[Password: exactly]

„What do video games essays offer us? The possibility of playing again.“

Chris Marker

VERTIGO is a film about reproduction. About the drive to repeat and to reproduce lost things, and about the failure to do so. Each new attempt to reproduce the desired object and to re-stage the scene of its encounter makes it more ungraspable and remote. Eventually, we, the audience will be forded to understand that even what we believed to be the original was always already a reproduction.

I wondered what it would mean to repeat the images of VERTIGO (as many before me have wondered). To remake its scenes – but as a Doppelgänger which is both the same and not. Or, as Madeleine tells Scottie: „a dark image of me… and yet not me… someone else in another clothes, of another time, doing things I have never done… but still me…“ Curiously enough, these perfect lines stand in the film’s script, but they do not appear in the final film. The repetition is faulty, also on the level of movie production.

I fed the AI image generator DreamStudio with screenshots from VERTIGO combined with various text prompts. The so produced doubles of the original stills were often banal, yet sometimes held a detail so surprising, it made me go back to find its seed in the original. And I then re-combined the AI images with the original film images. Thus, the results are collages of photographic and hallucinated images. The mere repetition of the AI needed to be broken by re-insertig the original images into the new ones. I had to make the AI images more familiar again so that they would become more disturbing. The uncanny, psychoanalysis taught us, is that which is alway close by, familiar and unfamiliar at the same time.

But also something else happened when working with these AI images: Retroactively, they rendered the supposedly original stills more weird. Suddenly the film images looked as eerily fake as the AI ones.

It also became clear to me that the whole process of this video essay is actually mirrored and foreshadowed in the film itself, with the character of Midge, re-making, re-mixing the portrait of Carlotta by inserting herself into it. It is not by accident that it is her who leads through this video essay. And it made me understand why today I feel more for Midge than for any other character of the film. „Someone else in another clothes, of another time, doing things I have never done… but still me…“ this applies to Midge as much as to Madeleine. And to the video essayist as well.

with inspiration from:

Chris Marker: „A free replay (notes on Vertigo)“ (1994)
Cristina Álvarez López: „Replaying Marker“ (2022)

and
MIDGE AGONISTES (2021) and SEMBLANCE (2021)
by Catherine Grant