When I first heard that Alfred Hitchcock's 1958 film Vertigo was being "restored" I was surprised. The prints I'd seen since it was released in 1984 looked fine to me. Considering that it had been out of distribution for years before that, I doubt that many Hitchcock fans were unhappy with the film's appearance. So it came as a shock to hear that the negative was badly deteriorated, the colors faded, and that it was due for a major restoration, at a cost of over a million dollars.
The restorers were Robert A. Harris and James C. Katz, who also fixed up Lawrence of Arabia, Spartacus, and My Fair Lady. Paying the bills was Universal Studios, which owns the rights to Vertigo (originally a Paramount picture). They took the VistaVision original and made a new 65mm negative—which is theoretically fine since the 35mm VistaVision frame is equal in size to two standard 35mm frames—and then made 70mm release prints from the new negative, which seems OK too. Let's not be churlish and thank them for the brighter, richer colors of the new version. Let's give them the benefit of the doubt on how well these colors match those in the original, non-deteriorated film (and how they know). Vertigo now looks great and it's good, they say, for the next 200 years. Guys, thanks.
There's one more piece of good news. While working on the project, they found the original stereo recordings of Bernard Herrmann's famous score for the film. (To be precise, about half of the score was recorded in stereo. The London orchestra Paramount was using went on strike in the middle of the sessions, and the unit had to move to Vienna, where the remainder of the score was recorded in mono.) Now, bad news. Because they had stereo music, and, I venture to say, simply because they could, the restorers decided to remix the whole soundtrack in stereo. That meant digitizing the music, dialogue, and sound effects and doing a whole new mix. Since the sound effects and foley tracks no longer existed, they had to rerecord them, using the original film as a guide and trying to copy the sounds; they consulted Hitchcock's dubbing notes.
I'm with them on the color and on the 70mm. I draw the line at the sound.
For one thing, my ears are still smarting from another recent "restoration"—Orson Welles's Othello. Welles's daughter and her husband got hold of the original negative and found that it printed pretty good, better than any print of the film had looked in decades. But of course they couldn't leave well enough alone. Because Welles was underfunded and working under labyrinthinely complex circumstances (to some extent of his own choosing), the soundtrack of Othello was, let us say, not up to James Cameron's standards. But it was Welles's soundtrack. Muffled and out of sync though much of the dialogue was, he signed off on it, allowed it to go out into the world, and never touched it again. His "restorers" decided to digitize the dialogue, slowing it down, speeding it up, and adding pauses to force it to match the actors' lips. They went so far as to commission a new recording of the film's score (done on the basis of a transcription! since the sheet music was lost). The result is a completely new soundtrack that sounds impossible for a 1952 film and that deforms the atmosphere of the film.
The difference between watching a bad print of Welles's original Othello and watching the new one is like the difference between reading the play in a faded, nth-generation Xerox with some words practically illegible, and reading a nicely printed book of a paraphrase of the play into modern English. This analogy is no good, though, for the following reason: It's unthinkable that Shakespeare's Othello wouldn't be readily available in bookstores, libraries, and on the Internet, whereas the new version of the Welles film has pushed away the old, making it virtually unavailable. (A version with Welles's original soundtrack has been released on laserdisc only.)
The restorers of Othello, who maybe had a digital Ouija board too, said that if Welles had had modern technology at his disposal to fix up his film, this is what he would have done. The restorers of Vertigo make similar assertions when it comes to the differences between the new and the old versions. According to James Katz: "People who have seen Vertigo before have never seen it like this. Those who are lucky enough to be experiencing this film for the very first time will see it as Hitchcock would have wanted it to be seen today, with all the sound, visual effects and other elements of excitement at their absolute best and in sync with '90s technology."
More revealingly, Katz also said: "Vertigo will now be seen as Hitchcock could only have dreamed it would look and sound... Audiences are going to see a film that Hitchcock never saw." And: "We're putting up something that Alfred Hitchcock never saw and was never able to see when he made it in 1958."
Well, here is Vertigo in something called DTS Stereo and to me it raises the question: Just because you have the money and the technology to do something, does that mean you have to do it? Harris and Katz aren't bad men, I don't want them from ropes. I just wonder how deeply they searched their souls before they did what they did with the soundtrack of Vertigo. And I'm sorry to say the results give me, to quote the film's (mono) trailer, "a feeling of dizziness a swimming in the head... figuratively a state in which all things seem to be engulfed in a whirlpool of terror."
The stereo makes itself felt especially in the many street scenes in the film. Car sounds are panned from left to right or right to left, as cars move across the screen. This is redundant and sometimes distracting, as when Scottie (James Stewart) and Madeleine (Kim Novak) talk on Scottie's front porch, and the cars all the way down the hill in the background of the shot are stereo-panned. One problem with a stereo mix is that it emphasizes laterality, left-right directionality, which is irrelevant to a film in which the geometry of the spiral predominates: the eye and the spiral in the opening credits, the spiral of the staircase at the Mission San Juan Bautista, the circular trajectories of Scottie and Madeleine in traffic, the curl in Madeleine's hair.
But the main problem with the new Vertigo isn't the stereo, it's the excessive detail of the sound effects. One has the impression of sounds out of control, calling attention to themselves when they should just support the image. Also, the rerecorded sound effects sometimes are significantly different from the original ones. Just listen. Vertigo opens, after the credits, with a scene of Scottie and a policeman pursuing a man across a roof. The policeman fires his gun twice. In the original version, each shot is a single report. In the new version, each shot is distinctly doubled, it has an after-report or something (I'm not a fucking ballistics expert, I don't know how to describe it). The new gun sound is bright, crackling, and pretty scary, which wasn't the point: We don't care about the person being shot at. The old gun sound, while loud, didn't have any fatal force behind it. It was like a gunshot in a memory, perfectly right for the long shot we see of faraway dark forms running at night across a city skyline.
