Vertigo

Abstract

Vertigo is pointedly a California story. Set among sightseeing vistas, landmarks, monuments, defining architecture, museums and other cultural bastions, this Hitchcockian domain of the late 1950s is that of regionally long-established public visual attractions. The magnetizing spectacles of mid-twentieth-century California are explicitly historicized, an ever-extant archive of paintings, photographs, and prints from a bygone age, towering sites of ancient germination, graveyards, identified Portals of the Past, vestiges of the Gold Rush era, and old missions, all underlain by foundational sagas emanating from bookshops, ancestral tales, time lines, and local legend.¹ In this space of the storied picturesque, Vertigo meditates on an associated mission: the director’s pursuit of authorship. An undertaking of consuming desire within a California landscape overdetermined by historically defined display and deeply ingrained narratives, autonomous authorial agency becomes its own myth.