Hitchcock and Contemporary Art

Hi tc h c o c k a n d
Co ntemp o ra ry A r t

Chris tine Sprengle r

hitchcock and contemporary art
Copyright © Christine Sprengler, 2014.
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2014 978-0-230-39215-1
All rights reserved.
First published in 2014 by
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN®
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registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills,
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ISBN 978-1-349-35185-5 ISBN 978-0-230-39216-8 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/9780230392168
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Sprengler, Christine.
   Hitchcock and contemporary art / by Christine Sprengler.
    pages cm
   Includes bibliographical references and index.
  
   1. Hitchcock, Alfred, 1899–1980—Criticism and interpretation.
2. Art, Modern—21st century. I. Title.
PN1998.3.H58S69 2014
791.4302933092—dc23 2013040053
A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library.
Design by Newgen Knowledge Works (P) Ltd., Chennai, India.
First edition: April 2014
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For my mother Ursula and my daughter Evelyn
 Contents

List of Figures ix
Acknowledgments xi

Introduction Alfred and the Art World 1

1 Cinephilic Pilgrimages and the Reification of
Profilmic Space 25
2 Activating Memories and Museums through the
Expanded Essay Film 45
3 Remediation and Intermediality: From Moving to
(Film) Still 67
4 Spatial Montage, Temporal Collage, and the Art(ifice) of
Rear Projection 91
5 The Acoustics of Vertigo: Soundtracks, Soundscapes,
and Scores 119
Conclusion Repossessing Cinema 141

Appendix: List of Hitchcock Artworks Cited 155

Notes 159
Works Cited 183
Index 193
 Figures

1.1 Cindy Bernard, Ask the Dust: Vertigo 1958/1990,

1990, photograph 28
1.2 Cindy Bernard, Ask the Dust: North by Northwest
1959/1990, 1990, photograph 28
1.3 David Reed, Scottie’s Bedroom, 1994, installation view 32
1.4 David Reed, Judy’s Bedroom, 1994, installation view 32
2.1 Christoph Girardet and Matthias Müller, The Phoenix
Tapes, 1999, film still from Rutland 57
2.2 Christoph Girardet and Matthias Müller, The Phoenix
Tapes, 1999, film still from Burden of Proof 60
2.3 Christoph Girardet and Matthias Müller, The Phoenix
Tapes, 1999, film still from Burden of Proof 60
3.1 Isabelle Inghilleri, Theme Park: Distracted for a Moment,
Words and Thoughts of No Importance Got Caught
Midair. Are You Still There?, 2007, painting 72
3.2 Cindy Bernard, Location Proposal #2: Shot 17, 1997,
installation view 77
4.1 J. Tobias Anderson, Nine Piece Rope, 2002, film still 92
4.2 Les LeVeque, 2 Spellbound, 1999, film still 94
4.3 Les LeVeque, 4 Vertigo, 2000, film still 95
4.4 Mark Lewis, Rear Projection (Molly Parker), 2006,
film still 106
4.5 Mark Lewis, Nathan Phillips Square, A Winters Night,
Skating, 2009, film still 113
C.1 RePlayed, 2005 147
C.2 ReVisited, 2005 150
C.3 ReVisited, 2005 150
 Acknowledgments

M y interest in art and my appreciation for Hitchcock began so long

ago that I can hardly recollect that moment of initial contact with
either. The former likely involved a particularly messy and vigorous
bout of finger painting while the latter would have been encountered
not long after on TVOntario’s Saturday Night at the Movies with Elwy
Yost, a weekly film program, which since 1974 has broadcast mainly
classical Hollywood films, or at least did so during the 1980s when
I tuned in religiously. These interests merged much more recently
and first took shape as a talk, “Hitchcock and Contemporary Art,”
presented to the tour guides of Museum London in 2007. While I
saw this as an opportunity to indulge my interests, the discussion
afterward showed me the way to turn what I thought was an idiosyn-
cratic pleasure into a research project. For although my intent was to
introduce the many, varied, and sometimes novel ways in which artists
engaged with Hitchcock and his films, it quickly became apparent that
these artworks offered us important insights into Hitchcock and the
cinema itself—its past, present, and future, as well as its realities and
myths. That art teaches us is an obvious fact long acknowledged. But
I didn’t realize just how precise and nuanced this knowledge could be
even when borne out of a practice driven by a simple love for film. Of
course, I soon realized that this love was often charged by a desire to
learn, to know more about the object of affection. As the discussion
at Museum London continued, we all became acutely aware of the
many sophisticated ways in which these artworks opened up meaning-
ful discussions about time, space, history, memory, fact, fiction, affect,
ontology, and phenomenology. Love and knowledge—cinephilia and
epistemophilia—kept cropping up in relation to these works at every
turn and, as motivating factors or facets inscribed in the works them-
selves, they became impossible to ignore. As such, over the next few
years, I road tested some thoughts on the issue in several lectures and
conference papers including “From Cinephilia to Epistemophilia: Fan
Practices, Art Practices and Classical Hollywood Film” at the Film and
xii A ck n owl e d g m e n t s

History conference in 2010 and “The Vestiges of Vertigo: Re-Staging

and Remembering Hitchcock” at the Society for Cinema and Media
Studies (SCMS) meeting in 2011. This latter paper was then gra-
ciously invited by Douglas Cunningham to be part of his excellent
collection of essays on Vertigo.
Along the way, conversations with friends and colleagues played
an important role in advancing this research. I must especially thank
Laura Mulvey for her support over the years, our chats on this topic,
and for pressing me on “why Hitchcock” during a long drive from the
airport. As the pages that follow reveal, I am also deeply indebted to
her very influential recent work on spectatorship as well as her essays on
rear projection and the films of Mark Lewis. It is to this groundbreak-
ing scholarship that effectively rethinks our relation to the cinema that
my study here hopes to make a very modest contribution. I am also
grateful to Mark Cheetham and Andy Patton for our short but lively
discussions in preparation for our exhibition Conspiracies of Illusion,
for thinking through the vagaries of time and space in relation to the
work of David Reed. Many members of SCMS’s CinemArts Special
Interest group, in particular my cochair Susan Felleman, have been
wonderful sounding boards and active audiences at a series of great
panels over the last several years. I’m particularly indebted to Steven
Jacobs for the wealth of material he sent me on exhibitions and artist
practices that fall under the purview of this project. His own research
has also been extremely influential for the ways in which it poses some
fundamental questions about the relationship between art and film.
Nicholas Haeffner has been a tremendous help in this respect too, by
sharing his thoughts on Hitchcock and pedagogy and by shipping me
an incredible package of materials on the exhibitions RePossessed and
Shadows of a Doubt. And, finally, I owe a huge debt of gratitude to
Daniel Morgan for his many astute insights and comments on parts of
this manuscript at both its most nascent and final stages.
This project certainly wouldn’t have been possible without the
generosity of artists who allowed me to interview them or provided
me with crucial information about their works: Gail Albert Halaban,
Isabelle Inghilleri, Mark Lewis, Matthias Müller, Les LeVeque, and
David Reed. These artists were also kind enough to provide me with
images, as were J. Tobias Anderson and Cindy Bernard. A particu-
larly huge thanks is in order for the assistance, encouragement and,
of course, patience of Samantha Hasey, Robyn Curtis, and Erica
Buchman at Palgrave Macmillan.
This endeavor would not have been possible without the mul-
tiple forms of support that come from friends, family, and a truly
 A ck n owl e d g m e n t s xiii

wonderful set of colleagues and mentors at Western University. As

always, I am most deeply indebted to Pippette Eibel, Bridget Elliott,
Debra Nousek, Kirsty Robertson, Donna Sasges, Sandra Smeltzer,
Kimberly Wahl, and my remarkable FCDG (Forest City Derby Girls)
­leaguemates to whom I owe my sanity. My mother continues to be
my most ardent supporter and the embodiment of a work ethic with
no equal. And, this undertaking benefited in immeasurable ways from
the love and encouragement of Devin Henry, the companionship of
Thea, and the curiosity, excitement, and joy with which my little Evie
greets each day.
 I n t r o d uc t io n

Alfred and the Art World

I n the early 1960s, Robert Whitman created a series of eight Cinema

Pieces or, “film sculptures,” a subgenre of that protean designation
“expanded cinema.” With titles such as Window (1963), Bathroom
Sink (1964), and Shower (1964), each addressed issues of realism and
illusion, conventions of representation, and the practices of viewing
associated with different media, namely, sculpture, cinema, and paint-
ing. Each did so by fusing tangible material objects with filmic images,
by pairing ordinary domestic items with footage of routine actions
associated with them. For Window, Whitman projected 16mm film of
someone gardening within the contours of a window frame mounted
on the gallery wall. In Shower, he installed an actual shower stall com-
plete with running water and projected an image of a woman bath-
ing. Apparently, the illusion was so convincing that several visitors
thought they had witnessed a live performance.1 However, as the film
progresses, close-ups of skin, the drain, and showerhead shatter the
believability of the rear-projected image. So, too, do moments when
the water turns to paint.
For Lynne Cooke, these gestures establish Shower as a work that
recalls traditions of nude bathers in Western painting and, more point-
edly, Yves Klein’s use of models as the “living brushes” with which
he applied his signature International Klein Blue during an infamous
1960 performance.2 Cooke suggests that these allusions are far more
pertinent to an understanding of Whitman’s work than what is per-
haps, for many of us, the more obvious one: Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho
(1960). And yet, it is hardly surprising that a filmed image of a woman
taking a shower, at points under a stream of red paint, whose image
is intercut with close-ups of skin and a drain, should also encourage
speculation of a Hitchcockian influence.3 In fact, Shower’s connection
to Psycho has become a common refrain in reviews of the work’s vari-
ous restagings. What is more, it is a connection that happens to be
extremely productive. When approached with Psycho in mind, Shower
2 Hi t ch co ck an d C on t e m p o r ar y A r t

opens up a series of specific trajectories into questions of voyeurism,

fetishism, realism, suspense, narrative, offscreen space, materiality,
phenomenology, modes of exhibition, and the extradiegetic life of
films and their iconic sequences.
This capacity for an artwork to initiate meaningful explorations
of cinematic concepts will be a key concern in the pages that fol-
low. In particular, I want to show how contemporary artistic practices
invested in Hitchcockian cinema activate sophisticated engagements
with memory and history, time and space, as well as broader issues to
do with the cinema itself. I also want to consider cinephilia and episte-
mophilia as two interrelated forces motivating the production of these
artworks and examine how these forces inflect the nature of the art
objects created in response to Hitchcock’s oeuvre. In short, I hope to
introduce the reader to the world of art about Hitchcock and to see
what we might learn from it—about Hitchcock in particular and the
cinema in general.
With Shower, Whitman inaugurated a rich, multifaceted, and mul-
timedia set of artistic practices invested in the aesthetics, legacy, and
significance of Alfred Hitchcock’s films. Not just broad in scope, but
also plentiful in number, these works have populated several exhibi-
tions dedicated exclusively to this subject that were first staged in
1999 to mark Hitchcock’s centenary. For example, the Museum of
Modern Art in Oxford organized Notorious: Alfred Hitchcock and
Contemporary Art, collecting works from the late 1970s to the late
1990s by artists situated in diverse traditions. Cindy Sherman’s
Untitled Film Stills (1977–80), Judith Barry’s video projection,
Casual Shopper (1980–81), Douglas Gordon’s mail art project, A
Souvenir for Non-Existence (1993), and Victor Burgin’s photographic
installation The Bridge (1984) that brings John Everett Millais’s
Ophelia (1851–52) into contact with Madeleine and Marnie, speak
to the range of practices devoted to Hitchcock’s filmic worlds. That
same year Oh! Hitchcock appeared at the Kunsthalle Tirol in Hall,
Austria, featuring the work of 19 international artists including
Ruth Schnell, Claudia Hart, Sam Samore, and David Falconer. The
curators of this show sought to offer visitors a cinematic experience
by transforming the space of the gallery itself with Peter Kogler’s
tunnel installation through which visitors had to pass and Stefan
Demary’s attachment of bird silhouettes to all of the gallery’s win-
dows. Moral Hallucinations: Channelling Hitchcock at the Museum
of Contemporary Art in Sydney also opened in 1999 and featured
work by 11 contemporary Australian artists tasked with responding
to themes prevalent in Hitchcock’s oeuvre.
 I n t r od u ct i on 3

More exhibitions soon followed. In 2003, Hitch opened at the

Glasgow Print Studio and showcased still images in a range of media
by artists such as Sam Ainslie, Steven Campbell, Peter Howson, John
MacKenzie, Janice McNab, and Ray Richardson. In 2005, RePossessed
opened in London offering visitors a highly interactive experience
through a series of interrelated installations designed to activate our
engagement with Vertigo.4 In 2007, Steven Jacobs organized an exhi-
bition in Antwerp titled The Wrong House. It featured a symposium and
screening session of Hitchcock-inspired art called The Wrong Artist:
Hitchcock and Video Art.5 Also in 2007, Solar in Portugal staged
Under Hitchcock, an exhibition of contemporary works like Johan
Grimonprez’s Looking for Alfred (2005), a video about Hitchcock
himself involving a number of impersonators, and Laurent Fiévet’s
Portrait a l’Écume (2007), a two-room installation devoted entirely
to Vertigo’s Madeleine. In 2008, the Austrian Film Museum presented
Hitchcock Experimental featuring, for example, J. Tobias Anderson’s
Bodega Bay School (2004), Martin Arnold’s Psycho (1997), and Gregg
Biermann’s Spherical Coordinates (2005).
Dominique Païni and Guy Cogeval’s Hitchcock and Art: Fatal
Coincidences, which showed at the Centre Pompidou and Montreal
Museum of Fine Arts in 2001, took a rather different approach. With
the aims of documenting Hitchcock’s oeuvre, illustrating the artis-
tic influences on his filmmaking practice, and evoking the profilmic
spaces of his films through select iconic props and staged settings, this
exhibition found multiple ways to unpack the relationship between
art and film, and included, as part of its program, a few contemporary
works such as Holly King’s Place of Desire (1989), Alain Fleischer’s
Exhibition in the North of France (1992), and Merry Alpern’s Untitled
#28 (1994). A somewhat less ambitious exhibition of this type trav-
eled between film museums in Düsseldorf, Frankfurt, Munich, and
Potsdam. Obsessionen: Die Alptraum-Fabrik des Alfred Hitchcock
offered a survey of his oeuvre through clips, a full screening program,
and other forms of cinematic ephemera related to his works. In 2011,
Nicholas Haeffner, one of the curators of RePossessed, staged Shadows
of a Doubt. This exhibition featured photographs by David George
and Spencer Rowell of the East End London locations inhabited by
Hitchcock as a child to see how this geography might have shaped his
cinematic vision. Exhibitions like these featured both artistic responses
to Hitchcock and, what has been a mainstay of the exhibition circuit
for quite some time, a survey of artistic influences on his films.
Some of the artworks featured in these shows have become iconic
in their own right, appearing in the service of curatorial mandates to
4 Hi t ch co ck an d C on t e m p o r ar y A r t

chart the development of “gallery films” or illustrate a very broadly

defined “cinematic impulse.” They also exemplify the “cinematic
turn” in contemporary art. This turn, which took place during the
1990s, involved the widespread adoption by artists of cinematic tech-
nologies in the production of their work as well as the integration and
manipulation of images from film history. It was a turn made possible
by the increasing availability and affordability of digital technologies
and the rerelease of iconic films. Rhetoric too played a role. The lin-
gering effects of the “death of painting” overlapped with emerging
pronouncements of the “death of cinema” and prompted artists to
engage questions of an ontological nature: What is cinema? What was
cinema? What will cinema be in the future? In the museum world,
artistic responses to these questions have caused concerns about trans-
forming “white cubes” into “black boxes” as well as excitement about
the new audiences they might entice. These artistic practices have also
generated a fair bit of hyperbole. For Chris Dercon, currently the
director at Tate Modern, this recent generation of artists holds the key
to cinema’s future. He argues that those working with the question
“What is cinema?” in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centu-
ries have the capacity to “bring cinema through to its next phase” by
revealing to us what, how, and where things can be shown.6
Cinema’s centenary also played a role in encouraging this “cin-
ematic turn,” if not always directly in the production of art, then cer-
tainly in the organization of exhibitions designed to survey and make
known the history of the relationships between art and film. Art and
Film since 1945: Hall of Mirrors (1996) and Spellbound: Art and Film
(1996) are two notable examples of this tendency. Other later major
exhibitions invested in exposing this relationship, such as Future
Cinema: The Cinematic Imaginary after Film (2002) and Beyond
Cinema: The Art of Projection (2006), sought a balance between his-
torical and contemporary practices and between practices that looked
to film history and ones that imagined cinema’s multiple future forms.
Still others focused on the present and featured works that investi-
gated cinematic experiences, for example, Collateral, When Art Looks
at Cinema (2007) and The Cinema Effect: Illusion, Reality and the
Moving Image (2008). And it is worth nothing that in all of these
Hitchcock has played a role.
This relationship between art and film is a long and complex one,
stretching back to the cinema’s earliest years. It involves the creative
efforts of practitioners from both domains and experimental gestures
that pitted one against the other, thought one through the other, and
often blurred the distinctions between them. Connections between
 I n t r od u ct i on 5

art movements and film movements, art theories and film theories,
not to mention individuals who contributed in various ways to both
realms have done much to foster multiple points of contact. As part
of this early history of contact and collaboration, we might explore
Dada, Surrealism, and Constructivism as well as the writings of Walter
Benjamin, Erwin Panofsky, Rudolf Arnheim, and Sergei Eisenstein, to
name just a few.7 We might then consider Situationist and Fluxus ges-
tures, expanded cinema, as well as countless other avant-garde prac-
tices such as structural or structural-materialist film. Beyond film, we
might look to the multimedia architecture of Charles and Ray Eames,
the “filmic” photography of Robert Frank and, of course, the broad
and varied works of video art since the 1960s.8 Attention also ought
to be paid to the collecting and preservational roles played by art
institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art and to shifts in gallery
practices to accommodate moving-image works.9
A survey of the connections between art and film is far beyond the
scope of this—or any single—project.10 However, before speculating
on why artists have invested so much creative energy in Hitchcock’s
films, I want to consider one more point of connection: “paracin-
ema.” As an avant-garde practice, paracinema can be regarded as an
apt precursor to the works examined here. In fact, we might even label
these Hitchcockian-inspired gestures as a kind of ­second-generation
paracinema. First coined by Ken Jacobs in the early 1970s, the term
“paracinema” was reintroduced into art historical scholarship by
Jonathan Walley in 2003. It describes a neglected conceptual practice
of the 1960s and 1970s concerned primarily with the idea of cinema
and with “the cinematic” as a phenomenon independent of the mate-
rial properties of film. In short, this practice seeks the essence of film
in the conceptual realm, not the material one. As Walley explains,
“paracinema provides a way for avant-garde artists to continue to
make films by allowing them to access the conceptual dimensions of
cinema, whatever each artist thought those might be, without limit-
ing them to the medium of film.”11 Paracinematic works like Tony
Conrad’s film-based performances of the 1970s involving the literal
“projection” of food onto a screen or Anthony McCall’s Long Film for
Ambient Light (1975) in which a single bulb illuminated a loft whose
windows were covered with diffusion paper, sought to answer the
question “What is cinema?” They did so by deconstructing the cin-
ematic apparatus in order to examine the basic properties and effects
of its constituent parts. Projection, light, and duration were some of
the privileged objects of investigation in these practices and continue
to be the object of inquiry in some recent examples by artists like
6 Hi t ch co ck an d C on t e m p o r ar y A r t

