Hitchcock’s Vertigo and the tragic sublime
Journal of Organizational Change Management
ISSN: 0953-4814
Article publication date: 1 February 2002
Abstract
This is a paper about the cinematic as spectacle and the construction of the sublime. It is concerned with gendered constructions of desire and construes the object of desire in this case as a sublime object. At the same time, the paper is about decadence and falling, falling away. Therefore, this piece of writing attempts to deal with some thoughts on the relationship between decadence and mortification. So this paper is also about distance and about movement, about kinema (Greek movement) and the distance that is described by falling from the constructed sublime and its associated melancholy. These ideas are explored via an examination of one of Alfred Hitchcock’s most powerful films, Vertigo (1958), and a notion of the tragic sublime. Taken together, the concept of the sublime and the narrative of the film provide insights into the melancholy of commodified representations in the obsessive‐compulsive pursuit of organisational idealisation.
Keywords
Citation
Höpfl, H. (2002), "Hitchcock’s Vertigo and the tragic sublime", Journal of Organizational Change Management, Vol. 15 No. 1, pp. 21-34. https://doi.org/10.1108/09534810210417357
Publisher
:MCB UP Ltd
Copyright © 2002, MCB UP Limited