1 Repeating Visions: Hitchcock’s Vertigo and San Francisco

Abstract

Cinema, as Paolo Cherchi Usai observes in his polemic text The Death of Cinema, allows humans the illusion of seeing things again. The same can be said for film tourism, which operates through the propagation of visual desires disseminated through media fantasies (Urry 1990: 3). Film tourism is governed by the spectator's repetition and rediscov­ery of a film text through the joint acts of cinema viewing and visita­tion. Unravelling the metaphor of 'vertigo', here I will examine what I consider to be a poetics of film tourism and more broadly one of travel: this is the poetics of repeating visions, both within a particular Hollywood film text - Alfred Hitchcock's celebrated 1958 film Vertigo about displaced romantic desire and loss - and the real-life practice of film tourism as a nostalgia for seeing again a location first viewed on the movie screen (Riley and Van Doren 1992: 267-74). Therefore, I am writing about an interesting connection between a literary or cinematic poetics within the framework of the film, as well as a 'real-life' poetics of space in the process of tourism and travel itself: Gaston Bachelard in his influential text The Poetics of Space (1994) has memorably made this connection between space and 'reality' existing phenomenologically as a kind of poetics of the imagination.