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Vertigo, Duchamp’s Anémic Cinéma and a Žižekian Brassiere

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Abstract

A classic experimental film, Marcel Duchamp’s Anémic Cinéma, provides a cinematic example of sexual irreverence that one can trace in other cultural objects through the availability heuristic and confirmation bias. Certain details that would have passed unnoticed in early viewings of Vertigo now stand out as more meaningful than first thought. I argue that some of these are examples of “Hitchcockian blots,” after Žižek, that have gone unnoticed. A case in point is the symbolism of a brassiere, which I take further here than do the relatively few scholarly articles that allude to it.

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Belton, R.J. (2017). Vertigo, Duchamp’s Anémic Cinéma and a Žižekian Brassiere. In: Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo and the Hermeneutic Spiral. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-55188-3_5

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