Parky At the Pictures (3/4/2026)

(Reviews of Kim Novak's Vertigo; and D Is For Distance)

KIM NOVAK'S VERTIGO.

It's not often that a ghost is thanked in a film's credits. But the closing crawl of Alexandre O. Philippe's Kim Novak's Vertigo makes it clear that the spirit of Alfred Hitchcock was `undeniably present during the making of this movie'. This is the latest of the Swiss American documentarist's screen studies, following the likes of Earthlings: Ugly Bags of Mostly Water (2004; about Klingon), The People vs George Lucas (2010), Doc of the Dead (2014), Memory: The Origins of Alien (2019), Leap of Faith: William Friedkin on The Exorcist (2020), The Taking (2021; about Monument Valley), Lynch/Oz (2022), William Shatner: You Can Call Me Bill (2023), and Chain Reactions (2024). It's also the second to touch on the Master of Suspense after 78/52 (2017) took a forensice look at the shower scene in Psycho (1960).

Following what looks like a screen test of Kim Novak opening her eyes and looking towards the camera, we get a sequence of roving shots of her ranch near Eagle Point, Oregon. On the soundtrack, she confides, `I hesitate to even be recording this because I don't know what's gonna come out of what I say, what I mean. What do I mean? Is that what it's about: What do I mean? What do I think? What do I feel? I don't know what's expected of me to feel, or to think, or even to be, for that matter.'

Musing that it's not easy to grow old, the 92 year-old says she feels she's coming towards the end and thinks the time is right to reveal something that has been hidden in the closet of her mind. She remembers not knowing how to feel on discovering that her father, Joseph, kept the foetus of her miscarried younger brother in a jar in his basement workshop. Her mother, Blanche, had tried to abort her with knitting needles and later attempted to suffocate her with a pillow. But she survived and there's a sense of pride in her voice, as she sits at her easel painting one of the many spiral shapes that will recur throughout the film in recognition of their significance to Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo (1958).

She puts her fixation with swirls down to the Easter eggs her strict father had painted for Marilyn (as she was christened) and her sister, Arlene, when they were kids. Novak feels an affinity to Alexandre O. Philippe and is amused when he reveals that he was drawn into cinema because the red wallpaper in Ernie's restaurant in Vertigo resembled the pattern in the family home in Switzerland. Novak teases that he noticed the décor more than her green-and-black satin dress, but he reassures her that it was the combination that alerted him to the power of visual imagery.

While she was never sure her father was proud of her, Novak knew her mother supported her and reminded her to always be the captain of her own ship. She was also very close to her grandmother, who has a bluebird tattoo on her arm and she taught Novak always to have the courage to do what she wanted to do and to speak when things needed saying. Monochrome clips from The Notorious Landlady (1962), The Legend of Lylah Clare (1968), and Jeanne Eagels (1957) decorate this section, which explains the influence that women had in shaping Novak's personality and worldview, which would rub up against the egotistical misogyny of the tyrants who ran the Hollywood studios, including Columbia's Harry Cohn.

Novak notes that her grandmother often appears in her paintings, as a butterfly or bird, and she recalls how a wounded bird that had been healed by vet husband Robert Malloy had fallen in love with her and followed her everywhere. Greta Garbo also reminded Novak of her grandmother and we clips from Grand Hotel (1931), Mata Hari (1932), Queen Christina (1933), and Anna Karenina (1935), as Novak ponders the fact that both she and Garbo exhibited a certain vulnerability on screen and that she would justify her decision to walk away from Hollywood by claiming to be following her idol's example.

While discussing the pleasure of coming home to warm. fuzzy slippers, Novak compares Vertigo co-star James Stewart to comfortable footwear. As we see him in It's a Wonderful Life (1946), Novak confides that, on thes set of Bell, Book and Candle (1958), they would often sit with their toes touching. This sets her reminiscing about seeing Garbo in Paris, her first trip abroad, and how she started modelling (with refrigerators looming large in her early legend). During a trip to Hollywood, she was spotted and cast as a model on a staircase in The French Line. Richard Quine played a key role in her early days in film and she admits to having fallen in love with him. But she resisted being turned into another Marilyn Monroe after debuting opposite Fred MacMurray in Pushover (both 1954) and playing Jeanne Eagels helped her to understand the way the system worked and what she needed to do to prevent herself being overwhelmed like Monroe. However, what she feared most was becoming Kim Novak, as she was a construct not her real self.

