Voted the greatest film of all time in a 2012 poll by Sight&Sound magazine, Alfred Hitchcock’s masterpiece is perhaps the signature work of the director’s collaboration with enigmatic composer Bernard Hermann. When Scottie (James Stewart) is hired to watch the strange behaviour of his friend's wife Madeleine (Kim Novak) he begins to fall madly in love, slowly becoming more and more obsessed until one day, she leaps from a bell tower - but in true Hitchcock style, all is not as it seems. Showcasing perhaps Herrmann's most haunting, evocative and romantic score: spiralling, falling and rising to echo Scottie's frame of mind, it adds much to the film’s famously eerie atmosphere. Quite simply, Vertigo is a symphony of both music and film. A filmic masterwork.

Matt expands further:

“It’s one of the great partnerships in movie history - Hitchcock & Herrmann. Along with Psycho and North By Northwest they produced several classics but this is perhaps their crowning achievement. Martin Scorsese, who famously worked with Bernard Herrmann on his final movie score for Taxi Driver described the qualities of the Vertigo score as thus: "Hitchcock's film is about obsession, which means that it's about circling back to the same moment, again and again ... And the music is also built around spirals and circles, fulfilment and despair. Herrmann really understood what Hitchcock was going for — he wanted to penetrate to the heart of obsession”

Gerard and Matt Johnson will be in conversation with our cinema curator Mark Cosgrove on Sun 8 March, discussing their work, their influences and their recent collaboration on Hyena, which opens on Fri 6 March.

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