Custom Clothes: Carlotta Valdez

Friday 14 September 2012

Carlotta Valdez

Time is evoked numerous times in Vertigo. In his shipyard building office, old prints of San Francisco hang on the walls. Gavin Elster tells Scottie of his preference for yesteryears. "The things that spell San Francisco to me are disappearing fast... I should have liked to have lived here then— color, excitement, power, freedom." Elster's wife Madeleine is obsessed with the past too, wandering to Golden Gate Park to the Portals of the Past. She visits Mission Dolores graveyard to her great-grandmother Carlotta Valdez's tombstone (1831-1857). She goes to the Legion of Honor and sits at the portrait of Carlotta Valdez staring back into time, buying a nosegay of roses identical to those she's holding. She also mimicks Carlotta's hairstyle down to her spiral bun. In their trip to Big Basin's redwoods , they look at the cross section of a Coastal Redwood that is over a thousand years old . Madeleine points her finger at the outer rings and says "Somewhere in here I was born... and there I died.