The Green Fog

Over the course of the first third, I found this compilation of scenes from San Francisco so unintelligible and chaotic that I felt quite an urge to leave the projection room. Then I started to notice some clues of a storyline, and it occurred to me that The Green Fog was telling, very loosely, the story from Hitchcock’s Vertigo using shots from other films – something that was confirmed a couple of times during the viewing. Nevertheless, even if I was glad I managed to decipher this flick at least a bit, I found it very disparate, disturbing in its editing and, above all, completely pointless. And what about that green fog? I seriously haven’t found out its signification yet. [KVIFF 2018] (08/07/2018)

A film edited together by excerpts from other films set in San Francisco. In essence, the film is an attempt to tell the story of Hitchcock’s Vertigo through narrative and editorially experimental video montages. However, the film only has a continuous plot within short and very isolated segments a few minutes long, not across the entire film. It only reminds of Vertigo very remotely. These segments usually frame scenes with three men editing the film in the editing room and continuously playing various passages, which is quite a funny meta-solution to give the whole strange shape some cover, although it is somewhat cheap. Otherwise, all dialogues are cut out from most of the other scenes, and in some shots, either green fog, green tint or other green smoke effects are added, but only sporadically, and this has no deeper meaning on the image. A few sequences are very good and edited imaginatively, others are surprisingly inconsistent (the quarrel of a man and a woman edited together from scenes in which the protagonists do not quarrel) and overall, the hour can be survived if taken as something that is visually interesting. (29/06/2018)