Ordinary Lady Survives Auschwitz
What's the Opposite of Vertigo ? In 1975, film theorist Laura Mulvey published her landmark essay, Visual Pleasure in Narrative Cinema , in which she argues that the very act of watching a film is inherently masculine. The pleasure an audience derives from watching characters on a screen (she asserts) is a voyeuristic pleasure that turns those characters (female characters in particular) into objects for our satisfaction. It was this paper that was to popularise the term "Male Gaze". In backing up her idea, Laura Mulvey cited several films that are essentially built around the notion of voyeurism; most of them directed by Alfred Hitchcock (which possibly tells you more about Hitchcock than it tells you about cinema in general). Chief among those films was his 1958 masterpiece Vertigo . Much has been written about Vertigo over the decades, and I am not about to get drawn into all of that right now. For our current purposes, Vertigo tells the story of a retired detective w...