Vertigo

Alfred Hitchcock made Vertigo during an especially creative period of 1958–1960, when he released three historic films, Vertigo (1958), North by Northwest (1959), and Psycho (1960). Each took a radically distinctive approach to the “suspense thriller.” With its overtones of mystery, romance, and the supernatural, Vertigo resembles Rebecca (1940) pushed over into the realm of the fantastic, without the irony saturating the earlier film. Despite its stellar cast, James Stewart, Kim Novak (1958’s top female box-office star), and Barbara Bel Geddes, it inspired mediocre reviews and a relatively poor financial return. Truffaut’s extensive 1962 interviews with Hitchcock reveal that he was devastated by the film’s poor reception, blaming, among other factors, Stewart’s age (fifty—twice that of Novak) for the film’s unimpressive showing. Hitchcock withdrew Vertigo and several other films from circulation between 1973 and 1983, for financial reasons. But despite initial lukewarm reactions, and the film’s unavailability to the public, critics, and journalists for a decade, Vertigo is one of the most thoroughly documented and analyzed films in history. It has risen steadily in “Top Ten” polls, often reaching the number one or two spot. (As of 4 July 2011 it ranks ninth in the AFI’s 100 Years . . . 100 Movies poll, and fourth in Sight & Sound’s International Critics Poll.) Now regarded as a defining work in Hitchcock’s canon, Vertigo may be his most “personal” film. It metaphorically comments, with great profundity, upon the process and meaning of making films and seems to convey, through the suffering of its protagonists, the director’s own powerful emotions. Thematically, the film reiterates Hitchcock’s best-known obsessions, including the attractions of an “icy” blonde who turns out to be warm-blooded and sexual fetishes such as scopophilia. Although these themes richly inhabit other Hitchcock films, Vertigo places singular emphasis on male power and control over women, men’s fear of their own often ill-repressed femininity, the role of “theatricality” in film, and the nature of suspense. For students of film, following the critical fortunes of Vertigo offers an opportunity to study important currents in cinema theory and criticism, especially feminist film criticism, in which Vertigo has been considered a prime example of women’s oppression in mainstream cinema and Hitchcock’s confessional deconstruction of that oppression. This bibliography aims to represent in a balanced way the major journalistic and critical debates around Vertigo, highlighting representative books, essays, reviews, films, and visual works that approach Vertigo from diverse disciplines.