Vertigo (1958)

Though Hitchcock’s films have been clichéd fodder for psychoanalytic study in film writing for some time now, it’s nice to have the historical perspective when watching this, thinking about the Rock Hudson and Doris Day films of the time, and to be reminded that at this given moment, at least one director was urging the view that all was not well at home with Mr. and Mrs. America. Maybe, in the postwar years, we were all post-traumatic time bombs. Hitchcock’s enthusiasm for dealing with deviant psychology is not just a projection of his own numerous neuroses but also a welcome break from the sugarcoated valium façade prevalent in many films of the era.

— Marianna Martin (Reverse Shot)

We know that films are made up of unconnected moments, scissored from our world and pinned to a timeline of similarly snipped events. No reason to be frightened of that—why should we be? We sense an authorial mind and hand behind the scissors and the pin, we know someone has sliced this glance and this car-horn from their original environs and stitched them together in celluloid . . . and we feel a sort of weird elation at having noticed that mind and identified with it, identified with the will to snip and order and infuse. This elation is well and widely taught, and it goes hand in hand with the compulsion to watch and consider a movie as a network of intentions. In watching film, this is commonly called the auteur theory; in life, it’s known as paranoia.

— Daniel Cockburn (Reverse Shot)

When I read the lines, ‘I want you to love me for me,’ I just identified with it so much. It was what I felt when I came to Hollywood as a young girl. You know, they want to make you over completely. They do your hair and make-up and it was always like I was fighting to show some of my real self. So I related to the resentment of being made over and the need for approval and the desire to be loved. I really identified with the story because to me it was saying, Please, see who I am. Fall in love with me, not a fantasy.

— Kim Novak: Vertigo: The Making of a Hitchcock Classic (1998)

The obsession with Vertigo is an obsession not only with the idea of a lost object but with the whole cultural history of obsession with a lost object: Vertigo itself, after all, was temporarily lost, disappearing from view for decades, in Hitchcock’s private control, before reappearing on video in 1983. Only after re-emerging from obscurity was it considered among the best films of all time, officially snagging the top designation in 2012 via the decennial Sight and Sound poll. Since the medieval poet Petrarch, or perhaps since Dante before him, or perhaps since the mythic stories of Orpheus and Apollo, male figures have been losing the women they love only to recover them through art. Ideally, this recovery sublimates romantic loss into aesthetic gain: Sexual disappointment is temporary, but poetic immortality is forever. And while in theory any loss could be thus sublimated, in practice it has to be a woman.

— Katie Kadue (MUBI)