The film will be introduced by Dr. Roel van den Oever.
Vertigo
Vertigo was his favourite film, British director Alfred Hitchcock said in a 1962 interview with his French colleague François Truffaut. When the film was released four years earlier, however, it was received rather negatively by the press; the story was too slow to get going and also contained sexually perverse elements. Over the years, as often happens, that opinion has completely changed: Vertigo is now considered an absolute masterpiece, in which psychological depth and cinematic innovation (such as the dolly zoom) go hand in hand.
After a terrible incident, former police officer John “Scottie” Ferguson (James Stewart) suffers from a fear of heights. One day, he is approached by his old school friend Gavin Elster, who asks him to shadow his wife Madeleine (Kim Novak), because he suspects that she is mentally unstable. John agrees, but during his investigation he falls madly in love with her. These feelings get him into trouble, with his fear of heights proving to be a decisive factor.
Dr. Roel van den Oever is assistant professor of English literature at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. He is the author of Mama’s Boy: Momism and Homophobia in Postwar American Culture (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012) and co-editor of Bodies That Still Matter: Resonances of the Work of Judith Butler (Amsterdam UP, 2021).
