Roundtable discussion at the Philoctetes Center, New York, on November 6, 2010, with Richard Allen, John Belton, Joe McElhaney, Edward Neresessian, and Brigitte Peucker
Vertigo (1958) is the Hitchcock film in which the confusion of ontological registers—of reality with illusion—takes center stage. Indeed, it’s a case study of someone for whom this confusion is nearly pathological. The James Stewart character, Scottie, is duped by a performance with criminal intent, as he falls for a woman he believes to be Madeleine, but who in reality is a woman named Judy (played by Kim Novak) perpetrating a masquerade. Around this “false” Madeleine, a narrative is created that's designed to ensnare Scottie. The film concerns a mysterious case of “possession”—a staged fascination with death—played out in a series of silent tableaux, each of which aestheticizes and eroticizes the Madeleine figure. The film's narrative structure is circular and repetitive; it's been suggested that the film itself represents a distinct form of madness. "Vertigo is just a movie," writes Stanley Cavell in The World Viewed, "but no other movie I know so purely conveys the sealing of a mind within a scorching fantasy." What is the role of psychoanalysis in Hitchcock's work? Is psychoanalysis merely one "surface feature" of Hitchcock's work, as Richard Allen has suggested, subject to irony like all the others? What draws psychoanalytic critics to Hitchcock's work, and how, if at all, is this phenomenon related to its modernism? [Philoctetes Center]
Film Studies For Free brings you one of its regular link-fests pertaining to the study of a single film: today, it's the turn of Alfred Hitchcock's truly magical thriller Vertigo (1958).
The below list of openly-accessible resources was very much inspired by the recent posting of a hugely entertaining, and vertiginously brilliant, discussion on this film between some of the most able Film Studies academics and writers of their generation (see above). The discussion was hosted by the wonderful people at the Philoctetes Center in New York City. Thanks so much to them for making this video available for all to watch and learn from.
The below list of openly-accessible resources was very much inspired by the recent posting of a hugely entertaining, and vertiginously brilliant, discussion on this film between some of the most able Film Studies academics and writers of their generation (see above). The discussion was hosted by the wonderful people at the Philoctetes Center in New York City. Thanks so much to them for making this video available for all to watch and learn from.
- Richard Allen, 'Camera Movement in Vertigo', The MacGuffin, 2007
- Pilar Andrade, 'Cinema's Doubles, Their Meaning, and Literary Intertexts', CLC Web, Volume 10 Issue 4 (December 2008)
- Jonathan A. Austad, Hemingway and Hitchcock: An Examination of the Aesthetic Modernity, PhD Thesis, Florida State University, 2008 (see especially p. 36 onwards)
- Emanuel Berman, 'Hitchcock's Vertigo: the Collapse of a Rescue Phantasy', epff3: Film and Psychoanalysis, 2000
- Giorgio Biancorosso, 'Beginning Credits and Beyond: Music and the Cinematic Imagination', Echo, Volume 3 Issue 1 (Spring 2001)
- John Conomos, 'The Vertigo of Time', Senses of Cinema, Issue 6, 2000
- Ben Dooley, 'Psychoanalysis in Bringing up Baby and Vertigo', Offscreen Journal, Volume 9, Issue 7, July 31, 2005
- Joyce Huntjens, 'Vertigo: A Vertiginous Gap in Reality and a Woman Who Doesn't Exist', Image [and] Narrative, Issue 5, January 2003
- John Locke, 'Last Laugh: Was Hitchcock's Masterpiece Vertigo a Private Joke?', Bright Lights Film Journal, Issue 18, March 1997
- David George Menard, 'Form Inversion in Alfred Hitchcock, Part 1 ~ Hitchcock and Romantic Irony', Offscreen Journal, Vol. 12, Issue 9, Sept 30, 2008; and Page 2
- David George Menard, 'Form Inversion in Alfred Hitchcock, Part 2 ~ Hitchcockian Suspense', Offscreen Journal, Volume 12, Issue 9, Sept 30, 2008 and Page 2
- Ken Mogg, 'Alfred Hitchcock', Senses of Cinema, 2005
- Ken Mogg, 'The Fragments of the Mirror: Vertigo and its Sources', The MacGuffin, No. 25, 2000
- Ken Mogg, 'Some Notes on Vertigo (and Strangers on a Train), The MacGuffin, 2007
- Ornam Rotem, 'The World as One Whole: The Syntactic Role Of Colour in Film', Kinema, 2008
- Tom Schneller, '[Review of] David Cooper. Bernard Herrmann’s Vertigo: A Film Score Handbook...', The Journal of Film Music, Volume 2, Number 1, Fall 2007 Pages 75–78
- George J. Stack, 'Vertigo as Existentialist Film', Philosophy Today, Fall 1986
- Anthony Stagliano, 'Disruptive excesses: gender economics, excesses, and the gaze in Marnie and Vertigo', MA Thesis, DePaul University, 2010
- David Sterritt, 'Introduction', The Films of Alfred Hitchcock [extended sample] (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993)
- Jack Sullivan, 'Overture', Hitchcock's Music (Yale University Press, 2006)
- Alanna Thain, 'Funny How Secrets Travel: DAvid Lynch's Lost Highway', Invisible Culture, Issue 8, 2004
- Jennifer Tyburczy, 'Crossing Borders and the Female Body: The Vampirization of the Female Characters in Hitchcock’s Vertigo', Text, Practice, Performance V (2003): 85-106
- Constantine Verevis, 'Remaking Film', Film Studies, Vol. 4, Summer 2004 (pp 87-103)
- Michael Walker, Hitchcock's Motifs (Amsterdam University Press, 2005)
- McKenzie Wark, 'Vectoral Cinema', Senses of Cinema, Issue 6, 2000
