Overview

Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo has dazzled and challenged audiences with its unique aesthetic design and startling plot devices since its release in 1958. In Classical Vertigo: Mythic Shapes and Contemporary Influences in Hitchcock’s Film, Mark William Padilla analyzes antecedents including: (1) the film’s source novel, D’entre les morts (Among the Dead), (2) the earlier symbolist novel, Rodenbach’s Bruges-la-morte, and (3) the first-draft screenplay of Maxwell Anderson, a prominent Broadway dramatist and Hollywood scenarist from the 1920s to the 1950s. The presence of Vertigo amid these texts reveals and clarifies how themes from Greco-Roman antiquity emerge in Hitchcock’s project. Padilla analyzes narrative figures such as Prometheus and Pandora, Persephone and Hades, and Pygmalion and Galatea, as well as themes like the dark plots of Greek tragedy, to reveal how Hitchcock used allusive form to construct an emotionally powerful experience with an often-minimalist script. This analysis demonstrates that Vertigo is a multifaceted work of intertextuality with artistic and cultural roots extending into antiquity itself.

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As Classical Vertigo demonstrates, the ancient gods and heroes live on in our stories and are as inescapable as fate itself. Mark Padilla does for Hitchcock's masterpiece what Joseph Campbell's The Power of Myth does for the modern imagination. --Joel Gunz, HitchCon International Alfred Hitchcock Conference Vertigo, a film very much about the weight and ever-presence of the past, is a perfect focal point for the latest volume in Mark Padilla's ongoing examination of classical elements in Hitchcock's films, elements that are both ancient and sempervirens. In this book, Padilla shows in great detail how classical Western mythology lives on in the characters, plots, settings, and artifacts of what is often described as Hitchcock's most important film. Padilla demonstrates how there is a vibrant tradition bolstering the individual talent of Hitchcock, and that the resonance of Vertigo is collaborative and cumulative: behind it lie Georges Rodenbach, Boileau and Narcejac, Maxwell Anderson, Alec Coppel, and Samuel Taylor, among others, who contributed to linking Judy, Madeleine, Scottie, Midge, and Elster with Orpheus, Eurydice, Prometheus, Pandora, Pygmalion, Galatea, and Medea, among others, whose stories are both theirs and ours. --Sidney Gottlieb, Sacred Heart University

As Classical Vertigo demonstrates, the ancient gods and heroes live on in our stories and are as inescapable as fate itself. Mark Padilla does for Hitchcock's masterpiece what Joseph Campbell's The Power of Myth does for the modern imagination. --Joel Gunz, HitchCon International Alfred Hitchcock Conference One certainly hopes that this is not the last of Padilla's book length analyses of Hitchcock's mythopoesis. The author has whetted his tools for analyzing Hitchock's films as adaptations of classical mythology. Unlike, past articles and books that have shown how Greek myths inform the narratives and receptions in various cinematic works by the great auteur, Mark Padilla turns his full attention to Hitchcock's focused manipulation of classical myth in what is arguably the greatest cinematic narrative. No treasure in this deep dive into Vertigo has been left submerged. Throughout current scholarship, we have come to know that Orpheus and Eurydice were in Vertigo ever since Boileau-Narcejac sowed the overt acknowledgements into the source novel and Hitchcock curiously obscured them. Padilla explores this process to show us that there is so much more mythology lurking for detection and interpretive analysis. Padilla writes with such learning and clarity that we will consider his new insights with new curiosity at every subsequent viewing of Vertigo. Padilla reasons through his arguments with authoritative verve -- he has been watching, writing on, and reading Hitchcock for the better part of a decade, and it shows. Few (if any!) readers of this book will have read everything that Padilla cites, inviting the reader to probe further. It is a work of considerable learning lightly worn. This book's scholarly findings and reasoned speculations will be cited among aficionados and friends, in college classrooms, and by future scholars of Vertigo for a long time to come. --Roger Macfarlane, Brigham Young University Throughout current scholarship, we have come to know that Orpheus and Eurydice were in Vertigo ever since Boileau-Narcejac sowed the overt acknowledgements into the source novel and Hitchcock curiously obscured them. Padilla explores this process to show us that there is so much more mythology lurking for detection and interpretive analysis. Padilla reasons through his arguments with such authoritative verve, that this book's scholarly findings and reasoned speculations will be sure to discussed among aficionados, college classrooms, and future scholars of Vertigo time and time again. --Roger Macfarlane, Brigham Young University Vertigo, a film very much about the weight and ever-presence of the past, is a perfect focal point for the latest volume in Mark Padilla's ongoing examination of classical elements in Hitchcock's films, elements that are both ancient and sempervirens. In this book, Padilla shows in great detail how classical Western mythology lives on in the characters, plots, settings, and artifacts of what is often described as Hitchcock's most important film. Padilla demonstrates how there is a vibrant tradition bolstering the individual talent of Hitchcock, and that the resonance of Vertigo is collaborative and cumulative: behind it lie Georges Rodenbach, Boileau and Narcejac, Maxwell Anderson, Alec Coppel, and Samuel Taylor, among others, who contributed to linking Judy, Madeleine, Scottie, Midge, and Elster with Orpheus, Eurydice, Prometheus, Pandora, Pygmalion, Galatea, and Medea, among others, whose stories are both theirs and ours. --Sidney Gottlieb, Sacred Heart University

As Classical Vertigo demonstrates, the ancient gods and heroes live on in our stories and are as inescapable as fate itself. Mark Padilla does for Hitchcock’s masterpiece what Joseph Campbell's The Power of Myth does for the modern imagination. -- Joel Gunz, HitchCon International Alfred Hitchcock Conference Vertigo, a film very much about the weight and ever-presence of the past, is a perfect focal point for the latest volume in Mark Padilla’s ongoing examination of classical elements in Hitchcock’s films, elements that are both ancient and sempervirens. In this book, Padilla shows in great detail how classical Western mythology lives on in the characters, plots, settings, and artifacts of what is often described as Hitchcock’s most important film. Padilla demonstrates how there is a vibrant tradition bolstering the individual talent of Hitchcock, and that the resonance of Vertigo is collaborative and cumulative: behind it lie Georges Rodenbach, Boileau and Narcejac, Maxwell Anderson, Alec Coppel, and Samuel Taylor, among others, who contributed to linking Judy, Madeleine, Scottie, Midge, and Elster with Orpheus, Eurydice, Prometheus, Pandora, Pygmalion, Galatea, and Medea, among others, whose stories are both theirs and ours. -- Sidney Gottlieb, Sacred Heart University

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Mark William Padilla serves as distinguished professor of classical studies at Christopher Newport University.

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