Abstract
Another early avant-garde film, Robert Desnos and Man Ray’s L’Etoile de mer, provides a different set of signifiers that suggest, through comparison, a different and greater emphasis on symbolic details in Vertigo. A close-up of a hyacinth in the early film seems to symbolize both a threat to sexuality and a reinforcement of it, making it an example of an auto-antonym (or contranym). Words like “dust” or “trim” can mean either “add” or “remove,” as one might dust a cake with powdered sugar or trim a Christmas tree, as opposed to dusting a mantle to remove dirt or trimming toenails. There are, in Vertigo, numerous examples of one signifier that generates opposing signifieds. Through confirmation bias influenced by L’Etoile de mer, we can find that one of them is flowers.
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Belton, R.J. (2017). Vertigo, Man Ray’s L’Etoile de mer, and Flowers. In: Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo and the Hermeneutic Spiral. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-55188-3_6
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