How Alfred Hitchcock’s ‘Vertigo’ popularised the dolly zoom
The 1958 psychological thriller Vertigo, directed and produced by Alfred Hitchcock, is considered the English director’s greatest work and finds its place among the best films of all time. James Stewart plays Scottie, a former police detective who retires after developing a fear of heights and vertigo, who is hired to follow the strangely behaving wife of his acquaintance, Gavin.
The narrative and Hitchcock’s superb direction are what make it a classic of the cinematic medium, although Vertigo is also admired for popularising the use of an inventive cinematography technique called the dolly zoom. In fact, the dolly zoom became so ubiquitous with Vertigo that it became known as the ‘Hitchcock zoom’ or the ‘Vertigo effect’.
The dolly zoom effect has become a staple feature in films where the director wants to invoke a sense of disorientation and suspenseful unease in the audience. It’s created by moving the camera back or forward on a dolly at the same time as adjusting the zoom lens to achieve a distorted perspective.
Careful coordination is required in order to get the dolly zoom to look right, though, as the movement of the camera has to be perfectly synchronised with the zoom of the lens. Vertigo sees a brilliant use of the dolly zoom when Scottie experiences a sudden bout of acrophobia and vertigo whilst climbing a bell tower.
Hitchcock positions the camera from Scottie’s perspective and looks down the square-shaped staircase he has just climbed. The director has the camera pull back on a dolly whilst zooming in on the lens, which creates the perspective of his characters, disorientating his audience and imbuing them with a sense of fear and empathy with his protagonist.
The dolly zoom would go on to become a staple of filmmaking and saw several famous instances. In Steven Spielberg’s Jaws, the “get out of the water” scene sees a dolly zoom uses on a realisation that a shark is lurking beneath the water, while Martin Scorsese also used one in Raging Bull to put his audience in the shoes of Jake LaMotta.
But it’s Hitchcock who seemed to bring the dolly zoom effect to light in Vertigo, proving yet again his technical prowess as a director. By altering the audience’s perception of narrative events, Hitchcock was able to dive further into his film’s themes of obsession and psychological pressure, creating a metaphor for Scottie’s madness.
Check out the dolly zoom scene from Vertigo below.
