Recommended reading – Vertigo (novel & book of the movie)

D’entre les morts, translation: From Among the Dead

by Boileau-Narcejac (Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac).

Filmed as Vertigo (1958), directed by Alfred Hitchcock.
Published by Pushkin Vertigo.
First published 1954.

ISBN-10: 1782279741
ISBN-13: 978-1782279747
 
Description:
 

In World War II-era Paris, a troubled-ex policeman is entangled in a web of deceit and lies when he investigates a woman’s strange behavior.

 

Flavières doesn’t really want to investigate his old’s friend’s wife, but he doesn’t feel he has much of a choice. Madeleine has been behaving strangely, and her husband wants answers – answers that she isn’t willing to give him.

 

As WWII rages around him, Flavières is drawn into an obsessive cat-and-mouse chase across Paris. Soon his intrigue is replaced by obsession and his dreams by nightmares, as he edges towards discovering a dark, terrible secret.

 

The most celebrated collaboration of a ground-breaking crime-writing duo, Vertigo is the timeless story of morality and revenge, and the inspiration for Hitchcock’s iconic film.

 

Vertigo

by Charles Barr.

Published by British Film Institute.
Published 2012.
2nd edition.

ISBN-10: 1844574989
ISBN-13: 9781844574988
 
Description:

Vertigo (1958) is widely regarded as not only one of Hitchcock's best films, but one of the greatest films of world cinema. Made at the time when the old studio system was breaking up, it functions both as an embodiment of the supremely seductive visual pleasures that 'classical Hollywood' could offer and – with the help of an elaborate plot twist – as a laying bare of their dangerous dark side. The film's core is a study in romantic obsession, as James Stewart's Scottie pursues Madeleine / Judy (Kim Novak) to her death in a remote Californian mission. Novak is ice cool but vulnerable, Stewart – in the darkest role of his career – genial on the surface but damaged within.

Although it can be seen as Hitchcock's most personal film, Charles Barr argues that, like Citizen Kane, Vertigo is at the same time a triumph not so much of individual authorship as of creative collaboration. He highlights the crucial role of screenwriters Alec Coppel and Samuel Taylor and, by a combination of textual and contextual analysis, explores the reasons why Vertigo continues to inspire such fascination.

In his foreword to this special edition, published to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the BFI Film Classics series, Barr looks afresh at Vertigo alongside the recently-rediscovered 'lost' silent The White Shadow (1924), scripted by Hitchcock, which also features the trope of the double, and at the acclaimed contemporary silent film The Artist (2011), which pays explicit homage to Vertigo in its soundtrack.