Jimmy Stewart’s sleeping face turns blue, then flickers purple; he awakens and his eyes open; his face dissolves into a bouquet of roses, which in turn flutters away into a deconstructed assemblage of animated forms, while Bernard Herrmann’s pulsing score marks an anxious heartbeat.
How tempting it is to relate the surreal nightmare sequence described above in Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958) to the series of flower and vase paintings that the painter John Ferren, who designed the film sequence for the great director, was creating just two years before the release of the film.
In The Bloom (1956), for example, Ferren offers the viewer a monumental parti-colored dahlia or chrysanthemum. Each petal is a single brushstroke, and the colors of the petals radiate or pulse from a hot fire-engine red at center, to purple, to green, to yellow, to ochre: a flower one could only see in a dream, or a nightmare. Around the main blossom are rhythmically fluttering white and brown petals. The correlation between oil on canvas and celluloid is the trademark of Ferren’s practice, a many-faceted use of media and various methods of execution, all correlating to a unified theme.
