The Green FogImitation is the most sincere form of flattery. The Green Fog is an experimental movie--a pastiche of clips from numerous other movies and TV shows, all set in and around San Francisco--and is itself a kind of retelling of Alfred Hitchcock's own San Francisco-set drama, Vertigo. It is almost uniformly devoid of dialogue, and what is there is deliberately meant to obfuscate or perplex rather than expound. And yet each scene is also framed and sequenced deliberately to recall the beat-by-beat plot of Vertigo, necessitating that audiences of The Green Fog are already familiar with the masterpiece that inspired it, just as it has inspired so many others.
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Vertigo is my favorite movie, and I've long been a fan of the works of Guy Maddin and his collaborator and co-director, Evan Johnson, including The Forbidden Room. Now, along with a third director, Galen Johnson, comes The Green Fog--an overt homage to my favorite movie, but with a bonkers aesthetic that makes it more of a spoof than a remake, akin to Mel Brooks' High Anxiety (which also gets a nod itself here). The film is composed entirely of archival footage--save for some superimposed green fog--and when re-edited, retells a story both familiar and foreign--a powerful example of the Kuleshov effect at work. This is a film that should not exist, for reasons not least of which include that it's never clear whether Maddin/Johnson/Johnson obtained permission from whomever gives it to reuse said footage; maybe they just did it for the heck of it. As a result, trying to see The Green Fog was itself a bit of a quest for me. It's unlikely that we'll ever see a physical release for sale of such a work, but it should be seen by Vertigo fans anyway. I, for one, was only able to watch it (and subsequently write about it) after creating an account with Vimeo exclusively for this purpose; that's where I recommend seeing it, dear readers. The sad truth about this, though, is that it means that it will remain difficult for audiences to find this movie, harkening back to a time when people would take road trips to go see a piece of art they couldn't otherwise enjoy remotely. It also, perhaps unconsciously, is a statement about the freedom of filmmaking to exist free of a commercial interest--a point made more ironic since all of this footage came from other commercial works. And for cineastes--arguably the true audience for The Green Fog--there is much joy to find in here. Some will likely recognize one film or another--my eyes lit up when I saw scenes from the 1978 Invasion of the Body Snatchers and the equally Hitchcockian The Game. Others will recognize character actors in various scenes, and their onscreen personae adds its own bizarre flavor to the film and even the story of Vertigo. In arguably the most remarkable example of this, there is an extended combination of scenes with a stoic (and almost painfully silent) Chuck Norris following one of a very few title cards that reads "Catatonia".
The greatest thrill of watching The Green Fog is in how it simultaneously embraces and subverts both its source and reference material. The film includes clips from a wide swath of cinematic history--films made before and after Vertigo. This adds a historic spin to Vertigo, as the audience is allowed to speculate on who inspired who...or even who ripped off who? There are scenes that feel--when presented in this sequence--like they were shamelessly raiding Hitchcock's masterpiece, like when a young man is forced into an office early on that looks unmistakably like Gavin Elster's. The icing on the cake comes when a secretary who looks like an older Kim Novak enters wearing a green business suit cut the same way as Madeline's. Every scene feels as though it would be in place at that point in time in the story--from when Madeline wakes up in Scottie's apartment, to their journey into the forest of ancient redwood trees. Most of these scenes are played for laughs, and have elements of voyeuristic surveillance peppered throughout--more in the spirit of Scottie's erstwhile occupation as a detective--like when an attentive cop asks for a music video by NSYNC (coincidentally set among the redwoods) be taken into evidence. Since dialogue is spare, and usually used only for punctuation, not exposition, most scenes have almost all instances of conversation edited out. This makes for some of the best yuks, as everyone is constantly on the verge of saying something...but they don't. Take one early scene where Joseph Cotton fills in for James Stewart, pruning flowers to relax, yet taking a moment (again and again) to look over the ledge of his high-rise dwelling, prompting cutaways to catastrophic falling accidents, unable to say what he wants to say to the surrogate Barbara Bel Geddes.
