Conomos, John,  The Vertigo of Time, Senses of Cinema, May 2000

Location Proposal #2: Shot 14, 35mm rear screen slide projection

Cindy Bernard’s luminous installation Location Proposal No 2 (1997-99) has digitised the redwood forest sequence in Vertigo. This moving moment in Hitchcock’s film, which looks at an ancient redwood tree stump and its rings as an index of time, memory and measurement, evokes Cabrera Infante’s description of Vertigo as “the first great surrealist film” (29). As we circumnavigate Bernard’s three suspended digitised screens consisting of carefully recreated shots from this specific sequence in the film, we are taking a new “walk through” perspective of Hitchcock’s forest. The artificial aura of Bernard’s digitised forest images allude to the highly artificial other-worldly spaces and travels of Hitchcock’s cinema, and its attendant multifaceted representation of the disturbed vertiginous state of mind of his obsessive characters.