beetleinabox:

Image from Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958).

Text spoken by the narrator in Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil (1983):

He wrote me that only one film had been capable of portraying impossible memory — insane memory: Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo. In the spiral of the titles he saw time covering a field ever wider as it moved away, a cyclone whose present moment contains, motionless, the eye.

In San Francisco he had made his pilgrimage to all the film’s locations: the florist Podesta Baldocchi, where James Stewart spies on Kim Novak — he the hunter, she the prey. Or was it the other way around? The tiles hadn’t changed.

He had driven up and down the hills of San Francisco where Jimmy Stewart, Scotty, follows Kim Novak, Madeline. It seems to be a question of trailing, of enigma, of murder, but in truth it’s a question of power and freedom, of melancholy and dazzlement, so carefully coded within the spiral that you could miss it, and not discover immediately that this vertigo of space in reality stands for the vertigo of time.

He had followed all the trails. Even to the cemetery at Mission Dolores where Madeline came to pray at the grave of a woman long since dead, whom she should not have known. He followed Madeline — as Scotty had done — to the Museum at the Legion of Honor, before the portrait of a dead woman she should not have known. And on the portrait, as in Madeline’s hair, the spiral of time.