Paper Vertigo

7/30/2019 Paper Vertigo

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UNIVERSIDADE DE SO PAULOFACULDADE DE FILOSOFIA, LETRAS E CINCIAS HUMANAS

Departamento de Letras Modernas

Disciplina: FLM0580 - Literatura e Cinema

Prof. Dr. Marcos Cesar de Paula Soares

2o semestre de 2012

Alysson Tadeu Alves de OliveiraNo USP6315093

(aluno de Ps-Graduao cursando a disciplina como adaptao)

Falling for you

The best (if not all) Alfred Hitchcocks films are about ruptures the turning point in

the narrative, the moment when the protagonist is mysteriously killed on a shower

(Psycho), or when the protagonists love interest is killed before the film reaches it half

mark in Vertigo. Nobody is capable of pull strings as Hitchcock did. He was capable of

manipulating both characters and audienceand everybody would enjoy it.

It took some time for his work be recognised. Vertigo, as a matter of fact, only

appeared in the Sight & Sound magazines top ten in 1982 (in the 7 th position). From then

on, it climbed positions until it reached the number one last august. In the September issue of

the magazine, Peter Matthews says that:

Tying for 11th place in 1972, Hitchcocks masterpiece steadily inched up

the poll over the next three decades, and by 2002 was clearly the heir

apparent. Still, even ardent Wellesians should feel gratified at the modest

revolution if only for the proof that film canons (and the versions of

history they legitimate) are not completely fossilized. 1

1http://www.bfi.org.uk/news/50-greatest-films-all-time. Accessed on October, 7th, 2012.
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It may have taken some time to accept how great Hitchcocks film is, and it may be

because we have been so perfectly manipulated by him and the movie, that it took some time

to realize that this is not one case of simply being manipulated like the female who falls to

hear death, we, metaphorically speaking, happily fall for the directors tricksin other words,

we like being manipulated.

Every artespecially the cinemacan be, at its core, a manipulation, a form that the

artist uses to achieve his/her aims. In this sense, as some have already pointed, Vertigos

ultimate theme is art itself.

Another reason why Vertigo turns out to be so intriguing, complex and

suggestive stems from the fact that it gathers together a strange synthesis

of various myths of Western culture, connected to the mystery of artistic

creation, which is perhaps the films ultimate subject2. (MARAS)

In his article in the British Film Institutes magazine, Sight & Sound, Spanish critic

Miguel Maras list some of the influences on the film and, according to him, the most

obvious myth is Pygmalion, combined with the Frankenstein variant of Prometheus.

Hitchcock works with themes and symbols that are already known, but he subverts them

reading in another way, and, thus, surprising and destabilizing the audience.

As most Hitchcocks films, and Vertigo is not an exception, multiple reviews are

always profitable, because details can tell too much about the characters and the plot. It is

curious that the screenplay- written by Alec Coppel and Samuel Tayloris based on a French

novel called DEntre les morts (roughly translated as From among the dead), written by

Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac the same authors of the short story on which Henri-

2http://www.bfi.org.uk/news/sightsound/vertigo-forever-falling . Accessed on October, 7th,2012.
http://www.bfi.org.uk/news/sightsound/vertigo-forever-fallinghttp://www.bfi.org.uk/news/sightsound/vertigo-forever-fallinghttp://www.bfi.org.uk/news/sightsound/vertigo-forever-fallinghttp://www.bfi.org.uk/news/sightsound/vertigo-forever-falling


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Georges Clouzot's Les Diaboliques is based. Both films share the theme of female

domination and a morbid atmosphere.

American cultural and literary critic Fredric Jameson says that in Vertigo,

Hitchcock enlarges the older generic framework so powerfully [] as to approximate an

expressive masterpiece of the other kind (114). Hitchcock is a filmmaker that has always

made genre films what doesnt mean to say that he strictly follows the rules of the game.

The beauty in his pieces resides exactly in the moment when we have glimpses or what

Gayatri Spivak calls rumorof the fracture convention. That is the reason why his films have

fascinated us so much.

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