Hitchcock / Van Gogh

In the third scene of Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, Gavin Elster asks his old college pal Scottie (Jimmy Stewart) to spy on his wife, because, Elster says, in what we later learn is a set-up, he suspects she’s been possessed by a dead woman. In a film with scenes of death, murder, and suicide, this early scene is a quiet one: a scene of exposition, to prepare the high drama to come. The scene is, nevertheless, unsettling. That’s due, in part, to the spooky topic of supernatural possession. But it’s also due to the editing. The timing of some of the cuts seems “off.” It’s hard to explain—I’m no film theorist—but some of the cuts seem to come too soon, or too fast.

Of course the cuts came exactly when Hitchcock wanted them to: the question is what his purpose was, in defying “naturalistic” editing conventions. This question is perhaps easy to answer. The not-quite-rightness of the editing—a feature of the scene’s form—augments the not-quite-rightness of the scene’s content. The possibility Elster broaches, of supernatural possession, is unsettling. A feeling of uneasiness is the fitting response. The editing functions to intensify this feeling, beyond the level that simply hearing Elster’s speech might produce. What’s cool about all this is that it works: an uneasiness, induced by a formal property of the film, is taken by us, the audience, to be (part of) the uneasiness we feel about what Elster said.

It’s a bit of a magic act; how’s it done?