Messing with History: Vertigo and Othello

Spot-on essay by Chris Fujiwara written in late 2000 - http://www.hermenaut.com/a36.shtml

(Favorite line: "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. ")


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A Swimming in the Head



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 dizzinessŠ 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 ****ing 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.

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My feeling is, if they have enough elements to make a decent surround mix--as was the case with VERTIGO, as some of the soundtrack was recorded in stereo--fine, but offer the original monaural mix as well, just don't stick us with a surround mix just for the sake of it. GWTW is a bit different situation--that sounds to me like a doctored kind of stereo, gussied up to sound more elaborate than it really is.

OTHELLO was another matter: rerecording music to create a stereo/surround mix. The same was done for Chaplin's CITY LIGHTS laser(and, I would guess, the DVD reissue), but the original mono was also there, and that's the only way to hear the film.

There are quite a few oddball surround mixes floating around for films. One howler is THE ROAD WARRIOR, with sound so garish and mixed at varied volume levels it can drive you nuts. Good popcorn movie, but the original soundtrack would have served just as well.


ED

 

I wouldn't be so quick to castigate Harris and Katz for the decision to redo the Vertigo soundtrack. Like Steve H., they're masters of their craft who use their knowledge of an artist's (in this case, the filmmaker's) original intentions to guide their actions, and any decision of theirs regarding a restoration is supported by much research and technical expertise. Also like Steve, they're underappreciated in their own field, and they presumably had to make compromises with the people holding the purse strings. Just because their names are listed as the restorers doesn't necessarily mean that everything you see and hear in a theatrical or DVD release was under their control.

A perfect example is the Lawrence of Arabia DVD. There are color-timing issues throughout the DVD image, and a few music cues come in later than they did in the original film. Despite what most film buffs think, the DVD is not the same as the deservedly lauded print restored by Harris for the theatrical reissue. Moreover, the transfer shows evidence of too much compression (despite the fact that the film is spread over two discs) and edge-enhancement. So what happened? Simple. The studio in their infinite wisdom decided not to consult Harris for the DVD release, and a bunch of after-the-fact tweaking and "improvement" was done by unknown hands. IIRC, Harris isn't even credited on the DVD, which, considering that it wasn't his work that was presented, is probably just as well.

 

I tried watching Vertigo with an open mind, but I have to agree, the sound sunk the restoration. I love how they put together Lawrence of Arabia, and I was surprised to find out that for some of the "lost" sections that had degraded a bit, they re-recorded a few pieces of dialogue with the original cast members. When I heard all the trouble they went through finding the right gun, the right car, etc. for Vertigo, I thought it could work, but it sounded like it was recorded yesterday. It simply didn't feel like it went with everything you see on screen. This was before I ever got particular with the sound-quality of anything. Knew nothing about Steve, DCC, gold CD's, etc.

Regardless, they're still the best in the business, and I still love what they did with Lawrence, Rear Window, and My Fair Lady.

 

Cellar,

In the end, it's not about castigating and/or exonerating Harris and Katz. I know they have done good work before and since the Vertigo debacle. What matters is that the Vertigo restoration was botched badly; the result being that I find it unwatchable. It really doesn't matter whose fault it is - what matters is somebody at some stage of the production chain made these decisions and we're left with either: 1) an unwatchable travesty (for those of us who know the film well) or 2) a lie; an inexcusably altered artifact masquerading as the true object - when it most certainly is NOT. The emotional vicissitudes, atmosphere and, subsequently, the meaning of entire scenes are manipulated and altered in this "restoration". Hitchcock's intent is radically (albeit via subtle methodology) changed; first-time viewers now experience something that Vertigo never was intended to be.

It doesn't matter whose fault it is, really. What matters is that THIS travesty is what we're now stuck with.

 

Pepzhez,

Sorry, but I think it matters a great deal whose fault it is. In the case of Vertigo, the bad decision to rework the soundtrack and not include the original soundtrack on the DVD was likely the fault of someone at Universal. Laying the blame properly is necessary because otherwise experts like Robert Harris (who actually thinks the same way we do about preserving history) might get their reputations sullied unfairly, which could make it difficult for them to do their work on other films that need preservation and need it done right. Wouldn't you feel like defending Steve if, for example, MCA reissued Who's Next with clipping distortion and labeled the mastering as having been done by him?

The more the big studios feel justified in giving restoration jobs to people not of Robert Harris' caliber or taking the experts' work away from them to "improve" on it, the more we'll keep ending up with travesties such as the "new" Vertigo.

 

I have to go with Raf here. If you're going to hire experts at restoration, let them do their work. Also take their advice! I can't imagine Harris wanting ONLY the 5.1 remix included on VERTIGO; makes no sense whatsoever, since the original film was put out in mono only(as was the original soundtrack Lp). As I posted above, the sensible thing, when it comes to 5.1 remixes of older films, is to include the original mono sound track as an alternate audio track; this is not unreasonable and not that much more of an expense, I would think.

As for the video quality, I've only seen VERTIGO once in a theater, and that was back in the '80s when Universal was putting out some of the Hitch titles they own on limited runs. I got to see most of those, but even then, I couldn't swear to you every print I saw was what was meant to be seen, even REAR WINDOW, which has kind of a funny color scheme to begin with.
What I do know is the VERTIGO DVD is different from that print I saw, and while it may not be perfectly accurate, the poor condition of the negative should allow some leeway in what constitutes the correct color scheme and contrasts. Really, I don't mind the picture quality so much as the sound track. Just as I don't think we should have the lone option of a remixed HELP! CD, so we should have the same options for movies.

ED