Bradley Eros. In Erosion (1999), a work that also pays homage to ear-
lier structural film practices, Eros pulls a found, water-damaged roll of
film through a projector by hand. He does so backward and forward
at an irregular speed and stops on occasion to let the celluloid burn
in the gate.12 Like Conrad and McCall, Eros isolates an aspect of the
cinema and, through acts that highlight specific operations, subjects
it to analysis.
Paracinematic works like Conrad’s and McCall’s, especially, are
important precursors to the case studies assessed here for two reasons.
First, as a conceptual practice that aims to produce knowledge about
the cinema, paracinema poses key questions about cinema’s ontology,
phenomenology, and effects. It also sets up the conditions necessary
for viewers to engage analytically with the problematics it confronts.
Second, paracinema is a type of practice that investigates the cinema,
but isn’t beholden to the moving image to do so. To be sure, many
Hitchcock-inspired works do make use of the moving image, by incor-
porating found footage or shooting new film or video. Single-screen
and multimonitor videos, animations, and projections (and rear pro-
jections) of 16mm and 35mm film constitute a significant propor-
tion of these works. However, there are others that employ drawing,
painting, photography, and digital imaging technologies including
video game level editors.13 Still others can be situated in the tradi-
tions of mail art, sound art, public art, and immersive and sculptural
installation. These works are significant creative interventions into
Hitchcockian filmmaking and the cinema more generally, but have
neither received attention as contributions to the “cinematic turn”
nor been addressed under the rubrics of “gallery films” or “screen
arts.” Thus, like paracinema, which was for a long time neglected by
both art and film history, many contemporary works about cinema
that eschew the moving image do not fit the purview of what are
quickly becoming the dominant categories of analysis.
Artistic responses to Hitchcock’s filmmaking form part of this long
and complex history of exchange between the worlds of cinema and
art. Thus, while the question “Why Hitchcock?” may be impossible
to answer comprehensively, it nevertheless deserves some attention.14
Speculation may lead us to the visually sophisticated, detail-oriented
nature of a Hitchcock sequence that lends itself to all sorts of analyses
and creative interventions. Much has been made of the thematic and
aesthetic orientations of his films that invite such attention. For exam-
ple, Erika Balsom argues that Hitchcock’s penchant for doubling and
fetishizing might be part of the appeal and she shows how these tropes
have become the subject of several artistic responses to his films.15 She
 I n t r od u ct i on 7

also suggests that the practice of remaking Hitchcock by filmmakers

and thus his encounter through the lens of other directors, which
itself is a form of doubling, may have spurred a form of this practice
in the art world as well.16 There is certainly much about his films
that attract attention and while his worlds, character types, narrative,
and formal strategies offer an abundance of possibilities for creative
response, certain individual films stand out. Vertigo is by far the favor-
ite among artists for a variety of reasons, as we shall soon see in the
case studies that follow.17 Rear Window (1954), North by Northwest
(1959), Psycho (1960), The Birds (1963), and Marnie (1964) attract
much attention too and round out what we might call a canon of
Hitchcock for art.18
Speculation on Hitchcock’s popularity as an artistic subject may also
point to the impact of decades of cinephilic writing and the fan and
filmmaking practices that keep his achievements firmly entrenched in
the public imagination. Academic writing too is responsible for direct-
ing attention to his films. As Steven Jacobs argues, “Hitchcock’s work
has also developed into a true test case for almost all film historio-
graphical and film theoretical paradigms that have become fashionable
in academia since the 1970s.”19 Certainly, the reasons for this can be
located in the importance of Hitchcock’s work to film history, his
lengthy career, and his contribution to the canon of films that popu-
late countless “best films” lists. Part of the answer may also be found
in the availability of his work through rereleases, screening programs,
and on video, and the increasing accessibility of technologies required
to scrutinize film’s components. Indeed, it might be discovered in
the nature of Hitchcock’s own engagements with modernism, which
find parallels in the art world, and his profound investments in art,
which are now being duly reciprocated. The self-consciousness and
self-reflexivity of his experiments with space, time, and aesthetics are
certainly of interest to artists invested in these very same strategies.
It is likely that Hitchcock’s own insistence that cinema is primarily a
visual medium resonates with artists too. Some, however, may see this
as a challenge to champion the significance of sound in his work.
Hitchcock’s appeal to artists may also have to do with how he
embodies many of the personal quirks and tendencies we stereotypi-
cally attribute to the mythic (male) artist-genius figure—somewhat
troubled, a bit mad, overly controlling, driven by his desires, con-
strained by his own artistic visions, and compelled to insinuate himself
figuratively (and in the case of Hitchcock, literally) in his work. The
extent to which these are true hardly matters. What does matter is
the perpetuation of this mythic figure and thus the entrenchment of
8 Hi t ch co ck an d C on t e m p o r ar y A r t

Hitchcock as not only an—if not the—auteur in the world of cinema

but also as an artist in the world of art. Of course, he was also a skilled
self-promoter and in a way that brought these two worlds together.
Take, for instance, his 1963 Museum of Modern Art retrospective.
This was part of a deal that the production company for The Birds
brokered with the museum, requiring the former to cover the cost of
the show in exchange for an exhibition time slot that coincided with
the release of that film.20 Hitchcock knew how to generate publicity
and how to construct himself as an image, to fine-tune a persona that
was distinctive and marketable.
A more cynical response to the question “Why Hitchcock?” might
point to not only such instances of self-promotion, but also a num-
ber of other interests, realities, and even fortuitous accidents of tim-
ing. We might speak of gallery mandates to draw in more visitors
through shows with popular appeal, ones that trade on Hitchcock’s
fame. Many of the exhibitions featuring Hitchcock emerged around
the time of Hitchcock’s centenary, which itself followed just on the
heels of cinema’s centenary and, as mentioned, the flurry of art and
film exhibitions that cinema’s anniversary spurred. In some ways,
these artistic investigations of cinema paved the way for even more
creative engagements with Hitchcockian film itself. What starts to
emerge here is a trail of mutually supportive endeavors that begins
with the inclusion of Hitchcockian artworks in cinema’s centenary
exhibitions, prompting further artistic production along these lines,
and eventually enough to fill entire shows. In this context, reflect-
ing on Hitchcock seemed like the natural thing to do. And, in this
context, Hitchcock was cinema. After all, they were born at the same
time, grew up together, enjoyed their heyday simultaneously, and, by
some accounts, died at roughly the same time, give or take a decade.21
Indeed, cinema’s centenary was defined as much by celebration as it
was by sorrow at cinema’s impending death by digital technologies or
its slower degeneration at the hands of television. In addition to this
fortuitous alignment of centenaries, the vagaries of the art market,
and its appetite for certain tendencies at certain times, can also take
credit for the veritable explosion of Hitchcockian artworks. Hitchcock
was “in,” his films were readily available in formats that could be tin-
kered with, and so too were practices of appropriation that looked
especially to the cinema in both critical and, as several scholars have
pointed out, increasingly affectionate ways.22 Unsurprisingly, this
popularity led to what we might call a case of overproduction. After
all, not all Hitchcock-inspired art advances the discourses of cinema.
In many instances, Hitchcock and his work have come to function
 I n t r od u ct i on 9

metonymically for classical Hollywood cinema itself, recalling in very

broad and often reductive terms a particular era of film history.
It is in the context of such uses we hear charges that these works
are now little more than products in a nostalgia economy. But how-
ever much the idea of yearning for a past that is really an invented
ideal seems retrograde, we should not dismiss nostalgia too quickly.
For nostalgia does not preclude a meaningful engagement with the
past or with our present conceptions of it. As reevaluations of Fredric
Jameson’s lament that we replaced history proper with a history of
aesthetic styles reveal, nostalgic practices and forms do have the capac-
ity to grapple with a range of concerns including time and its inscrip-
tions, the nature of cultural memory, the relationship between past
and present, the uses of pasts both mythic and actual, and the trans-
formation of nostalgia itself into a cultural phenomenon that can be
primarily visual, manifestly critical, and even divorced from its once
signature generation of affect.23 Nostalgia thus shares with cinephilia
a recent history of critical reevaluation that sheds light on its produc-
tive potential. They share an affection for something lost to time and
the capacity to generate attempts to revive this lost object through a
range of personal and creative gestures. As such, not all of the artistic
practices borne out of nostalgia should necessarily be charged with
the reductivism, obfuscation, or ahistoricism that was once thought to
mar nostalgia itself. Indeed, we might even suggest that in some cases
myths about Hitchcock and cinema are just as vital as truths for what
they reveal about our present moment, fears, and desires.
Whether reductive or complex, revelatory or banal, these art prac-
tices have also been determined by more than the simple availability
of Hitchcock’s oeuvre, his inscription into film and cultural histories.
They have also been shaped by the nature of our access to Hitchcock’s
films, not only as films in their entirety, viewed in repertory theatres
or screened at home, but also as isolated fragments encountered often
and in all sorts of venues. Psycho’s shower scene, for instance, has
been referenced in everything from quiz shows to cartoons, television
comedies to video games, and blockbuster films to amateur YouTube
videos. It also lends its name to an Australian punk band from the
1980s and 1990s called Shower Scene from Psycho.24 It is through such
repetition and rehearsal across the visual media landscape that iconic
sequences and images that for many define Hitchcock’s films have
become familiar even to audiences who haven’t seen Psycho, Rear
Window, or Vertigo. These fragments of films have come to occupy
privileged positions in what Victor Burgin calls the “image envelope,”
registers of the “already seen” and “already heard,” the debris of films,
10 Hi t ch co ck an d C on t e m p o r ar y A r t

including filmic moments detached from their original contexts but

nevertheless saturated with affect and both personal and cultural sig-
nificance.25 As Jean Luc Godard suggests, they are the moments that
we recollect long after memory of the film’s plot has faded.26
These fragments have also become privileged in artistic investiga-
tions of Hitchcock’s films. Artists have excised individual characters,
settings, props, aesthetic devices, themes, and scenes from their filmic
contexts and subjected them to a range of nuanced explorations.
Many of the objects selected for treatment are ones already invested
with narrative significance by Hitchcock himself. They tend to involve
things like Norman Bates’s room as remediated by Palle Torsson’s
Evil Interiors: Psycho (2003), Marnie’s robbery scene as recreated
and endlessly repeated by Stan Douglas’s Subject to a Film: Marnie
(1989), or Madeleine herself as wanderer in Salla Tykkä’s Zoo (2006)
and Anne Robinson’s ReTurning (2005). But a fair number of these
objects of artistic scrutiny might also be described as obscurities rather
deeply embedded in the Hitchcockian universe—objects, aspects,
or moments of an idiosyncratic nature, but ones that nevertheless
hold deeply personal significance for the artists whose attention they
attracted. They have the capacity to pierce like a Barthesian punctum
and share certain qualities with Burgin’s “sequence-image,” that is,
an image with the psychical intensity of a screen memory, something
constituted by “perceptions and recollections,” and associated with
past affects and meanings.27 John Baldessari’s Tetrad Series (1999)
and David Reed’s installations, Judy’s Bedroom (1992) and Scottie’s
Bedroom (1994), bear the hallmarks of such an approach.
In speculating on “Why Hitchcock?,” I’ve considered what it is
about Hitchcock’s films that attract attention and also very briefly the
tendencies of the broader art-world context that led to their inclusion
in curatorial programs designed to survey the connections between
art and film. What remains missing from this answer is a consideration
of what motivates artists to engage Hitchcock in the first place. It is
not my aim here to spell out in any detail the intentions behind these
works, to deal with the specificities of how and why artists performed
certain creative gestures in the ways they did. While I believe that
an approach that balances a consideration of the aims of the artist
with what the artwork accomplishes, enables, and generates in the
world is probably best in most cases, I’m inclined to agree with Cindy
Bernard’s thoughts on this issue. She writes, “I’m one of the people
who subscribes to the idea that once I put the work on the wall, I
might as well be dead, and the work is going to be read through the
lexicon of the person looking at it. What they choose to get from the
 I n t r od u ct i on 11

work is kind of up to them, and if the work is captivating enough,

they’ll do a little work and find out what I intended.”28 In fact, it
is less an issue of intention per se—though, where warranted, I will
appeal to it in the case studies that follow—than it is of identifying
what appear to be the general impulses that motivate artists to set
their sights on Hitchcock.
In the realm of Hitchcock-inspired art, the two primary general
impulses are cinephilia and epistemophilia—a love of the cinema and
a love of knowledge, respectively. Indeed most of the artistic practices
surveyed for this study appear to have been motivated by the former
in a way that is invigorated by the latter. It often seems that one leads
directly to the other. A love of cinema encourages attempts to learn
more about the object of one’s affection, prompting efforts to under-
stand how it works, its effects, or the nature of its constituent parts.
That is, cinephilia becomes charged by epistemophilia. Conversely,
the more one seeks to know about an object, the deeper one’s appre-
ciation for, or connection to, that object of study. Of this tendency,
we might say that epistemophilia develops into cinephilia. Even in
instances where art practices do not appear to have been produced
out of either, they nevertheless have the capacity to engage cinephilia
and epistemophilia as concepts. That is, they interrogate the nature of
cinephilia or the ways in which art gives us insight into film. My rea-
son for introducing cinephilia and epistemophilia as motivating forces
behind these art practices has do with what I believe is their direct
impact on what these artworks in turn produce: meaningful engage-
ments with Hitchcock, cinema, and all that circulates around cinema
as a practice and experience. For although my main goal here is to give
the reader a sense of the many and varied artistic gestures that have
targeted Hitchcock’s films over last few decades, I also want to argue
for the capacity of these gestures to contribute to our understanding
of film, to add insight to aesthetic, historical, and even theoretical
discourses on the cinema. But before detailing how artworks about
Hitchcock might accomplish such feats, I want to say a little more
about cinephilia and epistemophilia themselves such that we might
better recognize their impact in the case studies that follow.
From Cinema Journal’s “In Focus” section published in 2010
to a series of monographs and edited collections by both new and
established film scholars, the topic of cinephilia has enjoyed a fair
bit of attention over the past decade. Christian Keathley’s evaluation
of “cinephiliac moments” and their revelatory potential, Thomas
Elsaesser’s “cinephilia take two” and its implication in contemporary
reconfigurations of memory, and Laura Mulvey’s “cinema of delay”
12 Hi t ch co ck an d C on t e m p o r ar y A r t

and its production of new forms of spectatorship have opened up

rich discussions on the subject of cinephilia.29 Perhaps unsurprisingly,
these authors often describe their appraisals of cinephilia as responses
to the confluence of two key events at the end of the last century:
cinema’s centenary and the rise of digital technologies. (For the
purposes of this discussion, we can also add Hitchcock’s centenary.)
Coupled with enduring investments in history, affect, and ontology
in film studies as well as various neighboring disciplines such as art
history, these forces have generated an environment in which our
thoughts might naturally turn to how, why, and in what ways we love
the cinema.
Even a cursory inspection of cinephilia reveals its multiple forms
and the richness and diversity of its many expressions. Recent research
has also uncovered its varied history, privileged moments, defin-
ing features, and speculated on its possible futures. It has identified
its stages and assessed the significance and value of what cinephilic
energies produce. By entering into debates about the impact of new
technologies and what constitutes a cinephilic object, scholars on
the subject have also done much to complicate our understanding of
cinema itself. Yet, beyond a general consensus borne out of the rea-
sonably simple etymological equation that cinephilia equals a love of
cinema, another point of general consensus seems to have emerged.
That is that cinephilia produces something else. Cinephilia does not
end with the experience or feeling of love for the cinema, but compels
us to act in some way.
For the most part, this act takes written form. In Paul Willemen’s
view, for instance, “it is as if cinephilia demands a gestural outlet in
writing.” It is a demand, he says, that stems from a kind of excess
produced by the cinephilic experience, an energy that needs to be
expended through an “an extra, physical ritual, a gesture.”30 For some,
this kind of writing—and especially that which defined the writings of
the Cahiers du Cinema critics during that publication’s golden age—
amounts to a “creative act of substitution no less important than the
films themselves.”31 Since the 1970s, new technologies have led to the
proliferation of new ways of taking part in cinephilic discourse, new
sites of dissemination and circulation and, of course, new practices as
well. According to Elsaesser, the relative ease with which cinephiles
can now own the objects of their affection has transformed them into
archivists and collectors and thus transformed the experience of cine-
philia from one intimately connected to the experience of going to the
theater to one defined by repeat viewing in any number of contexts
and through a variety of media platforms.32
 I n t r od u ct i on 13

It is important to remember that some of these features of con-

temporary cinephilia have antecedents in much older fan practices. As
Mulvey reminds us, “since its earliest moments the film industry has
given its fans things to hold onto—things to possess; a way to hold on
to the elusive, fleeting image of cinema.”33 But these “things to hold
onto” are expanding, not just in quantity, but also in kind and use.
The film industry provides us with countless ways to deepen our con-
nection to films and their stars through merchandising, conventions,
online forums, or the supplementary experiences afforded by video
game tie-ins, for example. Whether cinephiles choose to participate
in industry-sanctioned practices or create their own alternative forms
of engagement, these acts themselves are starting to gain attention as
forms of reception and, quite crucially, forms of creative production.
But as we shall see, in many cases these cinephilia-inspired acts are
also often aligned with or charged by epistemophilia. Epistemophilia
is defined by an intellectual curiosity, one motivated by a desire to
know and one that produces pleasure from knowledge gained. It has
its origins in Freudian psychoanalysis and is a term derived from James
Strachey’s translation of the German word “Wisstrieb.”34 Freud theo-
rized the “epistemophilic instinct” as a drive for knowledge closely
tied to scopophilia and the child’s curiosity about sexuality. As Peta
Cox explains, it is a “complex drive which functions both to relieve
negative affect, typically anxiety, and excite pleasure in learning and
knowing.”35 It is a drive with multiple expressions and with both
constructive and destructive tendencies that have since become the
subject of debate in feminist research. While some scholars focus on
epistemophilia’s pathological dimensions like its link to the drive for
mastery or epistemophiles’ disregard for the welfare of those around
them while engaged in their quests, others, like Cox, consider creative
and productive expressions of the drive in terms of feminist pedagogy,
specifically in the achievement of a balance between psychic strength
and psychic safety in the student.36 In film theory, its imbrication with
scopophilia has been noted in theorizations of spectatorship as in
Mary Ann Doane’s work on the femme fatale.37 In Mulvey’s writings,
it plays a role in her theorization of the aesthetics of curiosity and spe-
cifically a feminist curiosity as constitutive of a political, critical, and
creative drive. She also explores this drive and the space it crafts for an
active investigative look associated with the feminine and as a way to
complicate her earlier arguments about the gaze.38
I plan to appeal to this more positive evaluation of epistemophilia
and to focus on what it has the capacity to effect and produce as a
motivating force in art practice. And while I want to preserve the idea
14 Hi t ch co ck an d C on t e m p o r ar y A r t

that epistemophilia functions like a drive and, as such, compels us to

act, to investigate, decipher, and seek out knowledge, I do not intend
to make much recourse to its Freudian roots. Instead, I wish to see it
in broader cultural terms, to use it in the way Henry Jenkins does. For
instance, Jenkins talks about how The Matrix (1999), with its “endless
borrowings . . . [and] layers upon layers of references catalyze and sus-
tain our epistemophilia; these gaps and excesses provide openings for
many different knowledge communities that spring up around these
cult movies to display their expertise, dig deep into their libraries,
and bring their minds to bear on a text that promises a bottomless
pit of secrets.”39 In fact, there are strong affinities between the fan
practices that Jenkins discusses and the art practices at issue here, in
terms of motivation and their capacity to lead to creative forms of
production. Moreover, the epistemophilia driving fan practices and
art practices actually necessitates some distancing from its psychoana-
lytic origins because, in both cases, a strong corollary of the drive is
the aim of communicating newfound knowledge to others. In fan
culture, collective efforts help create and sustain online communities.
Information gleaned about favorite films is shared through blogs and
secrets uncovered are instantly posted to websites or other forums.
Of course, artworks too are made for audiences to be experienced,
enjoyed, debated, and contemplated. As such, in fandom and art, the
epistemophilic quest does not end with the acquisition of knowledge,
but the sharing of it with others. Herein lies one of the most produc-
tive aspects of epistemophilia.
If epistemophilia-driven art practices inflict any harm, it may be, for
some, to the original films themselves. Any intervention that changes
an aspect of the original could be perceived as a compromise to its
integrity, if not an act of violence. Even artistic gestures that aim to
exalt an image or isolate a sequence for analysis “break the toy,” as
Robert Burgoyne (quoting Christian Metz) suggests. In the process,
these works manage to convert the mystery and fascination of the
cinema into something else.40 For Metz, this something else might be
the fetishism of the collector or the sadistic voyeurism of the expert
or theorist. For Burgoyne, however, this something else is much more
productive. When Douglas Gordon “breaks the toy” (the toy being
Hitchcock’s Psycho or Ford’s The Searchers [1956]) by slowing them
down, he does so in order to “rethink the basic illusion of stillness
and motion.”41 In the process, Gordon reflects on cultural memory,
the illusionistic nature of cinema, the material quality of film, and the
basis of film in still photography, among other things.42 Furthermore,
according to Burgoyne, “the return to the sources of the medium
 I n t r od u ct i on 15

