Recuperating Hitchcock's doubles: experiencing Vertigo in Garcia's Place Vendôme (1997)

Abstract

From its opening image, Nicole Garcia's Place Vendôme presents an almost excessive intertextuality, centring on a series of elaborate allusions to Hitchcock's Vertigo (1958). Deleuze's notion of ‘out-of-field’ suggests the possibility that it is precisely in the domain of the intertextual that Place Vendôme might be said to constitute not just a double (a repetition) of Hitchcock's Vertigo, but indeed a complex communication with the original. By reorganizations of Vertigo's vicious structures, Garcia fosters in her film a reworking of Freud's theory of the repetition compulsion. The closed system of repetitions in Vertigo is remobilized toward an open repetition in Place Vendôme and so moves from Vertigo's ‘repetition which fails and induces failure’, to Place Vendôme's ‘repetition which not only succeeds but recreates the model or the originary’ (Deleuze). Far from being recuperated by men (or male directors), as is Judy Barton/Madeleine, Marianne recuperates her role, her identity and her sexuality from those who would usurp them. In this ‘out of frame’ completion of Hitchcock's film, then, Garcia seeks to redefine woman's place in the cinema.