During the scene, Scottie loses his footing on a sloped roof and ends up hanging from a gutter over a street several stories below. Those who have seen the film will remember Herrmann's music being particularly amazing here in its evocation of absolute terror, the dizzying potential for absolute loss of self. In the new version, somehow we notice the sound of the metal gutter creaking. And to notice it is to be distracted by it.
Sometimes the restorers ignore sound effects that are rather firmly placed in the original. The first scene in the apartment of Scottie's friend Midge (Barbara Bel Geddes) has a remarkable background sound: After Midge turns off the classical music on the radio, we become aware of car noises from the street, adding to the scene's relaxed afternoon atmosphere. In the new version, the street noises are comparatively subdued, usually almost inaudible (although the foleying of footsteps, clothes rustling, Scottie's cane hitting things, etc., is always compulsively clear). Scottie and Midge's conversation now sounds like it's taking place high in a well-sealed skyscraper, not on the fifth floor of an apartment building.
Scottie tries to conquer his fear of heights by climbing a stepladder next to the window. As he puts his foot on "step number two" (so named in the dialogue), in the original version we distinctly hear two beeps of a car horn. The new version doesn't bother recreating this detail. Yet, clearly, the people who worked on the film thought about it, someone put it there with Hitchcock's approval (maybe even at his instigation), and, minor though it doubtless is, it was no accident that after the word "two" is heard in the dialogue, two beeps are heard on the soundtrack. (If you think Hitchcock and his technicians didn't pay attention to such things, you're wrong. Note how sharply the sound of another horn accentuates the close-up of Midge's look when Scottie refers to their almost having got married—a touch the restorers did preserve, although their timing is less adroit.)
On the other hand, the restorers some-times put sounds in that weren't meant to be there. The worst example of this is the birds. When Scottie and Madeleine visit a sequoia forest, in the new version we hear, very distinctly, bird calls. The enlarged soundspace of stereo gives plenty of room for the birds to be placed, and the restorers take full advantage of it. Yet, in the original, there are no birds in this sequence, at least I couldn't hear any and I was listening closely.
The sound in this sequence is critically important, and it was lovingly done in the original: the sober, haunted voices of the actors; the slow, sad music over everything. Underneath it, you can hear the wind blowing—or are you just imagining it? or is it some subliminal string effect in Herrmann's score? This wind, which as it turns out is definitely there (you can tell when it carries over into the next scene on the shore, where it's unmistakable), is crucial to the sound of the scene, especially in the eerie long shots of the people crossing the space, and in the famous shot of Madeleine marking her birth and death among the time-rings on the cross-section of a cut sequoia ("It was only a moment for you; you—you took no notice"). In the new version, the wind is barely there, it's way down in the mix, you can't feel it. To compensate, those birds chatter meaninglessly throughout the sequence. Maybe one of the restorers was an ornithologist or an Audubon Society member, because birds are also dubbed into the first two scenes at the Mission San Juan Bautista, where, again, I detect none in the original.
I could go on with examples (but I assure you I'll stop with this paragraph). Sometimes the sound just inevitably stands out more than it was supposed to because the restorers didn't compensate for the superiority of today's sound recording and reproduction over 1958's. Thus, Scottie's car, which gets a lot of mileage during the first half of the film, now makes a deep, raspy, rather agitated rumble instead of a calm low purr. Sometimes the mix is different without necessarily being "better" or "worse." But if this is a restoration, shouldn't "better" mean: more slavishly faithful to the original? The new version fails to retain the original's palpable drop in car and street noise when Scottie, following Madeleine, turns his car into the alley behind the flower shop. Later in the film, there's a shot of Midge walking down the corridor of the sanitarium where Scottie is recuperating from a nervous breakdown. In the original, her steps get progressively quieter as she walks away from the camera, finally becoming inaudible. In the new version, her steps are clearly audible all the way to the end of the hall, and Herrmann's unison cellos, which give such a desolate effect, are mixed lower.
Clearly, Vertigo's soundtrack has been made to conform to the reductive literalism that's standard in sound practice in contemporary filmmaking. If you can see it onscreen, you must hear it (Midge's foot-steps); if it moves from one side of the screen to the other, it must pan in stereo (the street traffic); if a sound would be expected in a scene if it were happening in reality, it must be heard even if the object is never visible (the birds).
In a Philip K. Dick-like process, this kind of restoration turns the film into a simulacrum of itself: similar to, but eerily unlike the original. The experience of watching it becomes strangely double. The film is there, it's almost the same film, you can watch it as if it were the real film and have (almost) the same relationship to it. At the same time, you're aware, if only from time to time, that this is not the real film. An awareness jogged by a too-crisp sound or a palpable stereo effect. You wonder how closely a given moment, a given effect, recreates that of the original: You feel driven to compare the two. This doubling of the film creates a perverse echo of the story of Vertigo, which is all about originals and copies, about trying to love the original through the copy and the copy through the original's shadow, trying to stimulate through the copy all your feelings toward the original. Unfortunately, while in the film itself this situation is deeply tragic, the real-life doubling of Vertigo 1 by Vertigo 2 is merely kind of regrettable.