itself and to its fundamental mechanisms of fascination draws the cine-

philia of artists such as Gordon into a kind of artistic dialogue with
film history and film theory alike.”43
With 24 Hour Psycho (1993), for example, it is not just cinephilia
that is drawn into this dialogue. Through this work, Gordon makes
a meaningful contribution to these discourses and initiates dialogue
about and within film history and film theory. Perhaps the best known
of all Hitchcock-related artworks, 24 Hour Psycho projects the film
at two frames per second on a screen, typically suspended above the
viewer, and thus stretches the film’s running time to 24 hours.44
Gordon’s work reduces Hitchcock’s film to a series of stills without
the accompaniment of sound. In many ways, it is a simple gesture:
he screens an extreme slow motion version of Psycho in an art gallery.
And yet, it is a gesture borne out of a desire to know more about its
object and one that has, in turn, encouraged in-depth and sustained
responses from critics, journalists, curators, historians, and theorists.
As expected, they describe the work and their experience of it, offer-
ing interpretations of its meaning and significance. They also, quite
crucially, talk about the capacity the work has to teach us about Psycho,
Hitchcock and, often, cinema and cultural memory more broadly.
Commentators like Mulvey, Burgoyne, and Philip Monk reveal how
Gordon’s work initiates productive ways to think about and under-
stand stillness, slowness, suspense, narrative, practices of representa-
tion, and practices of viewing both art and film.45 They detail for us
the insights about cinema that one might glean from engaging with
24 Hour Psycho, from pursuing the searching philosophical questions
it poses about time and space, cultural memory and its articulations
in the present.
The idea that we might learn something about cinema from
Gordon’s 24 Hour Psycho has even entered the realm of literary fiction
and in a way that further confirms the growing cultural, if not iconic,
status of the work. It plays a prominent role in Don DeLillo’s Point
Omega as the object of an almost perverse fascination for an unnamed
spectator in the first and final chapters of the book.46 Through an
anonymous spectator, who we later assume to be the elusive Dennis,
DeLillo devotes nearly a third of his novel to an analysis of the work.
He describes this spectator’s encounter of it in a gallery space traversed
by other visitors, the impact of the stilled images on his thoughts about
time, and how an “array of ideas involving science and philosophy and
nameless other things” flow out of even the briefest of sequences.47 It
is the nature of Gordon’s intervention into Psycho that produces for
this character a chance “to see what’s here, finally to look and to know
16 Hi t ch co ck an d C on t e m p o r ar y A r t

you’re looking.”48 It prompts him to reflect on voyeurism itself, his

own, that of the museum guards and other spectators, and, certainly,
that of Norman Bates. It permits him to feel time passing, to “be alive
to what is happening in the smallest registers of motion,” to experi-
ence “pure film, pure time.”49 It even gives him the sensation that
the film is “thinking into him, spilling through him like some kind of
runaway brain fluid.”50 For this character, who we come to suspect is a
killer, 24 Hour Psycho proffers an experience so inexorably real that he
commits his own Hitchcockian murder. Thus, for spectators both real
and fictional, Gordon’s cinephilia-driven and epistemophilia-charged
interventions into Hitchcock’s Psycho have yielded compelling insights
into the nature of cinema and its effects.
To suggest that art teaches us something is not a radical notion.
Art’s faculty for generating knowledge has been recognized in very
general terms and its edifying potential the subject of philosophical
debate in aesthetics for centuries. Questions about art’s capacity to
improve us in some way, to drive us to political action, or help us
better understand our world have emerged in a variety of iterations
throughout the history of art. More recently, these questions have
been taken up by those reflecting on the idea of art as research, art
as theory, and art as knowledge.51 In particular, we might start with
Hubert Damisch’s ideas around art and what he calls the “theoretical
object.” Damisch explains,

a theoretical object is something that obliges one to do theory. Second,

it’s an object that obliges you to do theory but also furnishes you with
the means of doing it. Thus, if you agree to accept it on theoretical
terms, it will produce effects around itself . . . Third, it’s a theoretical
object because it forces us to ask ourselves what theory is. It is posed
in theoretical terms; it produces theory; and it necessitates a reflection
on theory. But I never pronounce the word theory without also saying
the word history. Which is to say that for me such an object is always a
theoretico-historical object.52

A “theoretical object” can be an element of painting such as a cloud,

which, for Damisch, is emblematic of pictoriality itself. The cloud also
happens to be an object that complicates yet another paradigm osten-
sibly invented by painting, namely, perspective. As signifiers, clouds
open up a series of theoretical questions about perspective as a rep-
resentational device, not to mention space and place, more generally,
and they do so because of their often complex uses in the history of
painting.53
 I n t r od u ct i on 17

Permutations of these ideas can be found in the work of Ernst van

Alphen who convincingly shows us how an artwork might “practice
cultural philosophy” by functioning as a “historical agent” rather than
“historical product.”54 Art, for van Alphen, has successfully inter-
vened in our “thinking, imagining, and representing such key aspects
of human existence as individuality, identity, and space.”55 It has the
capacity to undertake philosophical projects, to explore the cultural
issues that occupy our thoughts, and to make very real contribu-
tions to how ideas (around individualism, for example) take hold and
develop. In fact, van Alphen argues that art does more than simply
contribute to existing discourses; it can “transform the ways in which
cultural issues are being conceived.”56
Mieke Bal too shares Damisch’s belief in the power of art to function
theoretically. In her section on “Images” in Travelling Concepts in the
Humanities: A Rough Guide, Bal writes that theory “is not an instru-
ment of analysis, to be ‘applied’ to the art object supposedly serving it
but in fact subjecting it. Instead it is a discourse that can be brought
to bear on the object at the same time as the object can be brought
to bear on it.”57 For her, the capacity for artworks to exist as “theo-
retical objects” speaks in more general terms to an artwork’s capacity
to behave in a conceptually self-reflexive way, to “offer and articulate
thought about art” and indeed, as she also argues, to “think.”58 Bal
proposes that if “visual art makes any sense at all beyond the narrow
domain of beauty and the affective domain of pleasure, it is because
art, too, thinks; it is thought.” This “thought” is neither something
generated in response to an artistic gesture, nor does it refer to an idea
or narrative made manifest through visual form. Instead, it is “visual
thought, the thought embodied in form.”59
Expansions of these ideas by scholars like Giovanni Careri who makes
a case for the Sistine Chapel as “theoretical object” and Jill Bennett
who pursues Bal’s arguments about how such objects ­“co-perform”
analysis are particularly relevant for this project.60 Bennett’s approach
is especially compelling because of the way in which she looks to con-
temporary art practices that function as a type of “cultural studies
without words” and for the questions she asks in response to Bal’s
proclamation that art “thinks.” Specifically, what is the product of
this thought? How is it accessed and used? By looking at the work
of Gabriel Orozco, Candice Breitz, and Douglas Gordon, Bennett
argues that such practices “operat(e) at the intersection of different
discourses, practices and aesthetics [and] . . . constitute an intermedial
space through which new ways of seeing and new terms for analysis
can emerge.”61 Her focus on what she calls “intermedial aesthetics”
18 Hi t ch co ck an d C on t e m p o r ar y A r t

as something generated by works existing between media speaks in

many ways to the practices considered in this book and will be further
examined later.
In addition to exploring these ideas about art’s role in the pro-
duction of knowledge, I’d also like to particularize them in a way
that speaks more directly to the case studies at issue here. That is,
I plan to focus on how art practices might enrich a particular set of
discourses, themes, concepts or practices related to film and film stud-
ies, namely the cinephilic pilgrimage and profilmic space; the essay
film, its expanded forms, and relations with memory and museal
space; remediation, intermediality and the film still; spatial montage,
temporal collage and rear projection; and sound in terms of filmic
soundtracks and scores. More generally, I want to make a case for the
importance of mining cinephilia-driven (and epistemophilia-charged)
works for what they contribute to what we know and how we think
about cinema.
Chapter 1, “Cinephilic Pilgrimages and the Reification of Profilmic
Space,” extends the discussion about cinephilia initiated here by look-
ing at art practices that involve cinephilic pilgrimages. It focuses on
David Reed’s travels throughout the San Francisco of Vertigo and his
attempt to reify the profilmic spaces of Scottie and Judy’s bedrooms
through his large-scale, multimedia installations called Judy’s Bedroom
(1992) and Scottie’s Bedroom (1994). By doing so, he forces us to con-
front the limits of acts of reification borne out of a cinephilic impulse
and the phenomenological distinctions between the different ways in
which Hitchcock’s films are experienced—in memory, on television,
in fragments, and materially in an art gallery. I also consider Cindy
Bernard’s Ask the Dust: Vertigo 1958/1990 (1990) and Ask the Dust:
North by Northwest 1959/1990 (1990), parts of her photoconceptu-
alist project to find and document iconic filmic sites, and Douglas
Gordon’s public artwork Empire (1998), installed in a Glasgow
laneway for the cinephilic pilgrim. All three works are deeply invested
in questions about the cinema in relation to memory and place. They
also constitute cinephilic and epistemophilic gestures with the capac-
ity to generate both affective and analytical pleasures.
Chapter 2, “Activating Memories and Museums through the
Expanded Essay Film,” explores a cinematic form that, at its core, is
invested in generating knowledge about its subject. I begin with a dis-
cussion of the essay film and make brief mention of two landmarks of
the “genre,” ones driven by cinephilia and deeply invested in making
claims about Hitchcockian cinema, namely, Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil
(1983) and Jean Luc Godard’s Histoire(s) du Cinéma (1988–98).
 I n t r od u ct i on 19

I then define what I’m calling an “expanded essay film” by appealing

to certain strands in the tradition of expanded cinema and bringing
them to bear on conceptualizations of the essay film. My primary case
study, Christoph Girardet and Matthias Müller’s The Phoenix Tapes
(1999) presents an excellent opportunity to see how the expanded
form of this essay film functions differently, but no less critically, than
its single screen version. In particular, I explore the ways in which the
expanded version activates space and memory as well as confronts the
process of musealization, that is, how museological operations have
become the purview of other cultural practices including the cinema.
Chapter 3, “Remediation and Intermediality: From Moving to
(Film) Still,” begins with a series of painterly remediations by Aurélie
Bauer, Isabelle Inghilleri, and Bertrand Giraudeau that, through
engagement with other image practices related to the cinema, raise
issues of an intermedial nature. For my primary case studies, I shift
to the digital remediations enacted by Palle Torsson’s Evil Interiors:
Psycho (2003), which generates a still of the film using a video game
level editor, and Cindy Bernard’s Location Proposal #2 (1997–2001),
which projects images extracted from a digital model of Vertigo’s
“Muir Woods.” In all cases, the images generated by these artists
are still and, as such, the “film still” as a historical and conceptual
object enters the fray. I also spend time with the curious evacuation of
the human presence in Torsson and Bernard’s work, an erasure that
returns us to cinephilia.
Chapter 4, “Spatial Montage, Temporal Collage, and the Art(ifice)
of Rear Projection,” looks at art practices that collapse, overlay, or
juxtapose within a single frame or installation space multiple images
or image planes, not only ones extracted from Hitchcock’s films but
also created anew. I first make note of the various forms that spa-
tial montage and temporal collage can take by looking at J. Tobias
Anderson’s Nine Piece Rope (2002), Les LeVeque’s 2 Spellbound
(1999) and 4 Vertigo (2000), and Laurent Fiévet’s Continuations of
Hitchcock (2003–10) as well as briefly consider superimposition in Jim
Campbell’s Illuminated Average #1: Hitchcock’s Psycho (2000) and
Christopher Draeger’s Schizo (Redux) (2004). However, the majority
of this chapter is dedicated to two works that are not explicit engage-
ments with Hitchcock, namely, Mark Lewis’s Rear Projection: Molly
Parker (2006) and Nathan Phillips Square, A Winter’s Night, Skating
(2009). Although Lewis’s films are not concerned with Hitchcock
per se, they are cinephilically driven and epistemophilically charged
explorations of rear projection, an outmoded technology now closely
aligned with and often defined with recourse to Hitchcock. They also
20 Hi t ch co ck an d C on t e m p o r ar y A r t

intersect with Hitchcockian cinema on a number of other fronts that

open up productive discussions about Hitchcock’s relation to certain
moments in the history of art. Lewis’s films are sophisticated interven-
tions into the cinema and the modernity of its expressions, but as a
consequence, they also happen to shed light on some of Hitchcock’s
own complex cinematic image constructions. As such, this chapter
is also about the capacity for discourses around art practices to initi-
ate approaches to a subject that the works themselves do not directly
engage.
Chapter 5, “The Acoustics of Vertigo: Soundscapes, Soundtracks,
and Scores,” considers the ways in which art practices might contrib-
ute to our understanding of sound in film and especially its uses in
Hitchcock. With brief reference to works predicated on what Peter
Wollen calls a “mismatch” between sound and image, including Les
LeVeque’s 4 Vertigo, Gregory Chatonsky’s Vertigo@home (2007), and
Rea Tajiri’s Hitchcock Trilogy (1987), I hope to set the stage for think-
ing about how cinematic sounds cue memory and structure experi-
ence. I then turn to Christian Marclay’s Vertigo: Soundtrack for an
Exhibition (1990) and Douglas Gordon’s Feature Film (1999) to
consider sound in relation to space and sound in relation to sight
and the image. These are complex, multifaceted works that investi-
gate cinematic sounds and cinema itself in sophisticated ways, target-
ing an important dimension of Hitchcock’s filmmaking practice often
overshadowed by the (unsurprising) focus on the visual in his films.
As such, they permit us to recognize the vanguard contributions by
artists to an area of Hitchcock studies that its proponents claim still
suffers from neglect.
The body of artworks that respond to Hitchcock is vast, spanning
decades of production, a range of artistic media, and movements. And
although this study is a survey in some respects, it is far from compre-
hensive. Each chapter provides several examples of practices aligned
with the larger problematic at issue, but privileges one or two works
to allow for greater depth of analysis. It is through these more detailed
readings of the works that I hope to make a case for their value to
our efforts at understanding Hitchcock, his work and legacy, and the
cinema itself in its past and possible future forms. There are other
omissions too that should be acknowledged from the start. This is not
a study of Hitchcock’s films except insofar as the artists considered
direct us to certain elements of his cinema. As such, my engagement
with Hitchcock’s oeuvre is piecemeal, fragmented, and outside the
logic of more conventional film analyses that rightfully speak to that
which is prevalent, structuring, or defining of his films. This is also
 I n t r od u ct i on 21

not a study that deals with works that can be interpreted as alluding
to Hitchcock. With the exception of Mark Lewis’s films, all works
selected are by artists who set out to deal with Hitchcock directly.
Nor does this study provide a complete picture of the most popular
works about Hitchcock. Although I discuss Girardet and Müller’s The
Phoenix Tapes, my attention to 24 Hour Psycho is limited and I all but
neglect others in a quickly forming canon, including Grimonprez’s
Double Take (2009), Pierre Huyghe’s Remake (1994–95), Sherman’s
Untitled Film Stills, or Douglas’s Subject to a Film: Marnie. Instead,
I aim to bring to light practices not that well known, even obscure in
some cases, and to represent a wide range of aesthetic and conceptual
investments. Lastly, this book is also not about art in Hitchcock, a vast
subject in its own right and one impressively detailed in several excel-
lent books and articles.62
As such, these chapters survey only a selection of the many ways
in which artists have dismantled Hitchcock’s films, transformed and
retooled them, nearly beyond recognition in some instances.63 But
the selections here are ones that cut deep into the visual and narrative
fabric of his oeuvre to extract that which these artists find compelling
or confounding. And while exceptionally varied in certain respects,
artistic practices motivated by cinephilia and epistemophilia do share
some characteristics, chief among them a conceptual, if not theoreti-
cal, sophistication. They are often guided by a desire to understand
as fully as possible their object of inquiry. In some cases, it is not the
artist’s initial cinephilic reverie that is celebrated or made available
to viewers, but rather knowledge about cinema gleaned from taking
the film or its images apart. As such, it is not just aesthetic or affec-
tive pleasures that these works afford, but deeply analytical ones and
in ways that encourage spectators to share in the epistemophilia that
spurred their creation.
This capacity for artistic gestures borne out of cinephilia and epis-
temophilia to offer us something of value has been noted by the few
scholars who consider cinephilia in the context of contemporary art
production. For instance, according to Burgoyne, the ­artist-cinephile
models for us ways of “customizing industrially produced pleasures,
reconfiguring, in a personal and illuminating way, the objects of visual
culture.”64 That is, these artists show us ways to transform the films
we love into objects that become our own, into souvenirs of a sort that
register our willingness to creatively invest our time and efforts. Others,
like Annette Michelson, draw our attention to the “highly produc-
tive” nature of these practices and the oppositional and transgressive
impulses that drive these artists.65 In these instances, epistemophilia
22 Hi t ch co ck an d C on t e m p o r ar y A r t

may be the stronger of the two motivating forces and the result a work
that incisively détourns its object. However, as we will see, cinephilia
and critique are not mutually exclusive, but can happily coexist, a sen-
timent also expressed by Federico Windhausen.66 For Windhausen,
the artist-cinephile operates like a cultural historian, someone with
the tools to perform cultural critique. And while this cultural historian
might take the film apart, she also performs a preservational function
by keeping the film alive in the cultural imagination. Interventions
by these artist-cinephiles confirm that the importance and meaning-
fulness of Hitchcock’s films have not diminished since their release
and, given the broad audiences for exhibitions that feature these prac-
tices, it also confirms that our fascination with Hitchcock has not been
exhausted. Instead, these acts suggest that much remains to be gained
from continued creative interventions into Hitchcock’s work.
What we find in this body of artistic work is indeed a kind of “cul-
tural studies without words” or the “practice of cultural philosophy.”
We find “thought” embodied but accessible, thought that deter-
minedly reaches outside its object to engage those who come across it.
Such thought is not fixed or immutable. Nor is it necessarily didactic.
In the examples at issue here, it is thought of an inquiring kind. It is
searching and encouraging of dialogue about time and space, history
and memory. These works can provide us with new ways into a film
out of which new or alternate histories and analyses can be written.
Many of these works exist as a form of metacinema with the capacity
to raise philosophical questions about the cinema itself—its past, pres-
ent, and future forms, expressions, uses, effects, and affects.
The case studies considered here also reveal that even practices
inspired by love, and thus what is perhaps the most uncritical of
impulses, still have much to teach us. Specifically, they teach us about
Hitchcock’s films, his cinematographic strategies and experimental
tendencies, the cinema he has come to represent, classical Hollywood,
and the forces of modernism. They teach us about relationships
between fact and fiction, the real and artifice, and space or place and
time. They teach us about cinema’s relations with other media like
painting, drawing, and video games and related practices like story-
boarding and the creation of film stills. They teach us about cinematic
technologies like rear projection and components like sound. They
teach us about how we watch film, how we might engage with film,
what we can do with film, the ways in which cinema works and works
on us. They teach us that however subjective, idiosyncratic, or nostal-
gic the art practice may be, it can still offer critical insights. And how-
ever much such art practices might represent the broader cinematic
 I n t r od u ct i on 23

art tendencies often lamented for their allusive or merely celebratory

approach, many nevertheless have the potential to issue acute analy-
ses of their subject. They teach us about the significance of the sites
in which film is encountered from the gallery to the museum to the
home or even en route through mobile technologies. They teach us
about the histories of film and the histories of other cultural forms
with which it is entwined. Finally, they teach us that while we are busy
trying to speculate on cinema’s future and what cinema means to us
in the present, we still might not grasp cinema’s past as firmly as we
should.
 1