Over trailers drooling over Novak's looks and allure, she explains that it was bewildering becoming a star and being in demand with the media because it was all so alien to her. She compares the way the studio made her over to Madeleine and Judy in Vertigo and she agrees that Columbia boss Harry Cohn was a controlling influence and she put up with it in Phffft (1954),.Picnic (1955). Pal Joey (1957), and Middle of the Night (1959) because she had little choice. But director Joshua Logan recognised that she felt being pretty was like wearing a crown of thorns, while she disliked having to play characters who had nothnig to do with herself. She also felt uncomfortable being presented as glamorous to be gazed upon and, over clips from 5 Against the House, The Man With the Golden Arm (both 1955), Bell, Book and Candle (1958), Of Human Bondage, Kiss Me, Stupid (both 1964), The Amorous Adventures of Moll Flanders (1965), and Lylah Clare, Novak laments that she kept wanting to escape and turn her back on the circus.

While others in the 1950s made much of acting, Novak specialised in `reacting', as this was her way of being authentic and not laying it on too thick, as so many contemporaries did. She also used to do sketches of her characters before she did big scenes, so they became part of her core. So, art helped keep her grounded during what she always felt was merely going to be a detour into movies.

She returns to the house perched on a cliff between Carmel and Big Sur to remember the sense of being reborn and free to paint and be alone with Warlock the Great Dane, an unnamed goat, and Pyewacket the cat. Archive footage shows them around the house, as Novak notes that she started painting in earnest here. Birds occur a lot in her art, as she sees them as messengers and their appearance lets her know she's heading in the right direction. Many canvases were lost in a house fire and she regrets the loss because each piece (including one of her father) was so personal. The script for Vertigo survived two blazes and she opens in on camera and remembers Cohn had told her it was rubbish. Yet it spoke to her as she read it and realised that she and Judy had much in common. The screen splits to show clips of Judy and Scottie and Novak reliving the scene in breathy whispers. The effect is used again, as Novak and Philippe go into the attic and find the Edith Head grey suit that transforms Judy into Madeleine and she holds it to herself, as she remembers the feeling of playing the scene under Hitchcock's direction and Stewart's anguished gaze.

Novak didn't know she was bipolar at the time and she confides that it's a wonder her brain didn't explode from the psychological strain of being herself in such a prestigious film and having to play Judy and Madeleine with a touch of Carlotta. She identified with Judy because she wanted Scottie to look at her the way he had looked at Madeleine and Novak always wanted to be herself rather than a studio possession. Recalling the intensity of her rapport with Stewart, she commends his gentleness and respect and insists they were never acting. Instead they were reacting in character to the situations they were trapped in and that made their performances all the more potent and persuasive.

Hugging the grey suit, she dabs tears on to the fabric and inhales to see if she can smell her old self. She's intrigued by how much softer it feels, as she expresses her gratitude to the suit for playing such a key role in her life. Sighing, she also opines that one of the good things about ageing is that you can look back and see how beautiful everything is. Accepting that she didn't do a bad job with her reacting, Novak thanks Philippe for giving her the chance to appreciate her achievements and come to some sort of peace with them. She reminds him to look into the sky after she's gone because she will keep painting and any spirals he sees in the clouds will be her way of keeping in touch.

It's very moving to hear someone of Novak's age retaining energy and optimism, while also coming to terms with once-troubling aspects of the past. For that reason alone, this is an engrossing of a woman who just happens to have been a legendary film star. Some of Novak's utterances are a little precious, but she's entitled to express herself in any way she wishes, especially considering how courageous she is being in revisiting the struggles she had endured while acclimatising to the rare atmosphere in 1950s Hollywood, where the sense of an era ending must have hung heavy, as the stars and directors who had dominated since the early talkie days started moving on - many into television, which had decimated cinema attendances and driven the studios into the financial crisis that would culminate in them all becoming part of multi-media concerns who were more interested in profit than art.

Philippe and editor David Lawrence pack in the clips, even finding room for Delbert Mann's 1973 teleplay, The Girl From the Left. But they're too often used for illustration not illumination or because a line of dialogue echoes something that Novak has just said. He largely leaves her the floor, when a little structural questioning might have sharpened her focus. But one gets the impression that the awestruck director was so delighted to be in Novak's company and get such erudite revelations that he let her extemporise. Such an approach means that there's no mention of such potentially compelling topics as Hitchcock's behaviour on the set, misogyny within the studio system, and Novak's scandalous romance with Sammy Davis, Jr., which prompted Cohn (who called her `the fat Polack') to threats to cripple or blind the Black entertainer for besmirching his star. Similarly, there's nothing about Novak's unhappy returns in Just a Gigolo (1977) and Liebestraum (1991) and why she chose to come back when she did. Mercifully, however, we're spared Donald Trump's ungallant online remark about Novak's appearance (after a lengthy exile) at the 2014 Academy Awards. Twelve years on, she looks remarkable, but he remains irredeemably oafish.

