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Vertigo

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Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo and the Hermeneutic Spiral

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Abstract

Despite not doing well at the box office when it was first released, Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958) has since been considered one of the masterworks of mid-twentieth-century film history, generating dozens of psychoanalytical, feminist, postfeminist, Lacanian, formalist and other readings. Many of these interpretations depend on revisions of earlier observations within the work and/or the production of new observations. The chapter “Vertigo” provides a general overview of the film and its reception, and it introduces the idea that different interpreters literally see and attend to different things, which makes it possible for them to come to different conclusions. The chapter introduces numerous examples of how material outside the film itself comes to play a role in our interpretations of it.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Critical Studies, The University of British Columbia, Okanagan Campus, Kelowna, British Columbia, Canada

    Robert J. Belton

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Belton, R.J. (2017). Vertigo. In: Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo and the Hermeneutic Spiral. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-55188-3_3

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