Abstract
Like so many others before me, I have long been enchanted by Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958). I was, however, also puzzled over why it has such a hold on anyone’s imagination, let alone my own. Certainly it has something to do with its handsome cinematography by Robert Burks, lushly romantic score by Bernard Herrmann, and meditative (if now somewhat dated) pacing by George Tomasini. But there is something else—a kind of productive artistic “disagreement” between its mood of abstracted reverie, which causes most viewers to lose focus, and its proliferation of intriguing details, which pulls them back to its specifics. In Hitchcock criticism we see both poles—immersion in its generally plaintive mood vis-à-vis sharp focus on minutiae highlighted for often very different critical ends.
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Belton, R.J. (2017). Introduction. In: Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo and the Hermeneutic Spiral. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-55188-3_1
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