The Haunting:Vertigo Via Muybridge Arturo Silva (bio) For Mallarmé, a poem is a pure crystal that allows to transpire an evanescent flickering. . . . Nothing really evolves in this poet's work, at least in his mature poems: Nothing takes the time to grow, nothing develops continuously. Nothing decays either, moreover; nothing truly perishes. The movement authorized in the structure is too rapid, too brief, too allusive to contain the thickness of transformative or corruptive duration. What is required is to capture a sudden modification, a transfiguration, a fulguration that abolishes in an instant the immobility of place, but also any possibility of change taking hold of things. A speed that interrupts the immutable, but also movement: a passed movement, annulled as soon as it is initiated. And thus a movement of which one could doubt whether it ever took place. —Quentin Meillassoux1 The Allegory Old San Francisco. Eadweard Muybridge, the man who murdered his wife's lover and got away with it. And he invented the movies. New San Francisco. John "Scottie" Ferguson, the man who tried to re-create his murdered lover—but she died too. What's the difference? Power and freedom; Muybridge had it, Scottie didn't. [End Page 34] Muybridge's apparatus was a simple one—a gun—and it worked. Muybridge stopped time, and then it exploded all over him. Scottie chose the whole cinematic apparatus itself, focusing on mise-en-scène and especially hair, clothes, make-up, and accessories, which is where it all went so horribly wrong. Time stopped Scottie, and when he tried to rewind it, he found himself trapped within its whorls. Introduction At the very beginning of Vertigo, the camera seems to pull back from something that is at first perceived only as a blur but is very soon revealed to be a metal bar.2 Once the camera stops, three successive actions occur that are all essentially the same; these three are then followed by another triplet of repeated actions. These are the first two "Hitchcock Motion Studies." Figures 1a and 1b, the Hitchcock Motion Study "Criminal and Cop Climb, Leap, Run" shown on the following pages, is taken from the film's opening shot. In figure 1a, a criminal reaches the top of the ladder, leaps from it, and then dashes across the roof; the same actions—climb, leap, run—are performed by the policeman, shown in figure 1b, and then again by Scottie (though in his case, only the first two movements are shown). The same is true for the film's third shot (following the flight across the roofs), and what we can call Hitchcock Motion Study 2, "Criminal and Cop Climb, Jump, Land, Flee," in which the criminal now jumps from one roof to another, lands, and then continues to flee. He is followed again by the policeman and then Scottie, both of them performing the very same movements. And what do these "motion studies" resemble but the famous work of Eadweard Muybridge? But what could Muybridge possibly have to do with Hitchcock and Vertigo? Could there be something "Muybridgean" about the film? Not at first glance, no. With only two slight instances that I know of, the name Muybridge has never before occurred in [End Page 35] Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1a. Hitchcock Motion Study 1: Criminal Climbs, Leaps, Runs. [End Page 36] Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1b. Hitchcock Motion Study 1: Cop Climbs, Leaps, Runs. [End Page 37] Vertigo studies—although there is one additional subtle linking of the two: the illustration on the endpapers of Patrick McGilligan's biography of Hitchcock is a Muybridge-like sequence photograph of Hitchcock in motion (fig. 2).3 While one can barely imagine the name Muybridge ever coming up during scripting sessions between Hitchcock and his scriptwriters, the prospect of something similar happening occurred to me while discussing Muybridge in a class on Pre-and Early Cinema. Going over bits of his biography, his career in San Francisco as a photographer, as well as his killing of his wife's lover, and subsequent acquittal, I briefly recalled that Scottie in Vertigo was also exonerated...