#026 - The Green Fog (2017)
Hello and welcome to my weblog. Tonight I watched The Green Fog (2017).
This afternoon some friends and I watched a couple of movies together and chatted over Discord; writing you all this email was not in my plans for the evening because I didn’t think we were watching any Nicholas Cage movies. The first movie we watched was the 1958 Hitchcock classic Vertigo about people falling off buildings and the psychic harm that causes Jimmy Stewart. The second was The Green Fog, a found-footage reinterpretation of Vertigo commissioned for the San Francisco International Film Festival and compiled by Guy Maddin and some of his frequent collaborators out of footage shot around or set in San Francisco. In the last five minutes of the film, there was a brief clip of Nicholas Cage from The Rock (1996); a minute later when there was a half-second shot of him in silhouette against the San Francisco sunrise, also from the Rock, there was no doubt to me that this counted as a Nicholas Cage movie even if it doesn’t make it onto his IMDB page.
The first half of the movie relies heavily on scenes where the dialogue has been removed; you only see actors’ faces right before they speak or reacting to lines off-screen. There’s something very elegant in the way they reverse-engineer a silent movie version of the original by cutting out the talking parts from something else. Dialogue starts to sneak into the film half way through, first through a meta-narrative of the editors inserting themselves into the film by using footage of people reviewing tape recordings, and then into the film proper, ending with a scene that parallels Scotty and Judy in the clocktower at the end of Vertigo with a rapid succession of clips of people yelling, including the clip of Nic Cage from The Rock.
Because of the limitations of the source material (the found footage, not Vertigo), it can be hard at times to parse how the footage on the screen is supposed to map to Vertigo. If you watch The Green Fog, which I enjoyed and would recommend, I do suggest that you also watch Vertigo first.
Thanks to everyone who watched these with me this afternoon; it was a treat!