“Hitchcock's rich and strange fable of love lost, and lost again, makes the case for him as a grand experimental artist who labored in genre cinema.” - Bill Weber, Slant Magazine
“The lure of death, the power of the past, the guilty complicity of a clean-cut hero, the near-fetishistic use of symbol and color: these Hitchcock hallmarks are all mesmerizingly on view.” - Janet Maslin, New York Times
Friday, February 21, 8:15 p.m. & Sunday, February 23, 5:00 p.m. | In Alfred Hitchcock’s grief-soaked thriller, a wrung out James Stewart is Scottie Ferguson, a San Francisco detective suffering from PTSD and a case of vertigo. When he falls, pun intended, for Madeleine (a smoldering Kim Novak), a woman he’s been hired to tail, he falls again, this time into a web of deception that will push him to the brink of madness. An unsettling and unrivaled portrait of obsession and identity (and the inspiration of perpetual essays about the male gaze), VERTIGO, considered by many to be Hitchcock’s masterpiece, is a dizzying portrait of a man haunted by his past.
Awards & Nominations
Nominee - Best Art Direction, Best Sound, Academy Awards
Persistence of Memory: Ten films (poetically, all quite memorable) that explore recollection, unreliable narrators and amnesiatic protagonists, ghosts real and imagined, the way others remember us (ouch), and the coming to terms with that, as much as we try to hold on to them, as time passes our memories shift and slip away. Read more
The Film Center is ADA accessible. This presentation will be projected without open captions. The theater is hearing-loop equipped. For accessibility requests, please email filmcenter@saic.edu