Saul Bass Film Analysis - Vertigo Analysis

As a class we watched the opening title sequence of Alfred Hitchcocks' film 'Vertigo'. I thought the opening title sequence was good because it give off a rather strange feeling. A sence of madness and suspence. It starts off with a close up of a womens face and it slowly zooms in on her eye. One note i made was that she never blinked her eye, so maybe she is in serious shock and she has frozen solid with fear. As it zooms in on her eye the colour of the picture changes from black and white to blood red. I thought this was really affective as we usually associate the colour red with the themes anger or fear, death and blood. So when the picture of her eye turns red we get a feel of fright or terror. What is going to happen next? It holds this still of the close up on her eye for a few seconds for you to really take the picture in, makes us think about what is she still for? and why is her eye turning red? Lines and circles then start to appear from the eye and they are spining around in a leaving you feeling confused and dizzy. It zooms on the eye whilst spining so it plays with our mind. Makes you feel disorientated. We go into the eye as we are spining and the picture goes black as we enter the pupil. This is extremely affective in my opinion because it is like we are travel into the women herself. Maybe it is some kind of flashback? Perhaps this opening sequence is some sort of flashback. You get lost in the picture so it leaves you feeling completely lost in the opening title sequence and wanting to watch the rest of the film. This swirling continues throughout the entire opening sequence, it builds up suspence because we do not know what is going to happen next, is this spining leading to something or is it just to lose focus on the women to lead you into thinking something else. What does this swirling represent? In my opinion I think the swirling represents madness and confusion. Saul Bass (the graphic designer of the title sequence) wants you to get lost in the opening so that we watch the rest of film to find out what is happening, why the swirling went on in the first place. Maybe the madness stands for some sort of psycho path who is out to kill the women whos eye we went into? Or maybe the killer is the women who stars in the opening titles?

Here is a picture from the opening title sequence of 'Vertigo': Picture from Google.com