The uncanniness of Vertigo is examined in terms of the relation between man and woman, of power, and of gaze as was discussed in the lecture. In the first scene we are brought into a busy restaurant mostly filled with men in black and white suits then enters the main female character. Without prior knowledge we know this bit of information as the woman stands out in her elegant emerald green dress against the red background of the restaurant probably representing feminine. Here we start to notice the male gaze of another man whose face we always see as a whole to concentrate on his eyes and see where they are looking and what they are looking at which is the woman in the green dress. Throughout the movie the view is always through the mans eyes creating an unknown view of the woman's, however no eye contact occurs between the two.
We then follow the man as he follows the woman who is not aware she is being followed because the man in almost all the scenes uses very dark shadows to make himself unseen by the woman. There was a scene where the woman visits a flower shop and the man closely watches her from behind, what seems like, a door. But the door had some sort of mirror on it and thanks to smart camera and imagery techniques, we were able to see the mans face and the woman's reflection next to each other composing a one-imaged frame. By doing so we were able to see the 'male's gaze' and what he was looking at it in one image.
Later on in the movie we come to the scene where the woman visits an art gallery with the male person still following her. She then sits infront of a painting of another woman who almost looks exactly like her with the exact same hairstyle; a sort of bun in a spiral composition. When the man realizes this an expression of curiosity and wonder can be seen on his face. This scene makes us too, the viewers, wonder who the person in the painting is and what relation they had to the woman looking at it as we had earlier known from the scene where the woman visits a graveyard and takes particular interest in a graze and takes particular interest in a graze belonging to a Carlotta Valdes, most probably the woman in the painting.
In relation to the idea of 'male gaze' one could say that this movie portrayed this quite well where that of the woman's was not experienced whatsoever. Everything was seen through the mans eyes or point-of-view. By doing so Alfred Hitchcock creates a character who is almost mysterious and increases our hunger to watch more of the movie to find out who she is and why the male character takes so much interest in her. As stated in an article by Robert Baird, "...The equation of the woman (Madeline) to a work of art also reveals her true nature. As a work of art Madeline is on the one hand easily accessible, because she is passive and an object of the male gaze, on the other hand, she is completely inaccessible as a human being. One cannot have a love affair with a work of art, unless a very passive one."
