Homage to Vertigo a film geek’s dream

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This article was published 07/06/2018 (2993 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Warning: The Green Fog is a film by and for film geeks.

It was initiated by Noah Cowan, the former co-director of the Toronto International Film Festival and current executive director of the San Francisco Film Society.

It was directed by Winnipeg auteur Guy Maddin along with fraternal filmmakers Evan and Galen Johnson, who were assigned the task of assembling a movie highlighting San Francisco as a setting throughout the history of film for the benefit of the San Francisco International Film Festival.

Upping the geek ante, the filmmakers effectively opted to do a remake of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1958 classic Vertigo, using a barrage of scenes from films that, well, aren’t Vertigo.

Familiarity with Hitchcock’s kinky story of romantic obsession is recommended to following the movie’s narrative through-line. But it’s not entirely essential.

In fact, the film’s assemblage of clips offers the same quirky pleasures as Christian Marclay’s 24-hour magnum opus The Clock, a massive collection of movie/TV clips unified by the theme of passing time, utilizing any footage of clocks and watches.

One came away from that film at least partly dazzled by the array of film genres and styles on display, all forced to harmonize to suit the director’s own obsessive purpose.

One has the same feeling — a connectedness to the disconnections — in The Green Fog.

This experiment makes for a decidedly loose parallel to Vertigo. The directors leave room for some comedy in the side trip/deviations. This film’s idea of a running gag is to edit dialogue out of dialogue scenes so that actors seemingly communicate through facial expressions, tics and bits of actorly business — funny and fascinating.

Watch young Michael Douglas (from The Streets of San Francisco) seem to critique older Michael Douglas’s nude scene from Basic Instinct. (Note too how, just for fun, that nude scene is perfectly juxtaposed with motion-picture pioneer Eadweard Muybridge’s male nude walking.)

Weirdly, Chuck Norris gets a whole sequence to himself, culled from the 1981 San Fran-set action obscurity An Eye for an Eye. When he’s not kicking and punching, Norris has an unusually blank screen presence so, removed from any cinematic context, he’s a hilarious negative space.

The experiment allows a bit of a critique of Vertigo, in which a man attempts to mould a woman into his erotic ideal based on a dead woman. It all ends with an explosive montage of men and women throwing recriminations at each other, culminating in the San Francisco earthquake. Call it an apocalyptic manifestation of Hitchcock’s gender politics.

Tied together with a Bernard Herrmann-esque string soundtrack by the Kronos Quartet, The Green Fog is mostly a lark. But for film geeks, it’s a lark ascending to heaven.

randall.king@freepress.mb.caTwitter: @FreepKing