Coastside Film Society presents Vertigo and conversation

Friday, the Coastside Film Society presents the gloriously restored version of Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, and the fascinating short film Calder’s Circus.

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Vertigo (1958, 128 mins—starting at 8:00)

Perhaps the most famous movie ever made starring San Francisco.  Certainly Hitchcock’s best known psychological thriller.

Vertigo has had a million-dollar facelift and the effect is wondrous. Jimmy Stewart is the former police detective pathologically fixated on the suicidal woman (Kim Novak) he is supposed to protect. The colors are vivid and Bernard Herrmann’s digitally remastered score is truly unsettling.

A complex and beautifully photographed story of obsession and descent into madness, the camera dotes on images of heroine’s perfectly twisted platinum blond coif, signaling her primal terror. Images of dizzying arrays of flowers, and automobile chases down San Francisco’s precipitous hills with a blue-gray atmosphere where it’s hard to find equilibrium, helps create the feeling of unsteadiness. The restored colors audiences had forgotten—that fabled green Jaguar, the stark white of Kim Novak’s bare back, the yellow roses in the cemetery at Mission Dolores, a San Francisco that appears mythical and alluring, shaded by fog and lonely streets, damp gardens and a hypnotic bay.  Hitchcock deliberately violates the conventions of the thriller to heighten tensions and abruptly shift the audience’s point of view.

Vertigo’s mysteries are beautiful and pained, to be savored. In its dark heart, the film is a sorrowful contemplation of love and the veils that manipulate sexual passions. It is a taste of romantic obsession, of flirtation and deceit. And it is a cold rumination on voyeurism, the heart-racing but somehow twisted excitement people feel when they spy on others.

If you haven’t seen this recently restored version, it’s time to watch Vertigo again.  The colors jump out at you and Bernard Herrmann’s score jangles the nerves.

Warren Haack, film historian and member of the Film Society’s Board of Directors will lead our discussion of what makes this such a great film.

Calder’s Circus (1961, 19 mins—starting at 7:30)

Before Alexander Calder became famous by inventing the mobile, he was fiddling with wire to create little circus creatures.  It was in Paris in 1927 that he created the miniature circus celebrated in this film - tiny wire performers, ingeniously articulated to walk tightropes, dance, lift weights, and engage in acrobatics in the ring. The Parisian avant-garde would gather in Calder’s studio to see the circus in operation. This film exudes the great personal charm of Calder himself, moving and working the tiny players like a ringmaster, while his wife winds up the gramophone in the background.

For more information see: hmbfilm.org

Friday, Oct 21
Community Methodist Sanctuary, Half Moon Bay
777 Miramontes, Half Moon Bay
Corner of Johnston & Miramontes
$6.00 donation per person