Authors:
- Offers a psychological and philosophical perspective on Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo
- Builds from the insights of visual culture theorists
- Argues that the meaning of Vertigo is inherently indeterminate
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Table of contents (10 chapters)
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Front Matter
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Back Matter
About this book
This book offers a new approach to film studies by showing how our brains use our interpretations of various other films in order to understand Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo. Borrowing from behavioral psychology, cognitive science and philosophy, author Robert J. Belton seeks to explain differences of critical opinion as inevitable.
The book begins by introducing the hermeneutic spiral, a cognitive processing model that categorizes responses to Vertigo’s meaning, ranging from wide consensus to wild speculations of critical “outliers.” Belton then provides an overview of the film, arguing that different interpreters literally see and attend to different things. The fourth chapter builds on this conclusion, arguing that because people see different things, one can force the production of new meanings by deliberately drawing attention to unusual comparisons. The latter chapters outline a number of such comparisons—including avant-garde films and the works of Stanley Kubrick and David Lynch—to shed new light on the meanings of Vertigo.
Authors and Affiliations
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Department of Critical Studies, The University of British Columbia, Okanagan Campus, Kelowna, Canada
Robert J. Belton
About the author
Robert J. Belton has taught film studies, popular music, and art history and theory at The University of British Columbia, McMaster, Western and Queen’s Universities. He is author of Sights of Resistance: Approaches to Canadian Visual Culture and other books.
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo and the Hermeneutic Spiral
Authors: Robert J. Belton
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-55188-3
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media Studies, Literature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-319-55187-6Published: 21 July 2017
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-319-85590-5Published: 14 August 2018
eBook ISBN: 978-3-319-55188-3Published: 12 July 2017
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XI, 155
Number of Illustrations: 4 b/w illustrations
Topics: Film History, Film Theory, Hermeneutics, Audio-Visual Culture, Aesthetics, Cognitive Psychology