The Berlin-based Swiss art historian and curator Jeannot Simmen published, in 1990, a book entitled «Vertigo. Schwindel der Modernen Kunst». Focusing on Newton’s studies on gravity and optics, on cosmologic illustrations (Fontenelle) and on falling figures by artists such as Courbet, Kokoschka and Max Beckmann, the author associates the notions of dizziness, frenzy and the loss of steadiness with the major pre-modern perceptual changes and the paradigmatic shift to abstract, non-representational and immaterial art. «As we leave the solid ground, we fly and hover, tremble and fall».
In 1958, Hitchcock releases his Vertigo motion-picture in which the actress Kim Novak plays the role of a woman secretly employed to play the role of another woman, the sophisticated and mysterious Madeleine, which in turn is playing Carlotta Valdès, a deceased ancestor who committed suicide. The topic of the double and the overlapping of simulacra pervade the whole convoluted gloomy plot. The repressed desire and the erotic charges involved in the relation between the female characters and detective Fergusson (James Stewart) alongside the emotional excess and distress, the image within the image, the frame within the frame and the complex mise en abîme of it all conjure up a staggering meditation on the downward spiral of life playing at the border of a fixed dark hole, death itself, sucking in everything. The museum sequence with Madeleine’s fascination for the portrait of Carlotta (a still and framed image within the framed moving images), her hair pulled back up into a bun as Victor Stoichita analysed it in «The Pygmalion Effect» and the famous sequence of the bell tower stairway, leading to death, are prominent visual occurrences of this petrified whirling dynamic. Spiral was thus used, both in the title sequence and in its iconic posters, by the graphic designer, Saul Bass, to render the idea of a negative psychological vortex induced by the roll-out of illusions and simulacra, therefore echoing the dizziness produced by the cinematographic experience itself.
If Hitchcock firstly comes to mind when calling for visual essays on this theme, vertigo is more prosaically associated with a common affliction, a disorder caused by the pathophysiological deficiency of the equilibrium organ; the vestibular apparatus which we know, since the late 19th century, is hidden in the inner ear. Dysfunctional spatial orientation and gravity impulses are sent to the brain by the complex and delicate organ, thus causing transient vertigo and intense imbalance episodes often felt as a sense of rotational movement, a moving floor, or the world is spinning. Other common symptoms linked with vertigo are hearing loss, fast and irregular eyes movements, blurred, doubled or distorted vision, palpitations, nausea, pain and altered states of consciousness.
The vertigo effect as a loss of stability, balance and a sudden failure of perception can serve as a metaphor for the disturbing collapse of a traditional world view and for any kind of experience related with the loss of landmarks and meaning. The phenomena may include a wide range of psychic troubles such as cognitive dissonance, inner inconsistency and a state of confusion, whether intellectual, political, social, aesthetic, psychological, moral, spiritual or erotic. Vertigo is also related to the experience of the edges and the tipping points, heights and depths, to the temptation of jumping or falling into the abyss, a potentiality induced by our essential, existential and absolute freedom. According to Kierkegaard, «anxiety is the dizziness of freedom».
Despite being rarely addressed, the theme of Vertigo – and its leap into the void, its bonds with optics and kinetics, acceleration and deviant motion experiences, disequilibrium and uneasiness – might be one of the crucial emblems not only of modern and contemporary arts, but also of our kaleidoscopic and puzzled, rocking and feverish current times.
Katherine Sirois