Cinephilic Pilgrimages and

the Reification of
Profilmic Space

S ince 2009, Gail Albert Halaban has been seeking out and photograph-
ing houses painted by Edward Hopper in Gloucester, Massachusetts,
in the 1920s.1 Titled Hopper Redux, this series of large-scale light box
images replicates the frame and vantage point of the original paintings,
but with certain modifications. Her motivation is twofold. On the one
hand, she wanted to see how another artist captured in paint a region
with which she herself was intimately familiar. On the other hand, she
wanted to explore a comparison identified by critics between her earlier
photographic series Out My Window (2007–) and Hopper’s paintings.2
As she puts it, “People kept comparing me to Hopper and I wanted to
know where that came from.”3 What this work accomplishes as a prefa-
tory example in the context of this chapter is threefold. First, it exempli-
fies an art practice involving the act of pilgrimage, the physical journey
to a special or sacred place. Second, it represents an artistic process
that leads to discovery about its objects of scrutiny—Hopper’s house
paintings, among other things. Third, and perhaps most appropriately,
it stands as yet another example of a practice inflected by Hitchcock.
For the modifications Albert Halaban introduces into Hopper Redux
are ones inspired by Hitchcockian mise-en-scène, modifications that
serve to “render these already familiar tableaux uncanny” and create
a “heightened sense of artifice [to] underscore[s] the photographs’
status as re-presentations.”4
Pilgrimage has been an important facet of various art forms for
many centuries. Medieval cathedrals were constructed to house relics
for travelers keen to gain proximity to a choice piece of their favorite
saint. Painters have embarked on taxing journeys to specific locations
for their natural beauty, landmarks, and historical or political signifi-
cance. But in Albert Halaban’s practice as well as other more recent
26 Hi t ch co ck an d C on t e m p o r ar y A r t

examples of artistic pilgrimage, we are presented with documentation

of a site rendered important or sacred by virtue of its previous rep-
resentation. It is a site made famous for no other reason than being
captured in paint or, as the focus shall soon be for the remainder of
this chapter, on celluloid.
At first glance, investing in travel to photograph a site previously
represented may seem a hollow act of appropriation. However,
what Albert Halaban gained through this process was insight into
Hopper’s work, specifically his earlier canvasses and their relation
to his more iconic images. For instance, she discovered Hopper’s
tendency to select the less flattering view of the structures he painted
and to eliminate the picturesque elements of the surrounding envi-
ronment, to capture instead “the more hard-edged, working-class
end of [Gloucester, Massachusetts].”5 In other words, she became
privy to how Hopper transformed a space to confront a history of
it often ignored, in this case one supplanted by a touristic image.
She also came to see how Hopper experimented with narrative by
conflating various times of the day by blending different qualities
and directions of light, thus turning on its head claims that the early
Hopper was a realist. This strategy, one prevalent in some of his
later, more famous paintings, directly contributed to their alienating
effects. It also prompted Albert Halaban to deploy similar tactics
in her own works as a means to inventing new narratives for these
spaces.6
Albert Halaban’s practice of pilgrimage and representation
unearthed important facets of Hopper’s work, shedding light on
his approach to painting. Much the same can be said of artists who
engage in (or with) the act of cinephilic pilgrimage and the type of
insights gleaned about the films and filmmakers that motivated their
ventures. To see what, in particular, we might learn about Hitchcock
and the cinema more generally from this type of practice, I want
to examine Cindy Bernard’s photographs Ask the Dust: Vertigo
1958/1990 (1990) and Ask the Dust: North by Northwest 1959/1990
(1990); David Reed’s installations/ensembles Judy’s Bedroom (1992)
and Scottie’s Bedroom (1994); and Douglas Gordon’s public artwork,
Empire (1998). I selected these examples for the ways in which they
stand as the product of (or prompt for in the case of Gordon) cine-
philic pilgrimage, the ways they bring the pleasures and limitations
of cinephilia into stark relief, and for the probing questions they
pose about the cinema in terms of its relationship to place, time,
and history.7 From the photographic documentation of filmic sites in
 Cinephilic Pilgrimages 27

Bernard’s case, to the material reification of filmic sites in Reed’s, to

the reconfiguration of urban sites for pilgrimage in Gordon’s, these
three case studies represent three distinct approaches to the cinephilic
pilgrimage, revealing each, in their own way, what cinephilia’s objects
might accomplish.
Like Albert Halaban’s Hopper Redux, Cindy Bernard’s Ask the
Dust begins with a physical journey to document sites rendered famil-
iar through their previous representation. Completed between 1989
and 1992, Ask the Dust comprises 21 photographs of landscapes and
locations from well-known Hollywood films released between 1954
and 1974, a time that roughly coincides with Bernard’s own child-
hood and youth. She chose her time frame based on significant his-
torical events, namely, the desegregation of American schools and the
resignation of Richard Nixon. These events bookend, for Bernard,
a particular period of history defined by its significant social trans-
formations and a growing cynicism in American life.8 It is also a
period subject to intense national mythmaking, efforts that resulted
in constructions like the “Fifties” and the “Sixties” and thus con-
cepts that have become deeply entrenched—thanks in large part to
Hollywood—in the American psych. Films like Them (1954), The
Searchers (1956), Bonnie and Clyde (1967), Easy Rider (1969), and
The Godfather (1972) are represented in this project, one for which
she spent countless hours at the Margaret Herrick Library and on
the phone with location managers attempting to pinpoint the exact
location of specific scenes. After discovering precisely where Roger
Thornhill attempted to evade the crop duster in North by Northwest
(1959), for instance, Bernard traveled to the site in order to photo-
graph it. Like other works in this series, it is devoid of any human
presence and framed to approximate the aspect ratio and shot distance
of the original filmic image as closely as possible. And, like the rest, its
title is that of the film followed by the year of its release and the year
Bernard took her picture.
Like others in the series, Ask the Dust: Vertigo 1958/1990 and Ask the
Dust: North by Northwest 1959/1990 prompt us to confront a number
of things (see figures. 1.1 and 1.2). They remind us of the constructed,
mediated nature of landscape and the ways in which representational
practices, and, in this instance Hitchcock’s cinematographic practices,
necessarily inflect what and how we see, what and how we remember,
and indeed how we experience the spaces we inhabit. Whether we are
acutely or only vaguely familiar with the sites captured in Bernard’s
photographs, we know, from their titles, that they refer to films.9 And
28 Hi t ch co ck an d C on t e m p o r ar y A r t

Figure 1.1 Cindy Bernard, Ask the Dust: Vertigo 1958/1990, 1990, photograph
(courtesy of the artist).

Figure 1.2 Cindy Bernard, Ask the Dust: North by Northwest 1959/1990, 1990,
photograph (courtesy of the artist).

yet, because landmarks and markers of the passage of time are present
in most of the images from her series, we also know (or at least suspect)
that we are looking at “real” places. Bernard appeals to the indexical-
ity of the photograph in order to bring into collision fact and fiction,
the real and the cinematic, past and present. These images, however
much aligned with a particular film, now also belong to Bernard. Her
authorship of photographs of locations otherwise already embedded
 Cinephilic Pilgrimages 29

in cultural memory through earlier filmic representations complicates

the practice of appropriation pursued by many of her contemporaries.
By eschewing the use of found footage or creation of visual pastiche,
Bernard intervenes in the legacy of iconic cinematic places and asks,
in this instance, what can actually be appropriated and what, in fact, is
there to appropriate?
For Bernard, these questions are political. Her aim was to appro-
priate (and confront) a legacy of landscape representation shaped by
male artists and thus a legacy steeped in patriarchy. Bernard explains
that she “set out on a semi-feminist project—to recapture the idea
of landscape from a long list of male photographers.” She continues,
“I’m going to go into these spaces to make these photographs with
my 4  5 camera all by myself, and there’s this act of recapturing
a space away from this male-dominated perspective.”10 It is a per-
spective wrapped up in the history of Manifest Destiny, mytholo-
gies of the West and expansionism, and the tenets of Romanticism.
As such, she appropriates landscapes defined by not only films, but
also sites already inscribed by earlier, politically charged mytholo-
gies and image-making practices. Ultimately, she wanted to see
how these spaces have been “coded by culture,” specifically from
a male perspective.11 And yet, as Martha Langford astutely points
out in her deeply personal and sharply analytical essay, Romanticism
informs Bernard’s approach as well through her appeals to “loss
and yearning, passion, historicism and exoticism.”12 For Langford,
Bernard positions herself as Caspar David Friedrich’s Ruckenfigure,
the “main protagonist of Romantic landscape painting . . . the figure
who turns his back to the viewer, the possessor and director of the
original gaze.” In Ask the Dust, it is Bernard who is this “surrogate
and solitary traveler.”13
Ask the Dust: Vertigo 1958/1990 and Ask the Dust: North by
Northwest 1959/1990 exist as documents of mythic, coded, and
mediated sites layered with history. They are also, quite crucially,
documentation of Bernard’s cinephilic pilgrimages, records of her
“solitary travels.” In his essay on the cinephilic pilgrimage, Douglas
Cunningham explores this phenomenon, arguing that such journeys
are the cinephile’s “attempt to reify (that is, ground within the real)
an inherently ephemeral experience of the past, while simultaneously
utilizing real spaces as portals through which to once again access,
personally experience, and even occupy the past.”14 Cunningham’s
acknowledgment that such visits tend to come up short for the cine-
phile and his identification of certain artistic practices (including those
30 Hi t ch co ck an d C on t e m p o r ar y A r t

enacted by Chris Marker, Victor Burgin, and Cindy Bernard) as key

to the process of rendering explicit these inadequacies is particularly
compelling. While visiting a site allows for some physical, material
connection to a film, it does not necessarily allow viewers to feel they
are inhabiting the world of the film. Missing, among other things, is
the cinematic frame that contains and thereby shapes this world. As
Cunningham puts it, “the human eye . . . can only fail in its attempt
to re-replicate the two-dimensional framed vistas and/or details the
camera sought initially to replicate. Such a re-replication requires the
intervention, once again, of an ‘optical crutch,’ as it were, a camera, a
telescope, or some such.”15
By closely approximating the cinematic image, Bernard’s photo-
graphs both provide and draw attention to this “optical crutch.” As
such, these images are as much the product of her own cinephilic
desires as they are about cinephilia itself, the ways in which a deep
love for the cinema is acted upon, and the inability of these acts to
bring back these objects of desire. And yet, despite these shortcom-
ings, there is pleasure in the process, in the research and the search,
in the journey and discovery of filmic sites—both real and imagined.
There are also pleasures to be had for the viewer, ones that stem from
Bernard’s invocation of places that resonate with our own cinephilia
as well as the potential for analytical pleasures from her invocation of
the theoretical problematics of film and photography, indexicality and
the real, and space and memory.
Whereas Bernard’s work is ostensibly about the cinephilic pilgrim-
age and the representational matters that its documentation brings to
light, David Reed’s concern rests more with the reification of ephem-
eral cinematic and cinephilic moments. During an excursion to paint
the landscapes of Monument Valley in the late 1960s, Reed experi-
enced what he has since come to call his “media baptism.” Looking
for reprieve from the hot desert sun, he discovered a cave with a small
spring. Once inside, a sensation of overwhelming familiarity struck,
compelling him to catch the flowing water with cupped hands and
drink it. What seemed at the time like a primal bodily memory, a
gesture reborn from a collective unconscious, resonated for years as a
cherished spiritual experience. That is, until he rewatched John Ford’s
The Searchers and witnessed Ethan (John Wayne) perform that very
same gesture in precisely that location.16 This moment of recogni-
tion shattered an illusion of mystical significance and initiated Reed’s
long-standing interest in how the cinema inflects our experiences and
structures our memories in ways that are often embodied and deeply
embedded.
 Cinephilic Pilgrimages 31

Since Reed’s media baptism, film has played an important and

highly varied role in a practice otherwise conceptually invested in the
histories and possibilities of painting. Indeed, it is through painting
that he attends not just to the legacies of abstract expressionism and,
at times, minimalism, but also to the effects of filmic color, light, sur-
face, and language, the nature and orientation of film’s material base,
and the myriad dimensions of cinematic time, space, memory, and
experience. This engagement with the ontological and phenomeno-
logical principles of cinema might best be characterized as a paracin-
ematic impulse. As noted in the introduction, this is an impulse to
grapple with the “cinematic” as a phenomenon independent of the
material properties of film, to locate answers to the question “What
is cinema?” in the conceptual rather than the material realm or in
creative practices that eschew the technological conventions of the
traditional cinematic apparatus.17 In Reed’s case, paint, installation,
and photography are mobilized in explorations of cinematic aesthetics
and effects.
In #72 and #90, both large-scale painted canvasses from 1975, Reed
lays bare the horizontal orientation of the celluloid strip and its struc-
tural logic grounded in both continuous and discrete coding.18 These
compositions are ones devoid of color and in which time is writ large
through gestural strokes that unveil themselves sequentially, almost
narratively.19 At certain regular intervals pauses appear that arrest what
reads as movement and, in the process, approximate film’s aspect ratio
through which a visual reference to its photographic base emerges.
This film strip orientation remains in Reed’s later works, including
#293 (1990–91) and #316 (1992), which replicate a cinematic light
and surface gloss as well as the distinctive Technicolor palette of early
two-strip technologies. The preternatural reds and vibrant shades
of turquoise juxtaposed to dramatic effect in Phantom of the Opera
(1927), for instance, are resurrected in Reed’s paintings in ways that
testify to the affective force of now outmoded practices of representa-
tion and their capacity to entrench themselves as cinematic—if not
cultural—history and memory.20
The surfaces of Reed’s paintings chronicle multiple ways of engag-
ing with film. But when these paintings become themselves contained
in one of Reed’s “ensembles,” Judy’s Bedroom or Scottie’s Bedroom,
both based on sets from Vertigo (1956), the terms of engagement are
radically transformed (see figures. 1.3 and 1.4).21 They are terms that
now involve philosophical complexities brought on by confrontations
between profilmic and museal space as well as collisions between mul-
tiple registers of cinematic and real time. By reifying and intervening
Figures 1.3 David Reed, Scottie’s Bedroom, 1994, installation view (courtesy of the
artist).

Figures 1.4 David Reed, Judy’s Bedroom, 1994, installation view (courtesy of the
artist and the Museum für Moderne Kunst Frankfurt am Main, Photo: Axel Schneider,
Frankfurt am Main).
 Cinephilic Pilgrimages 33

in Hitchcock’s profilmic sites, Reed challenges us to consider how

a cinephilic gesture, once assumed to be little more than the simple
documentation of love for a film, can extend into critical territories
marked by a series of spatial and temporal concerns. Judy’s Bedroom
and Scottie’s Bedroom are, in this way, extensions of Reed’s reflections
on his “media baptism” and one stage in a much longer and continu-
ally unfolding process of contemplating the nature of cinema.
As stages in a process of thinking through cinema, Judy’s Bedroom
and Scottie’s Bedroom’s origins can be located in actions and experi-
ences that took place well before the material components of these
ensembles took shape. They are locatable first in Reed’s consump-
tion of Vertigo, its lingering affective resonances and its capacity to
spark an analytical interest in the way we are affected by films. These
thoughts about cinema’s impact on us then turned to action and
prompted Reed’s cinephilic pilgrimage to San Francisco in order
to find the “real” sites, structures, and even seemingly insignificant
physical remnants captured by Hitchcock on celluloid.22 Once dis-
covered, these remnants were recaptured, rememorialized, this time
by Reed’s camera, resulting in the photographic documentation of
doorknobs, front porches, railings, and mailboxes. But as a way to
reclaim Vertigo, this form of intervention did not suffice. It failed
to properly satisfy the cinephilic desires that drove this pilgrimage
in the first place. Photographs alone did not do enough to reify
the fleeting cinematic moments sparked by Reed’s encounters with
the places that defined Hitchcock’s film. As such, he turned to a
different kind of representational practice, materially reconfiguring
spaces not locatable through pilgrimage, but only as cinematic illu-
sions on celluloid: the charged dreamscapes of Judy and Scottie’s
bedrooms, spaces originating as stage sets and cinematographically
transformed by Hitchcock as well as by what he directed to tran-
spire therein.
This ostensibly simple gesture to reify a key profilmic space—a
gesture oft performed by cinephiles to varying degrees of
­commitment—becomes, in Reed’s hands, one that prompts inspec-
tion of the spatial and temporal vicissitudes of cinema.23 Indeed, the
development of Judy’s Bedroom and Scottie’s Bedroom from their first
installation in the early 1990s to their more recent iterations, reveals
a growing commitment to visual verisimilitude and to a program of
conceptual refinements designed to foreground increasingly sophis-
ticated reflections on the very nature of these spaces. From the start,
Reed took great pains to replicate Vertigo’s props—furnishings, light
34 Hi t ch co ck an d C on t e m p o r ar y A r t

fixtures, bedspreads, and so on—as precisely as possible. Even the

green glow of Judy’s bedroom was the product of much dedicated
experimentation. It was first achieved with the application of theatri-
cal gels to floodlights and finally and, more convincingly, with neon
bulbs installed in the gallery ceiling. The placement of these bulbs
was also carefully measured in order to flood the bedroom with light
at the same angle and from the same direction as the neon Empire
Hotel sign did in Vertigo.24
But despite Reed’s faithfulness to the film, he imprints these
Hitchcockian spaces with an obvious and distinctly personal mark. He
does so by replacing the paintings that hung above Judy and Scottie’s
headboards with canvases of his own. For each room, Reed draws
from a set of three of his abstract paintings. He made his selections
based on the size of the work rather than the colors or forms that con-
stitute the image, preferring to foreground the gesture of inserting
his own painting rather than attracting attention to the specificities of
a particular canvas. After all, these bedroom ensembles are less about
Reed’s painting practice than what the act of inserting his painting
into a reified cinematic bedroom might accomplish. However, his
paintings are inserted into more than just this bedroom space. They
are also inserted into Vertigo itself.
Since the inception of these bedroom ensembles, Reed has found
increasingly convincing ways of grafting his paintings into the relevant
scenes in Vertigo and displaying these alterations as part of his installa-
tion. In the San Francisco version of Judy’s Bedroom, Reed inserted his
canvasses into a black-and-white framed film still from Vertigo. Later,
in Cologne, he invested in the production of an (expensive) edited
VHS version of the film and ran the sequence on a monitor posi-
tioned within the ensemble.25 The scene in Scottie’s bedroom proved
relatively easy to modify while the one in Judy’s presented more of
a challenge. In the latter, the painting casts a reflection in a mirror
and characters engage in conversation in front of it. Reed could not
include these details until he gained access to digital editing technolo-
gies, creating a DVD version of the film. While his curator found such
attention to detail obsessive, perhaps fittingly so given Hitchcock’s
own penchant for precision, these steps toward an ever greater verisi-
militude do betray the level of investment often seen in the actions of
committed cinephiles.
By inserting his own canvasses into Vertigo, Reed’s gesture literal-
izes a specific cinephilic desire: to place oneself in the film. In doing
so, he also performs a variant of what is, in Douglas Cunningham’s
 Cinephilic Pilgrimages 35

estimation, the quintessential act of the cinephilic pilgrim. That is,

upon realizing that the “real cannot live up to the [cinematic] image,”
Reed performs a creative act that redeems the “inadequacy of the
real.”26 As Cunningham explains, “In order to occupy and control
the space of possibility and meaning, then, the cinephilic pilgrim must
exercise his/her own creative agency; only then can the cinephile
redeem both the real and the image.”27 In fact, this is what Reed
leaves us with—a reality and image infused with and transformed by
his own cinephilic energy. It is also a reality and image redeemed by
the something extra they offer us: namely, a dialogue about cinema
that they invite us to enter into.
This dialogue is certainly worth considering, for its parameters
as set up by Reed are ones that encourage the traversal of mul-
tiple avenues of critical thought. These parameters also show us
how cinephilia, for instance, can be charged by epistemophilia,
understood here in its simplest terms as a desire for knowledge and
pleasure experienced from knowledge gained. In fact, just as Judy’s
Bedroom and Scottie’s Bedroom might be Reed’s gift of potential
affect to cinephiles driven by their desire to inhabit profilmic spaces,
Reed’s interventions into this cinephilic object are gifts to episte-
mophiles driven by a desire to confront analytically the nature of
the cinematic experience and to consider what is produced by the
carefully orchestrated collisions between different spaces, times,
and memories.
Critical engagements with Reed’s ensembles depend, in part, on
our somewhat tacit acknowledgment that Scottie’s Bedroom is not
Scottie’s bedroom, that Judy’s Bedroom, despite being bathed in a
rather convincing neon glow is not, after all, Judy’s bedroom. We
recognize that the lengths Reed went to in the service of verisi-
militude are instantly undermined not only by his creative interven-
tions, but also by the nature of museal space itself. For instance, we
immediately become aware that our desire to physically interact with
works, even ones such as this that invite a tactile response, will be
thwarted in an institutional space regulated by prohibitions against
touching.28 As such, we are left to negotiate between the impulses we
feel and the practices of looking and dictates of behaving that govern
museal and cinematic spaces, museal and cinematic objects. Do we
crawl into the beds, as some have been inspired to do, or carefully
walk between the “sculptural” objects that constitute the ensemble?
Are we to view Reed’s edition of Vertigo as we might another found-
footage video work on a monitor and consider the painting hanging
36 Hi t ch co ck an d C on t e m p o r ar y A r t

on the wall as we would any other in a gallery space? And how are
we to characterize the reconstitution of a space—the bedroom—that
is both deeply private but made eminently public, first by Hitchcock
through proliferation as a cinematic image, then by Reed as mate-
rial art object, and finally through its contextualization by a public
institution?
These collisions between spaces took on an added dimension in
Cologne. Here, Judy’s Bedroom was visible to the street, to pedestri-
ans, motorists, and tram passengers.29 During the day, it had the look
of a stage set, a distinctly public display designed to attract attention.
In the light of day, it was quite clearly an installation in a gallery. But
at night, according to Reed, when darkness erased the telltale signs
of the art institution, the bedroom, still lit, regained its intimacy and
domesticity. It began to feel more private and positioned its viewers—
outside in the dark—as voyeurs, as inhabitants of a very public space
with access to a world decidedly private. Given both the Hitchcockian
and cinematic engagements of the work, this result is particularly
appropriate. As such, under certain conditions, Judy’s Bedroom became
first and foremost a bedroom and the contextualizing force of the art
institution seemed diminished.
These spatial negotiations are further complicated by multiple
clashes between different moments in time, not to mention layers
and types of cinematic and museal time. On a basic level, these layers
involve the time of Vertigo’s registration on celluloid, the postwar
cultural time to which it belongs and the many subsequent instances
of its viewing. It also includes the various narrative registers of past
and present overlaid in an intricate dynamic that keeps Vertigo’s
audiences working to extract historical pasts from invented ones.
Moreover, the nature of Reed’s engagement with time departs in
marked ways from other artistic interventions into cinema that make
use of existing films. Whereas found-footage and other appropriation
practices tend to bring the past into the present, Reed inserts the
present into the past. However much his paintings seem to belong in
these Hitchcockian bedrooms or have been expertly sutured into the
material substrate and imagined worlds of Vertigo, they act as con-
duits to the “there and then,” conduits whose temporal axis points
back rather than one along which something from the past is carried
forward.
And yet, in the context of the gallery space, this temporal experi-
ment becomes even more elaborate as the here and now conflate in
unexpected ways with the there and then, as the ostensibly real collides
 Cinephilic Pilgrimages 37

