Vertigo and the tragic sublime

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 same time, the paper is about decadence and falling, falling away. Therefore,...

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Bibliographic Details
Author: Höpfl, Heather
Format: Article
Status:Published version
Publication date:2002
Country:Brasil
Institution:FGV
Repository:Revista de Administração de Empresas
Language:Portuguese
OAI Identifier:oai:ojs.periodicos.fgv.br:article/37630
Online Access:https://periodicos.fgv.br/rae/article/view/37630
Access Level:Open access
Keyword:Cinema
gender
theory
tragic
sublime
gênero
teoria
trágico
Description
Summary: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 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 alsoabout distance and about movement, about kinema (Greek movement) and the distance that is described by falling from the constructed sublimeand 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 organizational idealization.