Three Audiovisual Correspondences in the Main Title for Vertigo

Abstract

Saul Bass and Bernard Herrmann provided the visuals and music, respectively, for the main title of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1958 movie Vertigo. These expressions correspond with one another in three ways. First, when aligning two dimensions of visual and pitch brightness, a portion of each expression moves through this two-dimensional space using a similar path. Second, when arranging some of the tonal materials onto a certain space, these materials transform into each other using transformations similar to those that animate some of the visual designs. Third, under partial enharmonic equivalence, these pitch spaces curl into a partly-closed and partly-open shape that closely resembles manipulated visual forms whose looped closure is partially obscured. The first and third ways shed significant light on the film’s narrative, and the first way in particular parallels the film’s central dramatic form.