Content area
Full Text
Bernard Herrmann's Vertigo:
A Film Score Handbook
by David Cooper. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2001. 158 pp., illus. Hardcover: $52.00.
Let it be said straight away: Bernard Herrmann's Vertigo will be of zero use to anyone who does not have a solid grounding in music, particularly harmonic analysis. Indeed, the last two chapters of this book by David Cooper, a Senior Lecturer and Director of the Interdisciplinary Centre for Scientific Research in Music at the University of Leeds in England, consist of little more than verbal descriptions, often in highly technical terms, of the musical cues for each and every sequence in Alfred Hitchcock's 1958 thriller, and Cooper indulges in this same transposing of an artistic language into paraphrastic description throughout. When Cooper steps outside the musical arena he generally ventures into oft-covered territory without offering new insights, frequently relying on Dan Aulier's flawed Vertigo: The Making of a Hitchcock Classic (1998).
Cooper, to be sure, has done his homework, including reading both the French novel on which Vertigo is based, Boileau and Narcejac's D'entre les morts, and the final screenplay. Here again, however, Cooper indulges mostly in paraphrase, which allows him to leave unexplored major paths that could have produced considerably more interesting results than he obtains by rephrasing one language (musical) into another (verbal). He quite rightly picks up on the references to the Orpheus myth in the novel, for instance, even to the point of entitling his last chapter "Eurydice Ressuscitee." But he fails to note that the Orphic narrative in Vertigo is in fact doubled: Scottie retrieves Madeleine from San Francisco Bay, then loses her to the tower; he then brings Madeleine back by transforming Judy into her, only to lose her, once again, to the tower. Had Cooper noted the cyclical nature of Vertigo's particular deployment of the Orphic narrative, he might have been prodded to use his musical expertise...