with the illusory, and the physically material with the representational.
The inescapable presentness of our experience of this (or any) instal-
lation in a gallery is something that works against the pastness now
inscribed in the film and associated with our memories of it. In other
words, the presence of others around us, the sounds of their conver-
sations and footsteps, and our own conscious awareness of being in
space and time, interferes with attempts to feel as though we have
entered the film, to convince ourselves that Madeleine’s clothes hang
drying in the next room or that Judy will soon appear, hair upswept,
eyebrows tamed, wearing a pale grey suit. What we first recognize as
the conditions for an affective experience and the satisfaction of our
cinephilic desires through a return to Vertigo quickly turns into some-
thing else as the nature of the gallery space intrudes and wrenches us
out of our Hitchcockian reverie.
The cinema, conventionally coded by its pastness and an indexical
nature that registers both an image and an absence, also becomes, in
Reed’s ensembles, distinctly present, in both senses of the word. In
doing so, these ensembles signal another key (cultural) moment, the
time of their own creation in the mid-1990s, at the cusp of the emer-
gence of the digital, when film was thought to be losing its indexical-
ity. This also happens to be the moment during which curators like
Chris Dercon argued that we ought to turn to the contemporary art
gallery in order to witness the manufacture of cinema’s nascent future
forms.30 But museal spaces have their own histories and practices with
respect to time, characteristics that emerge when works of a com-
plex temporal nature are exhibited—histories and practices of arrest-
ing time, slowing time, evacuating time, or erasing the telltale marks
of time. And these spaces are ones in which time itself is continually
activated in several ways through the movement of works, images,
and people.
For another thing, the gallery renders static a space characterized
by movements, changes, and shifts. Scottie and Judy’s bedrooms are
containers for action, sites inhabited, used, and traversed by these
characters. Hitchcock’s camera travels, too, navigating these spaces
to reveal their contents and the signifying force of strategically placed
props. Shifts in lighting, in terms of color and brightness, as well as
in atmosphere through Hitchcock’s use of filters, continually rede-
fines the look of these rooms and thus their feel either as a “real”
space or as a dreamscape. In Reed’s reconstruction, the only thing
that moves is the image—the looped clip from Vertigo that plays on
a television monitor in the installation. But rather than introduce
38 Hi t ch co ck an d C on t e m p o r ar y A r t

a sense of dynamism, this inclusion only encourages comparison

between the vitality of the profilmic space and the static nature of
the objects that comprise its material reincarnation. This is especially
true in the context of an institution with a mandate to preserve, to
shield its objects from the effects of time. In such an institution,
Reed’s bedrooms start to acquire the aura of precious, mummified
relics.
Judy’s Bedroom and Scottie’s Bedroom can be seen as the culmina-
tion of a process originating with Reed’s media baptism, inspired by
cinephilia, and charged by a potent epistemophilia. As spaces that
complicate the registers and vagaries of time, they foster the condi-
tions necessary to spark searching questions about cinema and its
imbrications with the institutions of art and the practices of painting.
What happens when a key prop is reinvented as a piece of sculpture or
a stage set as an installation (or ensemble)? What happens when some-
thing we only ever accessed as an image is transformed into mate-
rial reality, when something from the past becomes both spatially and
temporally present, when objects from the present take us back into
the past, and when the spatial and temporal registers of painting and
film collude and collide?
These richly evocative ensembles are not the end point in Reed’s
process of thinking through and with cinema, or even in deliberating
on the legacy of Vertigo. In 2005, Reed created three digital C-prints,
titled Judy’s Bedroom, Scottie’s Bedroom, and The Kiss. Though small,
Judy’s Bedroom and Scottie’s Bedroom are, in essence, film stills that
approximate the aspect ratio of the film’s original theatrical release.
The Kiss, on the other hand, is a long horizontal strip composed of
four successive frames that recall Reed’s own strip-like canvases. In
each, Reed’s painting is conspicuously present, alerting us to the fact
that these stills are as much commemorations of Reed’s ensembles as
they are of Vertigo itself, as stages in an unending process of engage-
ment and memorialization. They speak to memory’s imprecision and
continual reconfiguration, our tendency to customize and personal-
ize shared cultural memory and its distillation and fragmentation into
other forms, expressed and circulated through other media.31 As such,
Reed’s C-prints make manifest Victor Burgin’s “sequence image,”
a primarily psychological object that hovers between sequence and
image, between film and photography and folds “the diachronic into
the synchronic.”32 Burgin explains that “the more the film is distanced
in memory, the more the binding effect of the narrative is loosened.”
With this, the sequences that constitute the film “break apart” and
 Cinephilic Pilgrimages 39

“the fragments go adrift and enter into new combinations, more or

less transitory, in the eddies of memory: memories of other films, and
memories of real events.”33 These C-prints thus exist as a logical next
step in the evolution of a practice deeply invested in spatial, temporal,
and mnemonic concerns.
And I suspect they are by no means Reed’s last. Judy’s Bedroom and
Scottie’s Bedroom are stages in a process, themselves subject to devel-
opment and reinvention. What started out as a cinephilically driven
pilgrimage to the San Francisco of Vertigo has produced creative inter-
ventions into the film that encourage reflection on cinematic (and
museal) space and time. As amendments are made to Reed’s bed-
rooms with each iteration of the work, they evolve into more pre-
cise testaments to the film and more nuanced engagements with film
itself. These ensembles may be Reed’s way of working through his
love of Vertigo and thoughts on the power of cinema, but they are
also gestures that translate into gifts to those who love and want to
know more about film. Indeed, there is much that these works have
the capacity to prompt us to consider about our own investments in
Hitchcock and the cinema more generally.
Douglas Gordon performs a similar gesture with Empire (1998),
generating the conditions necessary to stimulate in viewers both
affective and analytical pleasures. In Gordon’s case, however, his
cinephilic energies produce an object for the cinephilic pilgrimages
of others. Moreover, whereas Bernard and Reed’s practices are typi-
cally encountered within the space of the art gallery, Gordon uses
Glasgow’s urban environs to frame and contextualize his particular
act of reification. Empire consists of a neon green sign, five meters
in height, mounted on the side of a building with the letters of
the word “empire” reversed. Reflective plates attached to the wall
behind both sides of the sign function as correctives to this rever-
sal. Commissioned by Visual Art Projects (VAP) for their “Urban
Icons” series of “deliberately non-grandiose” public artworks,
Empire was initially revealed in Brunswick Lane between Glasgow’s
Trongate and Merchant City in January of 1998. Gordon selected
this site for what he felt was its distinctly “cinematic atmosphere,”
one enhanced by a suspended streetlamp that swung in the wind.
He also wanted his work to enter into a dialogue with the space
around it, including two nearby pubs, one of which repaired its own
retro neon sign and promised to screen Vertigo for its customers.34
Empire was then later moved to its current location, four blocks
over on Tontine Lane.
40 Hi t ch co ck an d C on t e m p o r ar y A r t

Gordon’s installation refers to the “Hotel Empire” sign in Vertigo.

It reproduces that same green glow that Hitchcock uses to engulf
Judy, to bestow on her a ghostlike quality. This allusion to some-
thing there in appearance and yet not materially tangible, finds an
equivalent in Empire’s engagement with the cinema itself through its
reversed lettering and mirroring effects. As Gordon explains, “I liked
the fact that I could make an artwork that would not look like an
artwork. I could make an object which was a copy of something that
doesn’t actually exist except in fiction, and the only way you can read
it properly is to look in a mirror which is a place that does not really
exist either.”35 In this way, Empire also enacts the processes of mirror-
ing, copying, reversing, and doubling so prevalent in Vertigo, through
significant thematic ways involving Judy/Madeleine or through sub-
tler allusions like the frequent use of mirrors or even the Empire’s own
signage in the film that reads “Hotel Empire” in neon and “Empire
Hotel” on its awning.
Gordon’s intervention into the cinematic reality of Vertigo does
more than point to themes in the film or, for that matter, assure
passersby that what they are looking at is art and not just another
commercial sign. His modifications, like Reed’s, signal the limits
of practices seeking to reify elements of the profilmic world. To
return to Gordon’s own explanation, his Empire sign comes closest
to replicating its referent as a two-dimensional image in the reflec-
tive surface of the mirror. As such, he reminds us of the very essence
of Vertigo as a work of the cinema, as a world that exists only in the
form of a representation on a screen. He also contends with a key
theme of the film, namely, the desire to make “real” that which is
fiction, to render tangible that which is an imaginary ideal. And yet,
Empire’s capacity to spark appreciation for the ontological prob-
lematics of film is tempered by the fact that it is encountered in
the world. It cannot evade the contextualizing force of its setting
in a Glaswegian alleyway: buildings of various architectural styles,
the appurtenances of urban infrastructure, the sounds of city life,
and the paraphernalia of a dense image culture. But as much as
we are guided to think about Empire through the cinema and that
which surrounds it, we are also, as in Bernard’s work, prompted
to consider how the cinema mediates our experience of place. In
Empire, this is accomplished in a rather direct way, particularly at
night, when it offers us the possibility of an immersive experience
by casting the space around it in a green glow, a point to which I
will return in just a moment.
 Cinephilic Pilgrimages 41

Certainly, there is something a little peculiar about coming across

Vertigo in Glasgow, especially given how strongly we associate the
film with San Francisco. For many, this experience of a Hitchcockian
moment will seem sheer happenstance. Some may feel delighted
while others with little or no knowledge of Vertigo might see it as
scarcely more than a curiosity. Still others will see an encounter with
Gordon’s Empire as an end in itself: the art pilgrim and the cine-
philic pilgrim, for example. Tontine Lane beckons art lovers and
fans of Douglas Gordon’s oeuvre. Those interested in his work trek
to its location as one would to a museum to visit a favorite piece.
After all, Gordon is one of Scotland’s most prominent contemporary
artists, a status secured by his Turner Prize win in 1996 and selec-
tion as Britain’s representative for the 1997 Venice Biennale. As a
result, Empire has become a crucial stop on Glasgow’s Public Art
tour trail as mapped out by “Community Walk,” a program dedi-
cated to creating themed walking tours of the city.36 For cinephilic
pilgrims, Empire fosters a connection to Vertigo by evoking a visually
distinctive and narratively important moment in the film. It is both
an object to be contemplated and, in the dark, a deeply affective
immersive installation. It can trigger our memories of the film and
of having watched it. Perhaps, it reminds us of Hitchcock’s asso-
ciation of green light with ghosts, one fixed during his own forma-
tive spectatorial experiences of the theater.37 Empire also supplies
answers to the types of questions cinephiles might ask: What would
it feel like to be engulfed by the eerie glow of a green neon light,
to be convinced, if only for an instant, that one had stepped into a
Hitchcockian dreamscape? What would it feel like to witness fig-
ures transform into apparitions as they pass through the illuminated
space under the sign?
To reiterate, Empire is less the product of a cinephilic pilgrimage—
though Gordon is, to be sure, a cinephile—than it is an object for
the cinephilic pilgrim.38 It entices us by promising an experience of
Vertigo’s profilmic space within Glasgow’s public space. This setting,
as much as it may recall the alleyways navigated by Scottie in his pur-
suit of Madeleine, remains at a geographical, cultural, and historical
remove from San Francisco. It is a remove that exposes a series of
disparities that, in turn, factor into Empire in a number of signifi-
cant ways. Empire’s setting amounts to a “reality” that impresses itself
on the work, forming what Gordon calls the “conspiracy of circum-
stances” that, for him “make or break” it.39 His choice of words here
suggests a lack of control over what accrues around his installation.
42 Hi t ch co ck an d C on t e m p o r ar y A r t

This is certainly true to an extent. Empire draws its resonances from

what is not only immediately and architecturally present, but also cul-
turally and historically inscribed in the space and the collective and
personal memories of those who encounter it. However, through a
simple amendment, Gordon effectively manages that which enters
into Empire’s constellation of meaning.
This amendment involves dropping the word “hotel” from the
sign as it exists in Vertigo. With “hotel” missing as an anchor, teth-
ering it to a very specific kind of place, other associations are free
to emerge and circulate. For instance, “Empire” was once a popular
name for theaters in the United Kingdom and could possibly recall
the type of signage advertising movie palaces of former eras.40 Those
first and foremost on an art pilgrimage may see it as a continuation
of Gordon’s interest in Andy Warhol, a sculptural homage to the
American artist’s famed 1964 structural film of the same name and
perhaps a complement to Gordon’s earlier 1997 film Bootleg Empire,
for which he surreptitiously recorded a screening of Warhol’s work.
Still others see Glasgow’s own history as the “Second City of the
British Empire” as the key determining factor in Empire’s meaning.
In fact, the city’s nineteenth-century history of trade and shipbuilding
industry and the strong links still retained by the Merchant City area
to an imperial past have led some commentators to overlook Empire’s
connection to Vertigo entirely. For them, Gordon’s work calls into
question official histories and challenges its viewers to reflect on the
legacy of imperialism.41
Gordon’s deceptively simply gesture toward Vertigo renders his
work prone to a rich “conspiracy of circumstances.” It opens Empire
up to a myriad of conceptual engagements and initiates, in the pro-
cess, what we may well describe as an ever-widening Bassian spiral of
associations. But, while a broad array of meanings spiral outward from
the work, they also return to it and to Hitchcock’s film. Armed with
thoughts about empire in the historical-political sense, we can return
to Vertigo and its own thematic concerns with this topic. Imperialisms
of a different kind may be evoked, like those activated by Bernard,
including thoughts about Manifest Destiny, westward expansion, and
the Spanish colonial presence in the Americas.42 Just as the past con-
tinually intrudes into the lives of Vertigo’s characters so, too, does
Gordon make it possible for the past to return in our encounters with
his work. The possibility of such returns and others are the result of
Gordon’s sophisticated orchestrations, his creative interventions into
cinema, place, and history.
 Cinephilic Pilgrimages 43

In the end, Bernard, Reed, and Gordon’s works are not just con-
tributions to the realms and discourses of art. They are also very real
and substantive contributions to our understanding of Hitchcock and
film more generally. They stand as testaments to the capacity for art to
enrich, complicate, and offer new angles from which to approach the
cinema. And if we are willing to follow Bernard, Reed, and Gordon’s
cinephilic journeys, we are likely to be rewarded with affective and
analytical pleasures.
 2

Activating Memories and

Museums through the
Expanded Essay Film

T o mark cinema’s centenary, Harun Farocki created Workers

Leaving the Factory (1996). It begins with the eponymous and now
iconic Lumière footage accompanied by the following words, spo-
ken unhurriedly and matter-of-factly: “The first film ever brought to
the screen is referred to under the title: Workers Leaving the Factory.
It shows men and women employed by the Lumière company in
Lyon, leaving the factory through two exits and the film image to the
right and left. These images were supposed, above all, to show that
it is possible to render movement in images.”1 Once the Lumières’
footage runs its course, a still extracted from near the start of the
film occupies the screen, showing the first mass of (mostly female)
workers exiting the large gateway on the right and a woman car-
rying a young child emerging through the single door on the left.
The image remains frozen as the narrator continues: “The remaining
impression from this first screening is of people hurrying away, as
if impelled by an invisible force. No one remains behind.” A pause
follows, permitting the viewer to reflect on this commentary aimed
to focus our thoughts on movement while consuming a moving
image halted. Next, the camera tracks another stream of workers
moving at a rapid pace through an industrial space of a much later
era. Shouts and bursts of speech emanate from the diegesis, under-
scoring the commotion we see. Once again, the narrator interjects:
“1975 in Emden. The Volkswagen factory. The workers are running
as if something were drawing them away.” And so the analysis con-
tinues, pairing footage and explanations that center on the produc-
tion, circulation, and mediations of “workers leaving the factory.”
Farocki’s ­36-minute essay film guides us through a century of filmed
46 Hi t ch co ck an d C on t e m p o r ar y A r t

versions of this trope, extracted from narrative fiction, documentary,

newsreel, surveillance, and promotional industrial video. The foot-
age alternates between black and white and color, silent and sound,
American and European.
As Farocki explains, this film is about how “the visible move-
ment of people [can stand] in for the absent and invisible move-
ment of goods, money and ideas.”2 But it is also about a much
broader history of labor and the cinema and how various technolo-
gies from the imagistic to the industrial define, regulate, and medi-
ate subjectivities or, more specifically, individuals as workers. Here,
image and narration work in tandem in a number of ways, generat-
ing moments of cohesion, irony, pathos, and, even, impossibility.
Some images are contextualized through their historical situation
in broader political events. Some are left to speak for themselves.
Some images are stilled and dissected, others repeated to empha-
size a point. The result is a deeply analytical work and one that has
prompted its labeling as an essay film, despite Farocki’s unease about
such a designation.3 It certainly fits the bill, as we shall soon see
when we consider some of the hallmarks of the form. However, this
single screen version is not the only incarnation of Workers Leaving
the Factory. In 2006, Farocki reimagined it as Workers Leaving the
Factory in Eleven Decades, a multimonitor installation without any
of the original narration.
Workers Leaving the Factory in Eleven Decades uses 12 small televi-
sion monitors positioned in a row on the gallery floor to showcase 12
looped sequences of footage of workers leaving factories. Some are
familiar from the original single screen version while others are new.
Headphones permit visitors to listen to the diegetic soundtrack (in
cases where there is one). This reiteration of the work provides a fruit-
ful way into debates about whether or not essay films are still essay
films—and capable of the many storied and celebrated feats of essay
films—when retooled as installations and without narration. Following
Nora Alter’s lead, I argue that indeed they are. I also want to sug-
gest that many essay film installations would benefit from a new label:
the expanded essay film. This label is especially suitable for describ-
ing Hitchcockian artworks for it alludes to two traditions—essay films
and expanded cinema—that directly inform these practices. Indeed,
this label carries with it the historical aims of these traditions: to offer
insight, analysis, and/or personal reflection on a subject in the case of
the essay film and to grapple with the nature of cinema through its
multiple and variegated expressions in the case of expanded cinema.
 Ac ti v at i n g Me m or i e s an d M u s eu m s 47

