Pippin - The Philosophical Hitchcock : ’Vertigo’ and the Anxieties of Unknowingness

As the book title indicates, I am proposing a philosophical reading of Hitchcocks Vertigo. My goal is to offer an interpretation that shows how the film can be said to bear on a philosophical problem, the problem I set out in this and the following section. This proposal immediately involves two enormous questions: what philosophy is, such that a film could be said to bear on it; and how an art object, a film in particular, must be conceived such that it could intersect with, bear on, philosophy. Several other unmanageable questions immediately arise. Stanley Cavell has said that what serious thought about great film requires is humane criticism dealing with whole films,

To try to address such questions in an opening section and then move on would obviously be foolish. But, given the proposal, some statement of principles (and nothing like a defense of the principles) is in order. So I briefly offer a summary of such commitments, but only that.

Consider first the conditions that must obtain for a cinematic experience to be an aesthetic experience, an experience uniquely directed at, informed Or, at least, this is how I understand his claim, not how he puts it. That is, we are not seeing actors on a big screen and, in a second step, imagining them being fictional characters (that is how he puts it).

It is also not the case that attending aestheticallyof knowing what we are doing when we are experiencing, attending to, the workis something that interferes with or competes with our direct emotional absorption in the plot. We can start watching a movie with the assumption that its ambition is merely to entertain us; we thus attend to it in such a way, take ourselves to be having such an experience. But then someone points out for us that there are elements in the movie that might be entertaining but also raise questions beyond plot details, questions that cannot be explained by that function alone. We then attend to the movie in a different way, a way I want to follow Wilson in continuing to call imaginative seeing, or, in the terms used above, aesthetically attending, but which now also requires interpretive work. We dont, in such a case, lose interest in the plot and become interested in another issue. (The same sort of parallel track attending is possible in admiring the performance of an actor even as we follow and try to understand what the character is doing. The main point is the same. There are not two steps: seeing the actor and imagining the character.)can say, then, that the imagination or attending in question is not limited to an emotional involvement in the events we see (and in what might happen) and in the events and motivations in the world of the film, but it ranges over many elements, as we try also to imagine why we are shown things just this way. When that happens, we attend aesthetically in a different register, see imaginatively, an attending that now includes an interpretive task.

Giving a formulaic account of just what in the work demands such closer interpretive attending is not easy. At least it is hard to point to anything beyond this abstract appeal to questions raised by the work, which are not questions about plot details but are questions like, Why are we so often looking from below at figures in shadows in some film noir? Or, What does it mean that Gary Coopers character throws his marshals badge to the ground in obvious disgust at the end of