Allegory and Referentiality

For more than a decade, since the publication, in 1975, of Laura Mulvey's essay, Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, Hitchcock's 1958 film Vertigo has been at the vortex of critical debates about the fundamental structures of classical narrative cinema.1 Psychoanalytic, formalist, feminist, post-structuralist, and Marxist readings of the film have multiplied, making it one of the most frequently analyzed films in the Hitchcock canon, if not in cinema history in general. I will not attempt to explain why Vertigo has been thus honored by critics, though I hope that the intrinsic interest of the film will become obvious in what follows. This is, rather, a critical review of the essays on Vertigo that seem to me most relevant to feminist theory. My aim is to identify certain fundamental problems in some of the most interesting of these readings: to point to, for example, a nostalgia for an empirically-based history, the essence of which is an unproblematized set of references, upon which

Allegory · Art · Criticism · Literature · Vertigo · Cinema and Media Studies · Literature, Film, and Journalism Analysis · Medicine

• Vertigo's Musical Gaze

  Open Access•Kenneth M Smith•Music Analysis•2018

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• Subversive Representations of Women and Death in Victorian Visual Culture

  Lucy Ella Rose•Visual Culture in Britain•2016

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