These two aims converge in many of the Hitchcock-inspired works

considered here and throughout this study.
In what follows, I will briefly sketch out the basic features that con-
stitute both essay films and expanded cinema. I do so to pave the way
for a deliberation on how the marriage of these two ­already-hybridized
forms might produce a useful analytical framework for addressing
the critical potential of expanded essay films. Christoph Girardet
and Matthias Müller’s The Phoenix Tapes (1999) will then serve as
my primary case study. I want to assess the specific contributions its
uniquely “expanded” nature makes to its otherwise essayistic engage-
ment with Hitchcock, film and other media, museological space and
memory, and the museal nature of cinema itself. I also want to spend
some time with the critical literature on this work, for it demonstrates
rather forcefully how a work clearly driven by cinephilia and epistemo-
philia can intervene in film discourses in highly useful and meaningful
ways.
The essay film is often explained through recourse to the literary
essay and the writings of Montaigne, Lukacs, Adorno, and Barthes
among others. These authors supply the essay with its roots and many
of its key characteristics. For them it is subjective, reflective, medita-
tive, probing, and provisional. They also highlight its failure to be cir-
cumscribed by strict definition. As such, commentators on both filmic
and literary essays tend toward loose portraits of their object of study,
often celebrating its fluidity. Several scholars, like Alter, avoid refer-
ring to the essay film as a genre because of the high degree of varia-
tion among its expressions.4 While recognizing its protean nature,
recent work on the essay film has identified some common tenden-
cies. Open, fluid, experimental, transgressive, analytical, argumenta-
tive, searching, and personal have all been used as descriptors. For
Laura Rascaroli, both literary and filmic essays are characterized by
reflexivity and subjectivity.5 Put another way by Timothy Corrigan,
essay films provide a point of “encounter between the self and the
public domain, an encounter that measures the limits and possibilities
of each as a conceptual activity.”6 From this, we can derive a set of
secondary tendencies of the form that lean toward the autobiographi-
cal and nonfictional, but in ways that often simultaneously challenge
these designations as they appeal to the formal strategies that define
them. For instance, essay films may establish a strong authorial pres-
ence only to erode the authority of the voice or participate in the
documentary tradition only to undermine the veracity of the “facts”
it presents. For now, I want to foreground three characteristics of
48 Hi t ch co ck an d C on t e m p o r ar y A r t

the essay film that are useful for articulating the significance of its
expanded forms, namely, its subjectivity, interstitial nature, and capac-
ity for critical analysis.
The “author” or “filmmaker” is an important figure in all accounts
of the essay film. And how the spectator engages with the personal,
subjective nature of the cinematic statements made by this figure
remains an important point of departure for making sense of this
form. Part of the renewed interest in essay films in recent years may
have something to do with the increase in the production of essay
films in various forms and, more generally, an increase in the personal
bent of contemporary gallery-based moving-image works. According
to Catherine Fowler, many artists of “gallery films” have modified
if not abandoned their retrospective approach for an introspective
one, especially in terms of their engagements with cinema.7 Since the
1990s, they have shifted away from replaying, reenacting, or remaking
original footage in a distanced and sometimes affectless way. While
these strategies certainly persist in current art practice, the tendency
now, Fowler argues, involves artists communicating their own personal
relationship and response to the cinema, their love for it or enchant-
ment with it, and in a way that activates and implicates the spectator
more directly in the production of the work. Rascaroli sees this kind
of interpellation as one of the consequences of the rhetorical structure
of essays films themselves, a structure that is predicated on “open-
ness” and which freely invites individual embodied spectators—as
opposed to an “anonymous, collective audience”—into “a dialogical
relationship with the enunciator, to become active, intellectually and
emotionally, and interact with the text.”8 This is precisely what Chris
Marker accomplishes in the segment on Vertigo (1958) in Sans Soleil
(1983), suggesting that Fowler’s contemporary forms of introspec-
tion have antecedents in other earlier forms too. Sans Soleil appeals
to memory—to the “impossible” and “insane” memory of Vertigo, as
Marker calls it—and merges this with his personal memory of pilgrim-
age through the San Francisco of Vertigo, drawing his viewer into a
captivating account of a cinematically inspired discovery of space and
place.9
This personal investment and personal exchange between author
and individual spectator does not preclude an engagement with
much broader histories or social and political forces. The emergence
of an introspective approach to the past has merely altered the ways
in which histories are excavated and told. It has not diminished
their prevalence in essay films. Quoting Howard Zinn, Paul Arthur
 Ac ti v at i n g Me m or i e s an d M u s eu m s 49

suggests that, in essay films, history (like the cinema in Fowler’s esti-
mation) has become a “private enterprise,” a broader public force
experienced, understood, and ultimately shaped by the person who
encounters it, often in highly specific and individualized ways.10 That
history remains alive and well in the essay film is confirmed by what
Arthur describes as its “near axiomatic” reliance on found footage, a
reliance that attests to a continued appetite for critical engagement
with how our collective pasts are stored, circulated, mediated, con-
sumed, and remembered.11 I would argue that essay films do impor-
tant historiographical work in this regard. They permit us to question
how and through what means history is produced, how cultural
memories are shaped and disseminated. Again, Sans Soleil’s Vertigo
sequence provides a useful example for the way in which it addresses
these very concerns. Here, we find a montage that juxtaposes past and
present, reality (however heavily mediated here) and fiction through
a sequence of images that includes footage of San Francisco shot
for Sans Soleil and frames from Vertigo that have the appearance, in
this context, of old photographs. Marker oscillates between the two
registers of time, media, and representation, charting spaces as they
appeared in Vertigo and as they appear now (or, rather in the early
1980s), populated by people other than Scottie and Madeleine and
sometimes missing the landmarks that charged Hitchcock’s scenes.
The narrator invokes history and memory at every turn, speaking
about the sites into which history and memory are encoded and
through which they are generated: the Museum at the Legion of
Honor, the cemetery at Mission Dolores, the small Victorian hotel
where Madeleine disappeared, and the giant sequoia, which contains
within its own history that of many others.
This capacity to do historiography and, more broadly, to engage
critically with a wide range of topics is something attributed to the
essay and, as some recent commentators have shown, to the essay film
as well. And it returns us to the discussion in the introduction about
the capacity for art to think and to be thought through in productive
ways. Jean Luc Godard’s views on cinema as having this capacity pro-
vide a touchstone in many accounts of the form and his Histoire(s) du
Cinéma (1988–98) remains the most prevalent example. For Daniel
Morgan, this work should be understood as the culmination of a
broader series of essays that begins with Soigne ta Droite (1987) and
includes Nouvelle Vague (1990) and Allemagne 90 neuf zéro (1991),
a series closely aligned with Montaigne’s conception of the essay as
“always provisional.”12 In this series of films, Godard continually
50 Hi t ch co ck an d C on t e m p o r ar y A r t

returns to and reworks a related set of concerns around “the interrela-

tion of history and the history of cinema,” in effect developing and
fine-tuning his arguments about this subject.13 Histoire(s) du Cinéma
does so by mobilizing found footage, satisfying Arthur’s hallmark for
the essay film. However, Godard’s strategy here has prompted crit-
ics like Jacques Rancière to charge him with unhinging this footage
from its own history, and thus failing to make good on his claim to
critically reflect on this interrelation of histories.14 In other words,
Godard fails to offer the kind of insight or analysis that such an essay
film promises. Although many critics accept Rancière’s claims here,
Morgan astutely shows us that this charge, based on his assessment
of section 4A, “Introduction to the Method of Alfred Hitchcock,”
misses the mark. Specifically, he shows us how Rancière’s charge of
decontextualization (and thus a “dangerous kind aesthetic formal-
ism”) does not hold up.15 As Morgan argues, the filmic contexts of
the clips do matter in Godard’s film and so, too, do the details. In
fact, the contexts are activated through those details, those images
Rancière thinks we remember in place of the film’s narrative. Morgan
shows that these images like the cigarette lighter, the glass of milk are
not random, but “narratively charged moments,” ones that enter into
a dialectic—if not a debate—with Godard’s voice over.16 They are
mobilized to several ends: to situate Godard’s practice in relation to
Hitchcock’s and to ultimately refute Hitchcock’s own claims about
narrative and absorption and, specifically, his belief in the public’s sup-
posed “unawareness of montage.” As Morgan explains,

if Hitchcock argues that the public is drawn into the stories being told,
absorbed into the narratives, Godard has been saying all along that what
we remember about his films is precisely not their narrative . . . but rather
the privileged moments, the instances of cinematic detail. Through this
gesture, Godard deploys a cinephilic approach that emphasizes details,
a move designed to undermine the narrative omnipotence Hitchcock
marks as his ambition.17

In the end, it is a gesture that challenges the source of Hitchcock’s

power, “a calculated attack on a specific target, a way of undoing the
spell or thrall of the original films.”18 What Godard offers here is a
filmically articulated argument that reveals the essay film’s potential to
“enact and disperse the critical act of thinking cinematically.”19
Part of this thinking through cinema or thinking cinematically
is accomplished by blending conventions scavenged from different
cinematic traditions and genres, bringing disparate practices into
 Ac ti v at i n g Me m or i e s an d M u s eu m s 51

collision to analyze the significance of formal or narrative gestures.

The resulting hybridity is, in its own right, a key feature of the essay
film and something responsible for its susceptibility to intermedial
expression. But the essay film is not just a “meeting ground for docu-
mentary, avant-garde and art film impulses” to name a few of the tra-
ditions it colonizes.20 It also provides a space for encounter between
“fact and fiction” and “the real and the artificial,” thus functioning
as an interrogative practice, one “consciously engaged in the activity
of representation itself.”21 While the essay film’s interstitial nature
has made it difficult for theorists to pin down, it is also the source of
its productive experimentation and ability to tap into a wide range
of practices and genres. For Alter, this contributes to the essay film’s
translatability into other media, especially, installation. What is more,
these translations of the form in no way diminish its critical, analytical
function; instead, we simply have to acknowledge how it functions
differently in these circumstances, how its theoretical configura-
tions may be spatialized, for example, instead of adhering to a linear
logic.22
When the essay film loses its linearity and appears instead as an
installation, it becomes an expanded essay film. There is some debate
about whether or not this is even possible, given what is lost in transla-
tion, namely, an authorial perspective shared through narration. The
precise nature of such an authorial presence has generated debate with
adherents of literary definitions, like Philip Lopate, requiring spoken
or written words to qualify a film as essayistic and those more attuned
to the grammar of film, like Rascaroli, Arthur, and Corrigan point-
ing to the mass of creative decisions about lighting, editing, framing,
camera movement, and soundtrack that define the mark of an author/
director. For them, it is less a question of what is lost than what is
transformed or locatable elsewhere. I would add that it is also a ques-
tion of what can be gained when essay films adopt some of the aims
and features of expanded cinema.
Like the essay film, “expanded cinema” is a highly inclusive term,
“more a loosely-knit set of practices than a coherent movement.”23
It is a term that first emerged in the mid-1960s and has since been
applied to a range of different practices, gestures, and events, from
“the vividly spectacular to the starkly materialist.”24 As Michael
O’Pray suggests, at its most basic level, “expanded” designates prac-
tices “which utilize some other element besides a single screen.”25
These elements may involve anything from additional screens to the
inclusion of other media and objects, the creation of whole environ-
ments or the enactment of performative gestures, and the inclusion
52 Hi t ch co ck an d C on t e m p o r ar y A r t

of live or recorded events. In some instances, spectators may be

expected to maintain an analytic distance while in others relinquish
themselves to the work, welcoming the haptic and embodied experi-
ences made possible through immersion.26 Consider the difference
between Lis Rhodes’s Light Music (1975), an all-enveloping light
and sound work, and Valie Export’s iconic work of expanded cin-
ema—Tapp und Tast Kino (Touch Cinema) (1968) for which she
invited spectators on the street to touch but not see her breasts
through a box worn over her chest with a curtained front. Certain
strands within the expanded cinema tradition share links with other
movements both in film (e.g., structural-materialist) and art (e.g.,
Conceptualism).27 Moreover, practitioners of expanded cinema can
also be divided into those in pursuit of the expansion of conscious-
ness like Gene Youngblood and those with a more analytical bent,
like Birgit Hein or Valie Export, for whom expanded cinema offers
“an analysis carried out in order to discover and realize new forms
of communication, the deconstruction of a dominant reality.”28 I
appeal to this latter tradition, for it represents the approach most
often encountered in essay films more broadly and the expanded
essay films that focus their attention on the subject of Hitchcockian
cinema. It is a tradition invested in the cinema as an object of study,
one to be dissected, reformulated, and reimagined through a limit-
less array of creative gestures that may involve cinematic technolo-
gies, but are certainly not limited to them. Expanded cinema may
find its expressions through technologies outside the cinema or
through the individual material components that constitute the cin-
ema as in the case of its close cousin, paracinema. Indeed, it is within
the nexus of expanded cinema and paracinema that we might find
an enlarged conception of what cinema can be in forms outside the
conventionally cinematic and thus useful ways to think about the
types of expansions to which the essay film has been subject.
Whereas Farocki translated his single screen narrated essay into an
expanded form in a way that opened up a further set of questions
about cinema, the cinematic, time, and space, Christoph Girardet and
Matthias Müller’s The Phoenix Tapes enacted the reverse trajectory,
beginning life as an installation, later to be repackaged as a linear essay
film. Such retooling tends to provoke criticism about what is lost in
this process, which, in the case of The Phoenix Tapes, requires us to
acknowledge what was initially gained by its expanded nature. This
kind of trajectory also provides us with an opportunity to consider
the “expansive” thinking that led to its creation and commission for
 Ac ti v at i n g Me m or i e s an d M u s eu m s 53

a show explicitly focused on Hitchcock and Hitchcockian cinema, its

relationship to the gallery space for which it was designed, and the
processes of musealization, more generally.
The Phoenix Tapes marked the start of the collaboration between
Christoph Girardet and Matthias Müller. Prior to embarking on this
joint venture, Girardet’s practice centered on video and video instal-
lation. In 1997, he devised Exit, a large-scale, immersive piece involv-
ing multiple projectors casting images of motifs recognizable from
films such as Veit Harlan’s The Golden City (1942) and Fritz Lang’s
Metropolis (1927). Though very much in the tradition of expanded
cinema, this work’s incorporation of found footage aligns it with
Müller’s practice. Müller, who took film analyses courses on Hitchcock
while at school, has been working with classical Hollywood cinema for
quite some time.29 Home Stories (1990) is perhaps one of his best-
known works and one that prefigures The Phoenix Tapes in several
ways. To create this piece, Müller recorded television broadcasts of
Hollywood films from the 1950s and 1960s. From this grainy foot-
age, he extracted sequences that showcased the quotidian but highly
charged gestures of its female stars, actions like opening doors to
darkened rooms and turning on and off lamps. As these brief descrip-
tions suggest, Girardet and Müller are very much invested in ques-
tions raised by the prevalence and circulation of Hollywood images.
Such images are often highly charged, both by their original narrative
context and by the appropriative practices that have carried them for-
ward into new configurations and new sites of consumption. Girardet
and Müller participate in this economy, reinforcing the significance of
iconic cinematic moments. But whereas other artists see Hollywood
as a resource of raw material to be mined in the service of their own
ends, Girardet and Müller view their interventions as more collabora-
tive than exploitative. And when it comes to Hitchcock, they claim
that their collaboration has resulted in an increase in their “appre-
ciation of and respect for the vitality, complexity, and abundance of
Hitchcock’s work.”30
Girardet and Müller’s The Phoenix Tapes was commissioned by
the Museum of Modern Art Oxford (now Modern Art Oxford)
for their exhibition Notorious: Hitchcock and Contemporary Art in
1999, an exhibition showcasing artworks produced since the 1970s
that respond, in some way, to either Hitchcock, the individual, or his
films.31 The Phoenix Tapes was the only commissioned work in the
exhibition and, as such, Girardet and Müller were able to incorporate
the structure and layout of the gallery in the design of their installation
54 Hi t ch co ck an d C on t e m p o r ar y A r t

in ways other artists could not. They did so by creating a work involv-
ing one single screen projection and five monitors positioned in dif-
ferent sites in the show. Each monitor looped a short film comprised
of edited footage extracted from VHS copies of 40 Hitchcock films.
Each of these short films addressed a particular subject or issue central
to Hitchcock’s filmmaking practice. Rutland is concerned with estab-
lishing and location shots; Burden of Proof focuses on highly charged
and narratively significant props; Derailed replays the motif of the
train and addresses the psychological unhinging of particular char-
acters; Why Don’t You Love Me? is all about mothers; and Bedroom
focuses on the kinds of violence endured by Hitchcock’s female char-
acters. Necrologue, the single screen projection, offers us a nearly still
close-up of Ingrid Bergman’s face from Under Capricorn (1949) at
the moment a tear falls down her cheek.
The “Phoenix” of the title is Phoenix, Arizona, the city from
which Psycho’s (1960) Marion Crane hails, while “tapes” describes
the medium from which Girardet and Müller gathered their clips and
through which we experience film in this instance. It also speaks to
archival processes, to keeping records. These tapes are evidentiary,
proofs for a series of arguments about the significance of the construc-
tion of mothers in Hitchcock’s films or the function of key props, for
example. As a whole, these tapes isolate and assess five major tenden-
cies and tropes that make a Hitchcock film a Hitchcock film. They
offer sophisticated analyses of how these tendencies and tropes func-
tion in Hitchcock’s oeuvre and, in the process, offer certain insights
into Hitchcock and cinema more generally. Although we will consider
the nature of the insights gleaned from The Phoenix Tapes’ expanded
version in just a moment, it is worth noting the tendency of reviews
of its single screen formation to itemize some of these as well. For
instance, for Christa Blüminger, The Phoenix Tapes “makes visible the
style of an author” and operates as “a counterpart to research done
in film theory in the last decade.”32 For Rembert Hüser, the critical
value of this work extends beyond an understanding of Hitchcock
to one of the broader “shifting parameters of filmmaking in the late
1990s.”33 He elaborates that it is

about how our knowledge about film is organized. How we are trained
to watch films. It is as much about the books that made the films, about
the way in which evidence is constructed, as it is about feelings or par-
ticular sensitivities that we can find in films. Feelings and theory are
closely related. Phoenix Tapes is about the programming of images and
how this activates the cultural archive and sets it in motion.34
 Ac ti v at i n g Me m or i e s an d M u s eu m s 55

Federico Windhausen’s analysis of The Phoenix Tapes even included an

assessment of certain responses to the analytical capacities of the work.
In his reading of its early reception, he outlines the praise bestowed
on the work for presenting what are ostensibly arguments about
Hitchcock’s core obsessions and foregrounding what is central to his
filmmaking practice.35 Such praise, however, is often followed by the
criticism that the theoretical work accomplished by The Phoenix Tapes
is not new and can be found in the many already published analyses of
Hitchcock’s films. These critics hold that Girardet and Müller merely
affirm or demonstrate cinematically what has already been discovered
by Hitchcock scholars and articulated in print.36 But what these crit-
ics miss, as Windhausen rightly points out, are the “various ways in
which the video conveys psychoanalytically-informed ideas” and the
way in which video—as opposed to theoretical or critical writing—
employs its own grammar and modes of formal enunciation in the
hands of Girardet and Müller.37 Indeed, Windhausen makes a strong
and articulate case for the many and varied engagements produced
by The Phoenix Tapes because of its status as video and because of the
particular uses and aesthetic operations to which Girardet and Müller
subject Hitchcock’s films.
To elaborate further, Windhausen shows how Girardet and
Müller’s specific use of montage offers insight into Hitchcock’s cin-
ema. For instance, their evocation of the visual tropes and stylistic
allusions central to modernist cinema focuses our attention on how
Hitchcock himself takes on the strategies and representational con-
ventions central to the work of many modernist filmmakers.38 The
Phoenix Tapes also does much to encourage us to think about narra-
tive itself in Hitchcockian and broader terms too, especially through
Rutland, which is “designed to actively engage those mnemonic pro-
cesses that help the viewer make sense of experimental structures.”39
Windhausen continues, “as it demonstrates the ways in which the
posing and postponing of questions and answers can occur visually,
without dialogue, in Hitchcock’s films, Müller and Girardet’s selec-
tion of clips evokes experiences of anticipation and sometimes frustra-
tion, which are common to both the director’s thrillers and narrative
cinema in general.”40
However, some of the abilities Windhausen ascribes to The Phoenix
Tapes, and Rutland in particular as the focus of his analysis, are contin-
gent on Rutland being encountered first in the single screen/monitor
version of the work. This doesn’t necessarily happen in the multiroom
installed version, nor even in the single screen version depending on
the point at which the gallery visitor comes upon the work. This is
56 Hi t ch co ck an d C on t e m p o r ar y A r t

certainly not a problem. Girardet and Müller are happy to package The
Phoenix Tapes in a variety of ways: as a 45-minute single screen film,
installed as originally planned for the Museum of Modern Art Oxford
show or in other ways as the space required, or as individual short
“films.”41 As Müller explained to Scott MacDonald in an interview, he
has “no problem taking a part out of the installation and screening it
separately in new constellations or other work nowadays.”42 Treating
The Phoenix Tapes in what is its most popular form as a single screen
film certainly permits key features to come to the fore. For instance,
Windhausen identifies an arc-like trajectory that first establishes the
importance of cinematic concerns to do with narrative and space in
Rutland, second offers a climax in Derailed and Why Don’t You Love
Me?, and third concludes with an epilogue or, as the artists title it, a
Necrologue.43 Approaching The Phoenix Tapes in this way can produce
an astute analysis of the many conceptual feats it accomplishes as a
more conventional essay film. However, I would now like to consider
its expanded form to see what else Girardet and Müller’s installation
might reveal.
When first tasked with creating a piece for Notorious: Alfred
Hitchcock and Contemporary Art, Girardet and Müller envisioned an
installation that could exist as a series of autonomous segments. They
also gave much thought to how these segments would function in
the context of the exhibition and, especially, how they would relate
to other, proximal works.44 Their concern was with how Rutland,
Burden of Proof, Bedroom, Derailed, and Why Don’t You Love Me?
as individual films could enter into dialogue with the works around
them. Rutland shared a space—and a concern with space—with
David Reed’s Scottie’s Bedroom (1994). In Rutland, Girardet and
Müller contemplate the geographies of Hitchcock’s films, exterior
and interior, rural and urban, real and invented, and physical and
psychical. We see expanses of rural landscape that engulf individuals
and reduce them to seemingly insignificant specks. These vast spaces
are unnervingly silent and offer a stark contrast to the cavernous inte-
riors that produce resounding echoes from even the most cautiously
placed steps. Some of these interiors are heavily ornamented spaces
that threaten to subsume the human body into their intricate design
scheme. We see deserted streets, alleyways, and staircases as sites that
anticipate action, from frantic pursuits to the deliberately slow strides
of someone hoping not to raise suspicion. We see on-location shots
that make the most of architectural details and the random traces of
everyday life as well as painted backdrops that unabashedly announce
 Ac ti v at i n g Me m or i e s an d M u s eu m s 57

