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Gazing and Constructing: Imag(in)ing Madeleine in Vertigo

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Abstract

Drawing upon Edward Branigan’s concept of point-of-view (POV) structure, this chapter examines the act of gazing in three key scenes from Vertigo (1958). The author argues that small inconsistencies and continuity errors in the film’s mise en scène which have hitherto been dismissed as ‘goofs’ are, in fact, part of the film’s complex subtext about deception, imagination, and lying. As Hitchcock directs some of Scottie’s gazes at Madeleine and Judy as deviating, divergent visual impressions that are consequently bound in continuous POV shots, the act of seeing itself is rendered problematic.

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Pabst, E. (2017). Gazing and Constructing: Imag(in)ing Madeleine in Vertigo . In: Schwanebeck, W. (eds) Reassessing the Hitchcock Touch. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-60008-6_6

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