In 1957, Alfred Hitchcock (1899-1980) made his 49th film: Vertigo, inspired by the novel by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac D'entre les morts [Among the dead]. Scottie Ferguson (James Stewart), a former inspector, is charged with shadowing the elegant Madeleine (Kim Novak), who was said to identify with a suicidal ancestor (Carlotta). Soon falling for this mysterious blonde, Scottie cannot prevent her from killing herself. When he meets the brunette and ordinary Judy (also Kim Novak), it is Madeleine he is seeking to bring back to life...
"What interested me most was the efforts James Stewart made to recreate a woman from the image of a dead woman", Hitchcock declared to François Truffaut (1). In Vertigo's intrigue there resonates the myth of Pygmalion, whose desire gives birth to the woman he sculpted (2) and Bruges-la-Morte [Bruges the Dead City], in which Rodenbach depicts the melancholy of a widower who crisscrosses the town, obsessed by "that hair of a fluid and textual yellow" (3).
According to Alain Bergala, curator of the exhibition Brune/Blonde, Vertigo is no doubt the most beautiful monument in film to feminine hair in the history of the cinema" (4). This work crystallises motifs and themes linked to the artistic representation of the hair: the famous coiled chignon of Kim Novak – who thus enters the ranks of the "Hitchcock blondes" – is at once fetichistic, erotic and deadly. It reveals the female nape in the shadowing scenes where "investigation and conquest blend together" (5). The colour of the woman's hair is the sign of female identity or duality: brunette and blonde constitute here two facets of the same woman.
Vertigo would mark filmmakers' imagination: Brian De Palma, Dario Argento and Chantal Akerman figure among the heirs of this film which paved the way for the modern cinema.
(1) Hitchcock/Truffaut, definitive edition, Paris, Ramsay, 1985, p. 206.
(2) A myth that also coincides with the approach of the filmmaker, who never stopped "moulding" his female actors.
(3) Georges Rodenbach, Bruges-la-Morte, Brussels, Labor, 1986, p. 29.
(4) Alain Bergala, "Qu'est-ce qu'un grand cinéaste de la chevelure ?" in the Brune/Blonde exhibition catalogue, p. 23.
(5) Barthélemy Amengual, "A propos de Vertigo ou Hitchcock versus Tristan", in Études cinématographiques, No. 84-87, p. 37.