Figure 2.1 Christoph Girardet and Matthias Müller, The Phoenix Tapes, 1999, film
still from Rutland (courtesy of the artists).

their own cinematic artifice. We see some spaces saturated with light
and others shrouded in darkness. Quite crucially, we also bear witness
to how changes in lighting from diegetic sources (i.e., a lamp turned
on or off, the glow of a cigarette piercing the dark, etc.) transform
what we see. Rutland catalogs these spaces and transformations,
repeating certain sequences that feature the farmlands of North by
Northwest and the impenetrable darkness of Lars Thorwald’s apart-
ment in Rear Window (see figure 2.1). Through the multiple juxta-
positions that such repetitions enable and through the separation of
scenes by black leader, we come to appreciate the many ways in which
space is crafted by the camera’s movement, forward and reverse dolly
shots, fast and slow tracking shots. In short, Girardet and Müller’s
careful curation of scenes render visible how space is structured by
Hitchcock.
This awareness of how space is structured and experienced cin-
ematically and thus physically and psychically is precisely what Reed
encourages in Scottie’s Bedroom, albeit in a different way. In Scottie’s
Bedroom, Reed makes possible in physical space an encounter with
58 Hi t ch co ck an d C on t e m p o r ar y A r t

Vertigo’s profilmic space. As noted in the previous chapter, this work

engages with additional registers of space beyond the physical and the
representational. It also brings into collision the public (museum) and
private (bedroom) spaces and the institutional spaces of the museum
and the cinema. And it does so in a way that problematizes these bina-
ries by raising a number of important questions: Can the bedroom
still be understood as a private space when encountered in the cinema
or the museum? Might a rejection of an opposition between real and
representational space force us to acknowledge just how much our
own spaces are determined by previous representations of their kind?
Reed’s gesture here reveals that cinematic spaces are as much defined
by the objects that constitute them as they are by how they are lit,
framed, and filmed and by the events that transpire within. I would
argue that much the same holds true for spaces in our physical world,
ones subject to a range of mediations.
Rutland and Scottie’s Bedroom share more than an interest in space.
They also employ monitors to showcase footage from Hitchcock’s
films that have been transformed in some way. Rutland offers us a
series of images that have been extracted from their original context,
spliced together according to a new logic, cropped and reframed for
television, and degraded by the act of copying from VHS. Scottie’s
Bedroom offers us a single clip from Vertigo that has been reedited to
introduce a foreign object into the mise-en-scène, looped in an unend-
ing repetition and, like Rutland, cropped, reframed, and degraded by
copying.45 In both cases, these interventions foreground the material-
ity of the film. And they do so on several levels. For one thing, the
monitor itself, in the space of the gallery, takes on the qualities of a
sculptural object. It is a physical object in space and encountered as
such. It can be touched, moved, and walked around and thus reads
very differently as a technology for the display of moving images than,
say, a projection screen, which offers us an image and little else. This
distinction is activated internally in The Phoenix Tapes as well through
its inclusion of monitors and a single screen projection. These moni-
tors are also, of course, television sets, and thus bring into the fray the
specific medium through which, in the 1990s at least, we were most
likely to encounter Hitchcock’s films. The materiality of Hitchcock’s
films is also foregrounded by the various procedures to which they
were subjected—cutting, splicing, reediting, copying, and so on. Such
manipulations remind us that film is a material object that can be
modified; it is a physical substrate as well as a representational image.
Of course, the image is of central importance to both Rutland and
Scottie’s Bedroom. What we see plays a key role in the engagements
 Ac ti v at i n g Me m or i e s an d M u s eu m s 59

with space that define these two works. It also speaks to our memories
of the films on offer, memories predicated on what was seen, and what
has been encountered since—during the long afterlife of Hitchcockian
cinema.
The capacity for certain facets of a Hitchcock film to flourish out-
side the original text, to persist, if not thrive in visual culture and
cultural memory, is something often noted. It was even celebrated
in Hitchcock and Art: Fatal Coincidences, an exhibition that placed
Hitchcockian props atop pedestals covered with red velvet. It is a feat
often ascribed to Hitchcock’s selection, cinematographic presentation,
and narrative activation of props, those “narratively charged” objects
whose power was reflected upon by Godard. This is the focus of the
next installment of The Phoenix Tapes, Burden of Proof, and another
work with which it shared space in Notorious: Alfred Hitchcock and
Contemporary Art, John Baldessari’s Tetrad Series (1999). Burden of
Proof offers a compendium of small objects and slight gestures that
prove central to the development of plot. It organizes series of clips
by type of object or type of gesture, each presented with the original
soundtrack intact. Each series transitions smoothly to the next with
segue shots and develops in ways we might expect from a written essay.
For instance, a series of shots of hands rifling through wallets for iden-
tity cards leads to a series of monogrammed objects like lighters and
briefcases, which leads to a series of briefcases, suitcases, and purses
being packed and unpacked, which leads to keys being removed from
purses, then keys grasped and hidden in hands, then keys inserted into
locks and doors opened, and so on (see figure 2.2). The list of highly
charged objects is long in Burden of Proof as it is in Hitchcock’s oeuvre
and includes, also, items of clothing, notes, telephone books, tele-
phones, newspapers, mail, doorknobs, small cases, teacups, guns, and
knives to name just a few. And in each instance, the object is enlisted
in some kind of action. It never appears isolated from a gesture and
rarely do we encounter a clip without a close-up of a hand manipulat-
ing the object in some way. These gestures take on a more prevalent
role as Burden of Proof continues, as the gestures themselves come to
replace the object as the structuring logic of the series. Actions like
shattering fragile objects, driving a car, opening doors, and inflicting
harm with weapons become foregrounded (see figure 2.3). Burden
of Proof offers a meditation on the relationship between object and
action, the transformation of everyday objects into props, and how
gestures activate the inanimate. Through doing so, Burden of Proof
appears to ask the question, what generates the narrative charge, the
object or the action? In the end, it forces us to consider how it is that
Figure 2.2 Christoph Girardet and Matthias Müller, The Phoenix Tapes, 1999, film
still from Burden of Proof (courtesy of the artists).

Figure 2.3 Christoph Girardet and Matthias Müller, The Phoenix Tapes, 1999, film
still from Burden of Proof (courtesy of the artists).
 Ac ti v at i n g Me m or i e s an d M u s eu m s 61

simple and seemingly insignificant objects become so highly charged,

fraught, and indispensable to the course of a film. However, by way
of conclusion, Burden of Proof presents footage that departs from its
own logic by offering a close-up of the eye. Yet, this epilogue of sorts
performs an important function by reminding us of the primacy of the
vision and the privileging of sight in all this. Seeing is believing—or is
it in a Hitchcock film? We may hear diegetic sounds emanating from
these clips, something that Girardet and Müller preserve for us, and
this may tell us how to read what we see, but our energies have been
directed—if not depleted by—footage that impels us to look, and to
look hard. What is more, the “epilogue” provides a segue (or at least
a point of connection) to the works we encounter alongside Burden of
Proof, a selection of images Baldessari’s Tetrad Series, including, quite
aptly, What Was Seen, which focuses on vision and To Be A, which sug-
gests an object if not an ontological premise.
Baldessari’s Tetrad Series consists of several large images divided
into four equal parts with the top-left quadrant featuring a photograph
of a small object, the top-right quadrant a fragment that reads as a
close-up from a painting or drawing by Francesco Goya, the bottom-
left a film still, and the bottom-right painted, white text on a black
background excerpted from Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa’s
Book of Disquiet, published posthumously in 1982. For Baldessari,
the four quadrants represent four ways we come to understand the
world around us, “through literature, through art, through objects
in the world, through film.”46 It is perhaps worth taking a moment
here to point to the asymmetry of Baldessari’s description. Whereas
literature, art, and film are representational practices that mediate the
world, “objects” are material things in the world. He does not men-
tion photography, the means through which they are presented to
us in his Tetrad Series, an omission that is somewhat striking. Are
we meant to see past the mediating effects of photography on these
objects in the way certain cinematic images require us to suspend our
disbelief? Are we supposed to understand objects as representations,
to acknowledge the materiality of both and the tendency of both to
accrue history, memory, and meaning through their uses and circula-
tion? Baldessari’s curious description of his work returns us in some
ways to Burden of Proof’s foregrounding of the prop, the small mate-
rial objects that insist on our attention, the clues that put demands
on our skills of detection and analysis. In the Tetrad Series, images
selected for Notorious: Alfred Hitchcock and Contemporary Art, the
“film” quadrant naturally features stills from Hitchcock’s films, specif-
ically North by Northwest (1959). The objects photographed include a
62 Hi t ch co ck an d C on t e m p o r ar y A r t

mousetrap and red shirt and text that reads “to be a” and “what was
seen.” In each case, it is Hitchcock—rather than Goya—who offers
the organizing logic for the composition, with objects that resonate as
Hitchcockian props and text, as noted above, that speaks directly to
the operations of a Hitchcock film. This marginalization of Goya in
a series otherwise united by his images speaks not only to the power
of context but also, I would argue, to the power that Hitchcock now
holds over how we interpret that which comes into proximity with
even fragments of his films. An object like a mousetrap or a red shirt is
no longer just an object if it appears alongside a Hitchcockian image.
It becomes a prop whose significance, even if unknowable, is never-
theless assured. Baldessari’s images also seem to confront how it is
that we encounter Hitchcock as part of a broader image and textual
landscape, as part of the systems of representation through which we
understand our world.
The focus on the small object, the close-up, and the gesture in both
Girardet and Müller and Baldessari’s pieces unites these two works.
Although Burden of Proof provides us with a sequential and conceptu-
ally fluid catalog of clips, rigidly and astutely organized to unfold with
crisp logic, Baldessari accomplishes something similar, but organized
spatially and stilled. Both provide different ways into the question of
how objects are charged and activated in Hitchcock and indeed both
say something about memory in relation to film.
The Phoenix Tapes certainly isn’t the first artwork to be broken up
and spread across a gallery space, but in the context of Notorious:
Alfred Hitchcock and Contemporary Art, it manages to activate mem-
ory and space in fairly unique ways. At its core, The Phoenix Tapes is a
work about memory. Each fragment of footage recalls if not the film
from which it was taken, then Hitchcockian cinema and even classi-
cal Hollywood cinema more broadly. It calls upon our memory of
films, of experiences of watching them at home on television. But this
expanded form of The Phoenix Tapes also activates memory in a more
immediate way in the context of the Notorious exhibition. It carries
with it the memory of its often close conceptual links to works whose
space it shares from one room to the next. Thus, Rutland not only
enters into a dialogue with Scottie’s Bedroom, but Scottie’s Bedroom,
through its attachment to Rutland, now also informs our reception
of the Tetrad Series images, and so on. While this type of imprinting
happens organically for many visitors to a gallery, in this instance, The
Phoenix Tapes works like a mnemonic prompt, a work that pushes us
to engage in memory work, to be aware of how memory functions in
 Ac ti v at i n g Me m or i e s an d M u s eu m s 63

our experience of these pieces and in relation to cinema. But it also

functions like a gel that holds parts of the exhibition together.
This activation of memory is closely tied to another activation
encouraged by The Phoenix Tapes, that of museal space. Thinking
about the contexts in which the individual components of The Phoenix
Tapes appears and thus the spatially expanded form in which it was ini-
tially designed, reveals the multiple layers of curation and mediation to
which Hitchcock is being subjected. And, at base, it reminds us what
happens to film: the acts, gestures, alterations, and interventions that
constitute the afterlife of cinema. The Phoenix Tapes curates and (re)
mediates a selection of footage with an eye to how this reformulated
cinematic text might also speak to and draw from other creative prac-
tices that share the same space. The dialogical exchange encouraged
by the curation of the exhibition as a whole then raises our aware-
ness of the contextualizing and determining force of the gallery space
and, quite crucially, reveals how this space and the individual works
in a show such as Notorious: Alfred Hitchcock and Contemporary Art
manage to accomplish very similar feats. In other words, the curation
of Notorious: Alfred Hitchcock and Contemporary Art points to the
museal nature of the works within it, a characteristic recently attrib-
uted to cinema in general and the essay film in particular.
In her astute assessment of Chris Marker’s essay films, Rascaroli
argues, citing Godard’s famous dictum that cinema is “the museum of
the real,” that “the whole history of cinema . . . may be viewed in terms
of musealization” and that essay films, in particular, have a “special
affinity” for the museum.47 This affinity, she continues, is a result of
the fact that “many essays are archival films, which select, store, recon-
textualize, and disseminate images of the past.”48 It follows then that
essay films and, I would add, expanded essay films especially, ought
to be “studied from the point of view of musealization.” Rascaroli’s
understanding of musealization, as a process, is grounded in Andreas
Huyssen’s definition of the term. In its broadest sense, musealization
speaks to what Huyssen, referring in turn to the work of Hermann
Lübbe, calls the “expansive historicism of our contemporary cul-
ture” and to the ways in which museological operations have become
the purview of a range of other cultural practices.49 Specifically, it
addresses how practices not originally tasked with safekeeping the
vestiges of our pasts have taken on this burden by virtue of their
technological capacities. This is a change also precipitated by shifts
in our understanding of what now constitutes important relics of our
history and what constitutes access to the past. For instance, on the
64 Hi t ch co ck an d C on t e m p o r ar y A r t

surface, The Phoenix Tapes may seem like little more than a compen-
dium of Hitchcock’s greatest hits. But beneath that, it records for
posterity a cinematic practice, a practice of representation, of seeing,
constructing, and thus of understanding the world as Baldessari might
say. It provides a historical record of a carefully crafted visual language,
of human relationships, and our relationships with the material world,
a record of modes of representation that structure our experience of
space and time in very specific ways.
As an expanded essay film, The Phoenix Tapes reveals much about
the museum and the museal nature of certain cinematic practices such
as found footage. The Phoenix Tapes is constituted by a series of physi-
cal objects in space and, as such, activates space in ways different from
a screened essay film. The dispersed components of the work unite
the multiple sites that comprise the exhibition space and help gener-
ate an awareness of being in space and specifically being in a space
that aims to structure and dictate our experience of what we encoun-
ter inside. Of course, the cinema too aims to structure and dictate
our experience of what we encounter therein and thus shares certain
institutional affinities with the museum. These affinities run deep, for
even the work itself—as the cinema itself—can be described as museal.
Each component of The Phoenix Tapes functions as its own minimu-
seum, an archive or collection of artifacts or, in this case, filmic clips
curated according to a particular theme. Each component assumes the
function of the museum. It organizes, stores, saves, (re)contextual-
izes, and offers a narrative about that which it contains. It offers us
access to our collective past by putting on display the cultural expres-
sions that defined a particular era. And each monitor provides the
physical structure for a carefully arranged set of images that strives to
reveal something about the history of Hitchcock and his films in the
way an exhibition strives to reveal something about the artist or artists
it features.
As this analysis has shown, The Phoenix Tapes certainly has much to
reveal about Hitchcock, the cinema, and museal space too. Its capac-
ity to engage with these broader concerns and to present a series of
carefully nuanced propositions about the nature of a Hitchcock film
is only bolstered by its existence as an essay film in an expanded form.
Girardet and Müller’s exploration of Hitchcockian cinema was fueled
by a cinephilia very much charged by epistemophilia, an intense curi-
osity about how their object of affection and study functions. In the
tradition of the essay film, they advance an argument about where to
locate the essence of a Hitchcock film and the operations performed
by Hitchcockian tropes, cinematographic and narrative strategies.
 Ac ti v at i n g Me m or i e s an d M u s eu m s 65

They reveal his intersections with other modes of filmmaking and

expression and how the construction of his cinematic images manu-
facture suspense, prompt analysis, and generate affect. And in the tra-
dition of expanded cinema, they show how the essay film itself might
be reimagined spatially to activate new avenues of inquiry to do with
the nature of cinema in terms of its materiality, sites of consumption,
and function as a mechanism for the creation, circulation, and pres-
ervation of cultural memory. They also address cinema in terms of its
relation to other media and practices as well as the space and mandates
of the art museum. As an expanded essay film, there is much that The
Phoenix Tapes reveals and accomplishes to help us better understand
the power and legacy of Hitchcockian cinema and its rich afterlife.
 3

Remediation and
Intermediality: From
Moving to (Film) Still

It is safe to say that the preferred mode of artistic engagement with

Hitchcockian cinema involves film and video. In many of these, the
original film is cut, spliced, reedited, slowed down, sped up, stilled,
or copied.1 Despite these interventions, we are still able to recognize
the source material, to identify Vertigo (1958), Psycho (1960), or The
Birds (1963) in these works. Even in the case of Girardet and Müller’s
The Phoenix Tapes (1999), which disperses compendiums of clips
across the gallery space or Baldessari’s Tetrad Series (1999), which
offers us only a portion of a film still in conjunction with other images
and text, there remains a close medial and indexical connection to
the original films from which these fragments have been excised. In
certain instances, the preservation of the original in some form attests
to artists’ desires for Hitchcock to continue to speak for himself. As
noted in the previous chapter, Matthias Müller sees The Phoenix Tapes
as a “collaboration” between himself, Girardet, and Hitchcock. This
approach reflects the kind of collaborative impulse Fowler detects in
much contemporary cinematic artwork.2 It is a form of collaboration
that is often borne out of a cinephilic admiration and an artistic urge
to maintain, on some level, the integrity of the filmic text. It is an
impulse to commit acts of creative intervention that do not, to the
artists’ minds, threaten Hitchcock’s cinematic vision or corrupt the
sanctity of a Hitchcock film. When the original film is taken apart for
scrutiny and analysis, often at the behest of an epistemophilic drive,
the individual fragments continue to have at least a degree of aesthetic
integrity and remain identifiable as cinematic clips. That is, we can tell
through some combination of the actor’s face or body, the gesture,
the props, the setting, the aesthetic texture of the image, or the style
68 Hi t ch co ck an d C on t e m p o r ar y A r t

of editing, lighting, or cinematography that what has been subjected

to a creative act is a Hitchcock film.
While artworks that do something to or with original footage con-
stitute the bulk of practices that engage Hitchcock’s oeuvre, there
is a growing body of work that eschews this tendency to start from
Hitchcock’s films, instead creating something anew and often at an
aesthetic and medial remove from the cinema itself. I am not refer-
ring to artist remakes of Hitchcock films like Stan Douglas’s Subject
to a Film: Marnie (1995), which restages the robbery scene, or Pierre
Huyghe’s Remake (1994–95) for which the artist hired amateurs to
read the script and perform in a perfunctory way the gestures of Rear
Window (1954). These are video reworkings of a Hitchcock scene
and film, respectively, and thus fail to depart from the cinema and its
language as much as I would like to here. Instead, I want to focus
on other media like painting, drawing, computer software, and video
games and thus practices that remove themselves even further from
the cinema in order to approach Hitchcock from the conceptual angles
afforded by different representational traditions. However, and true
to the spirit of paracinema, they end up not abandoning the cinema,
but showing us how the cinema and the cinematic, Hitchcock and the
Hitchcockian, can be located elsewhere. They also reveal the extent to
which cinema and Hitchcock in particular are beholden to the tradi-
tions of older media and have, in turn, paved the way for expressions
in newer media.
In many of these works, the medium through which Hitchcock’s
films are refracted makes itself markedly felt. For instance, we’ve
already seen how important photography is to Cindy Bernard’s
cinephilic gesture in her Ask the Dust (1989–92) series. Likewise,
the act of painting is foregrounded in several works that explore the
representational issues raised by merging painting and cinema. In
such practices, an older, static-image tradition comes into contact
with a relatively newer, moving-image tradition and the result is
often an exploration of the distinct ways in which each constructs
and mediates our world (and others). The result is an engagement
with representation itself and a series of attendant concerns to do
with illusion and fiction. Such collaborations also speak to the his-
tory of the many types of relationships between cinema and paint-
ing, starting with cinema’s prehistory of protocinematic forms and
spanning a century’s worth of intersections with art movements,
strategies, and spaces. In the context of a Hitchcock-inspired prac-
tice, we might also detect on these canvasses an acknowledgment
 Rem e d i at i o n an d I n t e r m e d i al i ty 69

