couple, along with their daughter Patricia, moved to the United States in 1939, where they lived for the rest of their lives.
Ancient links
One of Vertigo’s main themes—the attempt to create the ideal woman—has roots in the Roman myth of Pygmalion and Galatea in which the sculptor Pygmalion uses his art to create an ivory statue of the perfect woman and then tragically falls in love with it. But the film has roots in reality as well.
influences
Vertigo, like all Hitchcock films, was influenced by the art-film movement of the 1920s, which stressed experimentation and strong use of imagery. Early in his career, when Hitchcock worked at the UFA studios in Berlin, Germany, he absorbed the German Expressionism of F. W. Murnau and Fritz Lang, whose method of exposing the inner life of characters through unusual camera angles, moody lighting, and exaggerated mise-en-scène (stage-setting) influenced much of Hitchcock’s work. Hitchcock’s Vertigo, in turn, influenced the French New Wave school of film. Filmmakers such as Alain Resnais and François Truffaut introduced elements of Vertigo’s plot and certain symbolic and stylistic details from the film into their own works.
box office
The Hollywood premiere of Vertigo received mainly positive reviews from film trade papers. The Hollywood Reporter called it “. . . a picture no filmmaker should miss” and applauded Hitchcock’s “pioneering techniques.” Variety gave it a mixed review, predicting box office success but criticizing the film’s first half as too slow and too long. Reviewers outside Hollywood weren’t as complimentary. Cue panned Hitchcock’s concentration on scenery, technique, and “gimmicks” and lamented what it felt, at just over two hours, was an overlong film. The New Yorker went so far as to call the film “farfetched nonsense,” and Time magazine labelled it “another Hitchcock and bull story.” Vertigo had an average box-office run. In terms of box office receipts, it ranked twenty-first in 1958, making $3.2 million domestically.
Alfred Hitchcock was born to middle-class parents in London, England, fittingly on Friday the thirteenth of August 1899. When he was twenty-one, he took a job at Paramount Studios in London as a writer and illustrator of silent-movie title cards, which led to work as an art director and finally to a position as a director. He acquired the honorary title “Master of Suspense” while working on a radio adaptation of his film The Lodger for RKO in 1940. Hitchcock married his assistant, film editor Alma Reville, with whom he collaborated on all his work. The couple, along with their daughter Patricia, moved to the United States in 1939, where they lived for the rest of their lives.
Ancient links
One of Vertigo’s main themes—the attempt to create the ideal woman—has roots in the Roman myth of Pygmalion and Galatea in which the sculptor Pygmalion uses his art to create an ivory statue of the perfect woman and then tragically falls in love with it. But the film has roots in reality as well.
influences
Vertigo, like all Hitchcock films, was influenced by the art-film movement of the 1920s, which stressed experimentation and strong use of imagery. Early in his career, when Hitchcock worked at the UFA studios in Berlin, Germany, he absorbed the German Expressionism of F. W. Murnau and Fritz Lang, whose method of exposing the inner life of characters through unusual camera angles, moody lighting, and exaggerated mise-en-scène (stage-setting) influenced much of Hitchcock’s work. Hitchcock’s Vertigo, in turn, influenced the French New Wave school of film. Filmmakers such as Alain Resnais and François Truffaut introduced elements of Vertigo’s plot and certain symbolic and stylistic details from the film into their own works.
box office
The Hollywood premiere of Vertigo received mainly positive reviews from film trade papers. The Hollywood Reporter called it “. . . a picture no filmmaker should miss” and applauded Hitchcock’s “pioneering techniques.” Variety gave it a mixed review, predicting box office success but criticizing the film’s first half as too slow and too long. Reviewers outside Hollywood weren’t as complimentary. Cue panned Hitchcock’s concentration on scenery, technique, and “gimmicks” and lamented what it felt, at just over two hours, was an overlong film. The New Yorker went so far as to call the film “farfetched nonsense,” and Time magazine labelled it “another Hitchcock and bull story.” Vertigo had an average box-office run. In terms of box office receipts, it ranked twenty-first in 1958, making $3.2 million domestically.
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Mr Cooper
the task was Context of vertigo as shown in the title, and from it I learnt the context of Vertigo this included info about the director, links from olden cinema, its influences, and how it performed in the Box Office.
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