Such topics were evidently not on the agenda, as this was never intended to be a standard biographical profile. But it might have been nice to hear Novak's views on what were pivotal aspects of her brief stay at the top. Much can be read between the lines Lylah Clare exchanges abusive director Lewis Zarkan (Peter Finch) in a Tinseltown satire that was essentially Robert Aldrich's companion piece to What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962). But, for all its intimacy, this feels like one of Philippe's minor studies, as it lacks the forensic intensity that made 78/52 so compelling.

D IS FOR DISTANCE.

Parenthood was one of the themes of Chris Petit's Content (2010), a self-described `21st-century road movie, ambient' that also riffed on ageing, terrorism, and new media. Fifteen years have since elapsed and being a father has taken up much of Petit's time, as his son has required extensive care after his childhood memories were erased during a series of seizures. In D Is For Distance, Petit and parner Emma Matthews reflect on the family's recent experiences, while questioning existing NHS practices and ruminating on memory and the moving image.

As a narrator (Jodhi May) explains, Louis started having epileptic fits when he was 12. The prescribed medication left him unable to engage with his mother, Emma, in simple conversations, while he lost his childhood memories. He had also been investigated for Alice in Wonderland Syndrome, in which things seem simultaneously close and distant. However, two separate doctors insisted the conditions Louis was supposedly experiencing didn't occur together and they told Emma to stop putting ideas into her impressionable son's head. By the time it was found they were wrong, damage had been done and the narrator states that Emma blamed a mix of `hubris and bureaucracy'. She also discovered that a seizure that lasts more than five minutes is called `status epilepticus' and is extremely dangerous. Louis has had 12 such episodes and watching helplessly was unbearably stressful.

The next change of medication induced one-minute seizures every 40 minutes and, after two years of negative progress, the doctors apparently told Emma to grieve for the child who once was. Petit denounced them for being more interesting in prescribing than caring and applied for an Irish passport, which was apt, as his grandfather had run an asylum in Sligo. At her 100th birthday party, Petit's mother named everyone in a 1947 wedding photo except her groom and he had pondered the value of what is lost if it can't be remembered.

Througout the film to this point. we have cut away regularly to follow Louis and his father on a trip to Finland in order to scout locations for a film that might well never get made, about the connection between Beat author William Burroughs and postwar CIA chief. James Jesus Angleton, who we are told is one of the most secretive men who ever lived. On the journey, Louis is seen playing the guitar and reading and it's at this point in the film that he speaks for himself to reveal that his doctors had all-but given up hope when his parents had taken the decision to take him to the Netherlands to try medicinal cannabis. This had an instant impact by stopping the seizures, but access was denied via the NHS and obtaining the drug was expensive and risky.

Diverting away from Louis, we hear about Angleton and his downfall in 1974. The narrator suggests he really knew what happened with Lee Harvey Oswald in Dallas in 1963 and backed LSD experiments to examine the effectiveness of mind-controlling drugs. The inclusion of a photo of John Wayne on a Filipino military base with Oswald standing in the background is amusingly mischievous, indeed much more so than the passage of Burroughs explaining how he sought to tamper with the realm of pre-recording through his experiments with randomly assembling parts of cut-up pages (a technique also used by David Bowie, whose photograph is briefly shown because it made such an impact on Louis in 2016).

The narrator describes the effects Louis endured while withdrawing from prescribed drugs and she notes the importance of his art to keeping him grounded while he was having disturbing hallucinations. As the daughter of an NHS doctor, Emma is disappointed by the refusal to give Louis the cannabis that has clearly helped him and Petit seemingly put it down to a conspiracy led by the pharmaceutical industry that was well known to be in `a lethal addictive business'. As he spouts about the world being made a mess by social media before A.I. comes along to complete the job, we see footage of Louis in his early twenties making the most of his days that are still bereft of memories, even though the seizures have stopped. The closing images show father and son tramping over rough terrain beside a spectacular lake in Lapland. It's an aptly calm and poetic way to end, even though it offers no guarantees for either Louis's future or that of a human population that keeps ignoring the writing on the wall in front of its face. (According to Chris Petit, anyway).

He wrote the text for this deeply personal insight into an ordeal that the family has faced together with great courage and a tenderness that comes through a collaged testament that is deftly studded with clips from the earliest days of the moving image - by the likes of Louis Le Prince, Eadweard Muybridge, the Lumière brothers, Georges Méliès, Percy Stow and Cecil Hepworth, Segundo de Chomón, J. Searle Dawley, and W.W. Young, whose 1915 take on Alice in Wonderland pops up frequently - as well as some splendid monochrome cartoons featuring the likes of Betty Boop. The inclusion of Matthias Grünewald and Nikolaus Hagenauer's `Isenheim Altarpiece' is also welcome, as are the references to John Ford's The Searchers (1956) and Howard Hawks's Rio Bravo (1959). Yet, such is the intimate nature of the subject matter that it feels overly intrusive to say more, other than to wish all three well.