The Mise-en-Abime in Hitchcock's "Vertigo"

Abstract

During its sequestration, Hitchcock's Vertigo, along with four of his other similarly inaccessible films, seemed particularly fit to answer to Foucault's imperatives in his essay What is an Author?: What are the modes of existence of this discourse? Where has it been used, how can it circulate, and who can appropriate it for himself?' As was more or less well known, the films had been appropriated by the representatives of the Hitchcock estate, one ChasinPark-Citron Agency in Beverly Hills, for what Herman Citron called our own reasons,2 and occulted in a vault somewhere. Although there was no announced purpose for this blockage of the films' circulation, the vicissitudes of capitalism could only ensure that as commodities they would have appreciated upon their eventual rerelease. In this way they were hoarded against the death of their author, the occurrence of which in 1982 stimulated their recirculation in 1983. The films are capital, the estate banks on interest accruing to the attribution Hitchcock, for the name-of-the-author constitutes the films as missing from what that name itself defines as a stylistically and conceptually homogeneous corpus. Cinephiles of suspense are whetted by the gap. Since there is also, of course, a ban on its reproduction, the film in its immanence acquires an aura, that of the work of art (Walter Benjamin). It is thus doubly appreciated, on grounds of its singularity as well as its occultation. And being thus hidden from view as well as withheld from exchange, it assumes in its material history the two functions of the fetish: to deflect the gaze and to foreclose the symbolic. Since the resurrection of the film in 1983, there have been surprisingly few commentaries on it, and among these there is no thoroughgoing textual analysis that saturates the film in the way that the present article attempts to do. Three commentators use the film in a more or less ulterior way to make arguments about points of theory, in two cases to contest Mulvey's founding episteme in Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,3 and in one case to interrogate the privilege that film criticism has accorded to psychoanalysis.4 Two other critics, Robin Wood and William Rothman, each undertake to read in detail selected sequences from Vertigo, Rothman focusing on the sequence before the first fall of Madeleine and on the final sequence of the film starting with Judy's transformation,5 and Wood dealing with the first four sequences of the film, rethinking it after twenty years (his Hitchcock's Films came out in 1965), this time as he says with some new consciousness of the oppression of women