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Keywords Cinema, Gender, Theory
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 flin provide insights into the melancholy of commodified representations in the obsessive-compulsive pursuit of organisational idealisation.
Defensive structures and high grounds
The argument that follows is an attempt to examine the threat of disintegration, collapse and decadence on three levels. First, the level of things: of artefacts, edifices and ruins. Second, on the level of the sublime: of desire and melancholy. Third, on the level of phallogocentric discourse and its implications for the construction of the other. Hitchcock's cerebral film noir, Vertigo, uses each of these levels of meaning in order to draw the spectator qua audience into a lethal conspiracy (here used as a spurious etymological association with spiral (medieval Latin spiralis, coil cf. Latin spirare, to breathe) to echo the leitmotiv of downward spiralling which dominates the film). Consequently, the paper, like the film, is concerned with women and with madness, with vertigo, and with the fear of falling into the world. It is also about the move from ear to eye in the process of specularisation and, likewise of the audience from auditors to spectators. Clearly, these ideas have a line of descent that can be traced back to Plato and this will be discussed in due course. First, however, in order to pursue these ideas, it is necessary to give some passing attention to the defences that preserve such constructions. Broadly, the first strand of the argument concerns the high place, the...