The most original addition to the "plot" concerns the eponymous "green fog" that seems to descend on San Francisco, and can even be seen from outer space (presumably by aliens). Considering the way it is introduced into this film, it is suggested that this fog has addled the minds of all those in the city, and this same fugue state is what sprouts forth a reenactment of the doomed love affair between the "hard-headed Scot" and his two-faced lover. All of those great moments from Vertigo reemerge in a new coat of the absurd, but paradoxically, this funhouse mirror version of the movie lends a new perspective to the inspirational material. Take the massively jumbled argument edited into a cacophony at the point in the story when Scottie confronts Judy, having figured out that she set him up. In this film's most dialogue-laden instance, a man and a woman--frequently swapped out with different actors and actresses--argue at a heated point, likely signaling the end of their relationship. This scene adds a new dimension to the one from Vertigo, suggesting that the confrontation between Scottie and Madeline/Judy is more than just the protagonist revealing how he "figured it out", but of the real heartache of trying to tell someone you love how they betrayed you, despite your own sins. By definition, The Green Room isn't interested in telling an original story, but presenting its take on a cinematic classic as an artist would compose a collage--found from all that orbits around it, but arranged in such a way to tell a new story anyway.
Recommended for: Unquestionably for fans of Vertigo, first and foremost, and they are legion as The Green Fog suggests. Audiences unfamiliar with the Hitchcock film will be understandably lost, and really should go look the original up to get the most out of this love letter to Vertigo.
The greatest thrill of watching The Green Fog is in how it simultaneously embraces and subverts both its source and reference material. The film includes clips from a wide swath of cinematic history--films made before and after Vertigo. This adds a historic spin to Vertigo, as the audience is allowed to speculate on who inspired who...or even who ripped off who? There are scenes that feel--when presented in this sequence--like they were shamelessly raiding Hitchcock's masterpiece, like when a young man is forced into an office early on that looks unmistakably like Gavin Elster's. The icing on the cake comes when a secretary who looks like an older Kim Novak enters wearing a green business suit cut the same way as Madeline's. Every scene feels as though it would be in place at that point in time in the story--from when Madeline wakes up in Scottie's apartment, to their journey into the forest of ancient redwood trees. Most of these scenes are played for laughs, and have elements of voyeuristic surveillance peppered throughout--more in the spirit of Scottie's erstwhile occupation as a detective--like when an attentive cop asks for a music video by NSYNC (coincidentally set among the redwoods) be taken into evidence. Since dialogue is spare, and usually used only for punctuation, not exposition, most scenes have almost all instances of conversation edited out. This makes for some of the best yuks, as everyone is constantly on the verge of saying something...but they don't. Take one early scene where Joseph Cotton fills in for James Stewart, pruning flowers to relax, yet taking a moment (again and again) to look over the ledge of his high-rise dwelling, prompting cutaways to catastrophic falling accidents, unable to say what he wants to say to the surrogate Barbara Bel Geddes.
The most original addition to the "plot" concerns the eponymous "green fog" that seems to descend on San Francisco, and can even be seen from outer space (presumably by aliens). Considering the way it is introduced into this film, it is suggested that this fog has addled the minds of all those in the city, and this same fugue state is what sprouts forth a reenactment of the doomed love affair between the "hard-headed Scot" and his two-faced lover. All of those great moments from Vertigo reemerge in a new coat of the absurd, but paradoxically, this funhouse mirror version of the movie lends a new perspective to the inspirational material. Take the massively jumbled argument edited into a cacophony at the point in the story when Scottie confronts Judy, having figured out that she set him up. In this film's most dialogue-laden instance, a man and a woman--frequently swapped out with different actors and actresses--argue at a heated point, likely signaling the end of their relationship. This scene adds a new dimension to the one from Vertigo, suggesting that the confrontation between Scottie and Madeline/Judy is more than just the protagonist revealing how he "figured it out", but of the real heartache of trying to tell someone you love how they betrayed you, despite your own sins. By definition, The Green Room isn't interested in telling an original story, but presenting its take on a cinematic classic as an artist would compose a collage--found from all that orbits around it, but arranged in such a way to tell a new story anyway.
Recommended for: Unquestionably for fans of Vertigo, first and foremost, and they are legion as The Green Fog suggests. Audiences unfamiliar with the Hitchcock film will be understandably lost, and really should go look the original up to get the most out of this love letter to Vertigo.