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Sight and Sound (1997) - Compulsion

Details

  • article: Compulsion
  • author(s): Peter Wollen
  • journal: Sight and Sound (01/Apr/1997)
  • issue: volume 7, issue 4, page 14
  • journal ISSN: 0037-4806
  • publisher: British Film Institute
  • keywords: Film criticism, Motion picture criticism, Motion picture directors & producers, Psychology, Alfred Hitchcock

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Abstract

Wollen examines the mystery, perversion and psychosis in Alfred Hitchcock's film Vertigo. Hitchcock's contribution to the psychopathology of fetishism has a strange personal undercurrent -- the eroticized transformation he required was from gaudiness and vulgarity to the "perfect woman of mystery who is blonde, subtle and Nordic," as he evoked her in an interview published shortly after Vertigo came out.