of Hitchcock’s own fascination with art, made manifest through his

incorporation of paintings as significant props (Vertigo), use of art-
ists as characters (The Trouble With Harry [1955]), and enlisting of
artists as collaborators (John Ferren and Salvador Dali) in set design
and other filmed sequences. This history of alliances and allusion
haunts many of the canvasses that take on Hitchcock as their sub-
ject, even when their focus seems directed toward something else
entirely.
For example, Aurélie Bauer paints frames from Hitchcock’s films
in a way that calls attention to the surface of the canvas, the appli-
cation of the medium, the formal relationships and aesthetic differ-
ences between cinema and painting, and the role played by painting
in the development of a film. The highly gestural brushstrokes she
uses to describe Scottie carrying Madeleine after her plunge into
San Francisco Bay, Miss Lonelyhearts setting the dinner table, and
Roger Thornhill’s evasion of the crop duster announce themselves
as borne from traditions of modern painting.3 But they also prompt
us to see and think cinema through painting. Bauer’s Rear Window
(2009), which is comprised of 120 small paintings that capture scenes
in the film, is structured by a set of formal concerns and questions
such as how are light and darkness described differently in cinema
and painting, and how do framing practices in the cinema compare
to framing practices in painting? There is a parallel to be drawn here
with The Phoenix Tapes. Bauer too extracts, organizes, and catalogs
Hitchcockian fragments to expose aspects of the films under scru-
tiny such as the construction and significance of oft-repeated tropes,
bodily gestures, set design, and cinematographic strategies. There is
even an essayistic quality to Bauer’s compendium, though of a kind
that falls somewhere between the literary and filmic variety. The indi-
vidual images read as pages, in part because their size approximates
a standard sheet of paper. The seemingly hasty application of paint
suggests not just the capture of an image, but a scribble or note, a
thought rushed to paper before it evaporates. But it is also an inter-
pretive gesture, an attempt to say something more about what is rep-
resented. For Bauer also encircles the scene in question with a broad
wash of grey, focusing our attention on a detail at the expense of the
periphery and thus replicating the mechanism of vision, of watching a
film or looking at an image.
The display of these images is also significant. The paintings are
arranged in a grid-like pattern of four long rows. In this configura-
tion, it reads like a storyboard. However, a storyboard precedes the
70 Hi t ch co ck an d C on t e m p o r ar y A r t

making of a film; it does not follow it—for the most part. Thus, on
the one hand, Bauer’s work functions like an analytical gesture that
takes the film apart and returns it to its origins, its initial form as a
series of sketches that roughly plot out the course of action, the story.
As such, it reads as a series of propositions, as the preliminary work
that goes into the creation of both film and painting, as storyboard
drawing or even the quick oil sketches that are part of a conceptual
exercise, a thinking through out of which a finished cultural product
will eventually emerge. While in the art world, these sketches might
share museum wall space with the final iteration of the work, in
the cinema, they are often forgotten, except perhaps by cinephiles
and researchers who covet such forms of ephemera, believing they
might offer hidden insights into the mental processes of a director.
These works also remind us of the role of painting (or drawing) in
the initial conceptualization of a cinematic work. They remind us
that the first time Scottie carries Madeleine after her plunge into the
water may have been in paint and not on celluloid. Indeed, this may
be an act driven by Bauer’s appreciation of Hitchcock and desire to
understand film through its deconstruction, but it is also one that
reminds us of Hitchcock’s own tendency to find inspiration in art.
On the other hand, in the specific case of Bauer’s North by Northwest
series, we might see in it an attempt to confront Hitchcock’s practice
of faking storyboards after the fact in order to perpetuate his persona
as a master filmmaker obsessed with orchestrating every last detail
of a film.
Isabelle Inghilleri’s painting practice is driven by similar aims to
explore the relationship between cinema and painting, specifically in
terms of their respective constructions of narrative, suspense, and time.
Inspired by Hitchcock—as well as other directors including Michael
Haneke, Jean Luc Godard, Andrei Tarkovsky, Gus van Sant, Ingmar
Bergman, and David Lynch—Inghilleri’s filmic references range from
the allusive to the very direct in the “painted film stills” that consti-
tute her Theme Park (2007) series. In It Became Clear as the Sky Filled
with Features of a Darker Past, That the Need for Rehabilitation Was
Stronger Than Ever, an unidentifiable woman is situated in a shadowy,
nondescript space.4 Her clothing and hairstyle mark her as from the
1950s or 1960s and her gestures, comportment, and framing iden-
tify her as distinctly cinematic. However, Inghilleri’s painterly style
also situates the image in traditions of portraiture.5 A look of con-
cern marks this cinematic heroine’s expression, but not because she
is rendered as a victim as in related photographic images by Cindy
 Rem e d i at i o n an d I n t e r m e d i al i ty 71

Sherman, but rather because she is in the process of pursuit. As the

next image, On the First Day of April She Felt an Unknown Urge for
Revenge, clearly reveals, it is she who holds the gun. A look tinged
with apprehension in the earlier image transforms into a steely resolve
in this one. Suspense and fear exude from the image, but not from the
woman represented. If we follow the images sequentially, as the titles
encourage us to do, a story starts to emerge. As Inghilleri explains,
each image may contain its own story, but when hung in the right
order, together they transform into “a little film.”6 As such, they too
function like a storyboard, generating an engagement with some of
the same issues that Bauer addressed through her painterly decon-
struction of Hitchcock’s films.
For both Bauer and Inghilleri, storyboarding an already existing
film through painting isolates time as an essential concept for analysis.
Whereas Bauer removes the factor of time by eliminating the mobile
frame to see what remains, what new aesthetic dimensions come to
the fore, and what changes in our relationship to the image, Inghilleri
investigates how time functions differently in terms of narrative. She
notes, “With film you can press play and all will be resolved within
an hour or two. But with a painted still, this tension remains present
all the time.”7 It is thus a perpetual tension that never resolves, a nar-
rative intimated, but without a conclusion. What reads as a moment
in cinematic time is arrested in paint, preserved and prevented from
unfolding any further, from becoming anything more specific than a
potent allusion to a Hitchcockian world.
Distracted for a Moment, Words and Thoughts of No Importance
Got Caught Midair. Are You Still There? is one such work that is per-
meated by a Hitchcockian atmosphere of suspense (see figure 3.1).
Here we see a close-up of a woman dressed in dark green pick up
the receiver of a telephone, a gesture framed in a way that would
not look out of place in Girardet and Müller’s compilation of that
very same action in Burden of Proof. Subsequent images confirm
the reference to The Birds with the appearance of crows: outside
the window as the woman speaks on the phone in one image and
perched on a brick wall in another.8 But as this sequence unfolds, the
images move farther away from their Hitchcockian source material.
When the woman’s face is revealed, it is clearly not Tippi Hedren.
The resolve with which she points a gun certainly does not gel with
our knowledge of Melanie Daniels. If we are to continue to read
Inghilleri’s stills as a storyboard, this anonymous woman in green
then appears slumped on a kitchen floor, wearing a gas mask, with
one dead bird at her feet and another hovering above her head. While
72 Hi t ch co ck an d C on t e m p o r ar y A r t

Figure 3.1 Isabelle Inghilleri, Theme Park: Distracted for a Moment, Words and
Thoughts of No Importance Got Caught Midair. Are You Still There?, 2007, painting
(courtesy of the artist).

the birds remain, the Hitchcockian references seem to dissipate and

are gradually replaced by a distinct (David) Lynchian quality.9 What
Theme Park offers is a merging of filmic influences, of narrative and
representational practices, and of cinema and painting. References
may be fragmented, but alliances are confirmed between that which
is cited and the artistic practices that are mobilized: painting in gen-
eral and portraiture in particular; film in general and cinemas of sus-
pense in particular.
In both Bauer and Inghilleri’s work, there is a type of remediation
happening; a cinematic image is being reworked as a painted one.
This reflects Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin’s understanding of
remediation in some respects, but not all. For them, remediation is
defined as the process by which older media are remediated by newer
ones and, more specifically, how new technologies of the digital age
repurpose, and retain traces of, older media.10 In this scenario, reme-
diation happens according to either the logic of transparency whereby
the content is the focus and not the act of mediation or the logic of
hypermediacy whereby the act of mediation reveals itself through a
variety of self-reflexive gestures. Both Bauer and Inghilleri’s work bear
 Rem e d i at i o n an d I n t e r m e d i al i ty 73

the hallmarks of the latter. In both cases, the gestural act of painting
is front and center as is the practice of storyboarding in the display
of the series of paintings. However, in both Bauer and Inghilleri’s
work, the relationship between old and new media is problematized in
ways that go beyond remediation’s core uses as a concept. Although
Bolter and Grusin acknowledge that older media can and do remedi-
ate newer media, they see remediation as “the defining characteristic
of the new digital media,” and thus their case studies speak predomi-
nantly to how “digital media remediate their predecessors.”11 They
do not consider the implications of practices that reverse the trajec-
tory of remediation by repurposing a newer medium, such as cinema,
through an older one, such as painting. In answer to this, recent work
by Johan Callens on David Mamet’s The Water Engine or Weihong
Bao’s work on the Chinese “opera film” makes a strong case for the
need to denaturalize the chronological flow from old to new privileged
by Bolter and Grusin.12 What is more, Bauer and Inghilleri’s work also
shows us that, further to this, we need to consider the parallel histo-
ries between media, the long, overlapping, and uneven histories of
media, their fluid and permeable boundaries, and the messy generic
subsets of media that impede attempts to define them ontologically or
in terms of their specificity.
Much of this conceptual messiness is writ large in Bertrand
Giraudeau’s mixed media series of “portraits” of Hollywood stars. In
Cary Grant (2001), for instance, he repeats the same publicity still
of the star in various sizes and to various degrees of detail (or image
degradation) across a canvass. The entire image is monochrome, with
broad intermingling strokes of black and white paint, likely applied
with a putty knife, encircling the periphery of the collage and separat-
ing some of the portrait images. The thick streaks of paint recall an
Abstract Expressionist aesthetic and thus an artistic movement con-
temporary to the Grant portrait. As a result, both subject and style
hark back to a previous artistic and social context. The image of Grant
is ostensibly a portrait, but one that appears the product of a blend
of traditions of painted portraiture, photographic portraiture (which,
as Bolter and Grusin discuss, remediated painting traditions), and the
publicity still. But the cinema itself figures prominently here too. This
is not a portrait of Cary Grant, but a portrait of his star construct, an
image crafted through publicity and his many roles. His expression
does not offer any insight into him as an individual. It is the generic
look, that slightly bemused expression he wears in many of his films
and the one we, as audiences, have become accustomed to seeing.
74 Hi t ch co ck an d C on t e m p o r ar y A r t

Giraudeau’s treatment of Cary Grant (as well as other actors and films
in this series) reads as typical for a fan and cinephile. The collage-like
effect generated here recalls scrapbooking, collecting images of one’s
favorite star from celebrity magazines. However, we are not presented
with multiple images of Grant, but the same one, repeated over and
over again in a gesture of compulsive repetition that borders on obses-
sion. And yet, what this collage does in the spirit of hypermediacy is
acknowledge the many media that comprise this image, the multiple
forms that a single publicity photo can take, and the plethora of con-
texts it can inhabit. Indeed, a publicity still is made to be circulated.
While Giraudeau’s Cary Grant reads like star worship and cinephilic
homage, it also accomplishes a number of other things. It injects fan
practice into art practice and merges cinema with painting. By remind-
ing us of painting’s—and specifically portraiture’s—remediation by
photography, we are also able to attend to the differences between
these media in how they capture individuals and especially those ini-
tially mediated by the cinema.
While at a basic level the concept of remediation reveals the impetus
driving many painterly engagements with Hitchcockian cinema, Jill
Bennett’s understanding of intermediality takes us even further. She
argues that terms like “mixed media” and “appropriation” are insuffi-
cient to describe the ways in which contemporary artists combine and
explore media in their practices. For her, intermedia “implies more
than the internal differentiation or mixing of media” and involves
“the intersection of different practices, technologies, languages and
sign systems.”13 It also “describes not just the literal intersection of
media but the inquiry focused on—and conducted through—medial
relationships or mediality itself.”14
When viewed through the lens of intermediality, Bauer, Inghilleri,
and Giraudeau accomplish something similar to what Bennett iden-
tifies as the achievement of Gabriel Orozco’s The Atomists (1996),
a series of images that feature photographs of soccer players over-
laid with bold graphic patterns. In Orozco’s case, the concern is
“less with significations or the associations of particular sign sys-
tems, than with the staging of intermedial relationships, and thus
with the creation of an ‘intermedial aesthetic’ per se.”15 Likewise,
Bauer, Inghilleri, and Giraudeau’s painting practices stage rela-
tionships between painting and cinema and between traditions of
portraiture as they have been imagined across history and across
different media. What happens in their work, as what happens in
Orozco’s, is a resistance to allowing a single intervening discourse
 Rem e d i at i o n an d I n t e r m e d i al i ty 75

to be responsible for its aesthetic operations and thus interpretation.

In Orozco’s case, neither painting nor sports manage to emerge as
the primary lens through which to understand the work. Instead, its
“aesthetic operation” takes place “within the triangulation of paint-
ing, sporting image and text.”16 In Bauer and Inghilleri’s practice,
this aesthetic operation and the engagement with mediality and
medial relationships themselves are produced through the merger of
painted portraiture, cinema, and storyboarding in order to focus our
attention on the historical and aesthetic relationships between these
practices. In a sense, they suggest visually what media theorists have
been claiming about the latest resurgence of interest in intermedial-
ity, namely, that media were never really distinct and always related
to, or grounded in, other media.17 In Giraudeau’s case, the coali-
tion is much broader and its components more difficult to describe
in medial terms, with practices both professional and amateur and
ones already inscribed by multiple traditions: classical Hollywood
cinema, painterly abstraction, portrait photography, publicity stills,
collage, graffiti, and fan scrapbooking. As in creative gestures driven
by the logic of hypermediacy, the focus here is divided between
content, form, and the relationships forged between form and con-
tent in acts of iteration, not to mention multiple iterations across
different contexts. Consider, for instance, the many sites in which
we might encounter a publicity still of Cary Grant. Consider too
how fan scrapbooking would necessarily lead to different questions
about image production, circulation, and mediation than borrowing
a painterly gesture from abstract expressionism. What then emerges
from contact between “different discourses, practices and aesthetics”
is, according to Bennett, an “intermedial space through which new
ways of seeing and new terms for analysis can emerge.”18 Ultimately,
these intermedial practices show us that media are connected and
contingent on one another and always in contact with one another.
Media are not pure, and nor can our experience of them evade their
histories of connection and codependency.
These new terms for analysis, grounded in what Bennett sees as the
true interdisciplinarity possible within cultural studies, has the capac-
ity to produce a “‘visual cultural’ study without words.”19 For her,
“the object that emerges from the interdisciplinary nexus is . . . not
simply a material object but a conceptual one: an object of knowledge
that comes into being through the enmeshed practice of philosophy,
art, literature, cultural studies, anthropology and so on.”20 This is an
object of knowledge in two senses: it is an object that can be known
76 Hi t ch co ck an d C on t e m p o r ar y A r t

and one that has the capacity to transmit or activate knowledge(s)

through its operations. The artworks in question here have the ability
to register shifts in relationships between media in our digital age, the
nature and articulations of cultural memory, and in the many, varied
practices to which we put our cinematic images to use. This capacity
derives, in part, from how a slate of contemporary artistic practices
encourage coproduction, of meaning and, significantly, of analysis.
As noted in the introduction, this idea, as articulated by Mieke Bal
(and pursued by Bennett), opens the door to thinking about how
the art object can play a key role, when activated by a viewer in the
generation of analyses. This coproduction, according to Bennett,
can take place at a number of levels and across a number of differ-
ent discourses. Returning to her example of the intermedial constitu-
tion of the portraits generated by Orozco, this coproduction happens
“between artist and subject (both with a particular relationship to the
medium); between artist and art theorist; between the art work and
the interdisciplinary knowledge nexus in which it is created.”21
I want to turn now to two further case studies in order to pursue
how this coproduction of analysis can happen between the artwork
and the interdisciplinary knowledge nexus in which it was created and,
I would add, to which it contributes. To do so, I will consider Cindy
Bernard and Palle Torsson’s generation of film stills from Vertigo and
Psycho (1960), respectively, the act of (digital) remediation performed
by these artists, and the modifications they make to the cinematic
image. Both remediation and intermediality in Bennett’s and, also,
Jens Schroetner’s sense, will be called upon to investigate the aesthetic
operations at work in Bernard and Torsson’s practices and to assess
the means by which these artists engage the broader themes of time,
memory, medial relationships, fan practices, and cinephilia itself.
Cindy Bernard’s Location Proposal #2 (1997) involves a series of
18 rear-projected still images that “recreate” Vertigo’s redwoods
sequence (see figure 3.2). In many ways, this project extends the
theoretical concerns about cinematic mediations of place that under-
pin Ask the Dust. Location Proposal #2 also explores how films have
structured our experience of landscape and what results from the
appropriation of spaces already deeply embedded in our collective
memories. These conceptual affinities with Ask the Dust end, however,
with Bernard’s eschewal of photography in favor of the digital image.
Location Proposal #2 involved creating a 3-D digital model of a space
that combined the floor plan of the Muir Woods trail with the scene
in Vertigo that was actually filmed in Big Basin Redwoods State Park.
She then used the camera function within the model-making program
 Rem e d i at i o n an d I n t e r m e d i al i ty 77

Figure 3.2 Cindy Bernard, Location Proposal #2: Shot 17, 1997, installation view
(courtesy of the artist).

to reconstruct—through still images—the 18-shot sequence from the

film.22 Selections of these images have been projected on large screens
as part of multiroom installations and in a variety of public spaces in
the United States and Europe.
This shift from photography to the digital in Bernard’s practice
has complicated even further her engagements with time and space.
In Ask the Dust, the photographic image functions as the site where
different registers of time come into contact with each other: the
historical period represented in the film, the time of its inscription on
celluloid, the cultural time of its release, the time of our reception of
the film, and the time of the inscription of the photographic image.
In Location Proposal #2, these registers, though alluded to, are much
more difficult to access and differentiate. They must be imagined and
reconstituted in the mind of the viewer, primarily because the digital
image has all but lost its specificity in relation to both time and space.
The images that comprise Location Proposal #2 lack indexicality; their
referent is wholly indeterminate and thus virtual in every sense.23
They represent neither Muir Woods, nor Big Basin. They hail neither
from the cinema, nor reality, neither from the past, nor the present.
Instead, they exist as representational spaces that accommodate the
merger of allusions to all these things. As such, they enact collisions
78 Hi t ch co ck an d C on t e m p o r ar y A r t

between multiple media practices, traditions, technologies, and lan-

guages that, as Bennett argues, bring the nature of medial relation-
ships themselves to the fore. Indeed, Location Proposal #2’s images
are at a far aesthetic remove from both the cinema and photography.
They bear the hallmarks of a low-resolution digital image, ones that
create an impasse to the precise content of the image, though not
necessarily to its affective resonances. Cinema, photography, com-
puter modeling, and film stills are all evoked in a general sense as
media here and as media defined by varying degrees of indexicality.
In this act of remediation and the staging of intermedial relations
around indexicality, we are left to wonder what indexicality actually
accomplishes and whether or not it ever even could describe Vertigo’s
celluloid origins.
More precisely, this work shows us the difficulties of making sense
of indexicality with respect to Vertigo. It is a film that toys with what
is real and fabricated. It is a film in which images (and people) con-
tinually deceive. Location Proposal #2 aims to grant us access to these
complexities and to create the conditions necessary to think about
the Vertigo’s relationship to place. For instance, Bernard’s digital
projections highlight the virtuality of Hitchcockian spaces, them-
selves often painted, rear projected, and teeming with unapologetic
artifice. The exhibition of Location Proposal #2 in spaces like the
Schindler House or at impromptu spaces within the public realm—in
other words, places where inherent histories are permitted to pen-
etrate Bernard’s digital work (as opposed to “white cubes” and
“black boxes” that aim to decontextualize their objects)—allow for
an oscillation between reality and fiction, the real and the virtual.24
This recalls Hitchcock’s own practice of blending the real and the
virtual, of injecting manifestly fake visual constructions into osten-
sibly “real” settings. The painted tower atop the Mission San Juan
Bautista is perhaps the most famous example from Vertigo. However,
we might also consider the shots of Scottie driving through San
Francisco in pursuit of Madeleine. In this sequence, the rear-pro-
jected image outside the rear window of Scottie’s car offers us a view
of the city that looks entirely different from the one we are afforded
when the camera looks ahead through the front windshield. For the
former looks distinctly fake, while the latter, by comparison, appears
very real. However, this oscillation is further complicated by the
spatial geography of the city revealed by Scottie’s driving. No mat-
ter which way he turns, he seems to be driving downhill toward the
water. He is enacting that Bassian spiral downward, not toward a
 Rem e d i at i o n an d I n t e r m e d i al i ty 79

real, physical endpoint, but toward the psychological abyss of obses-

sion and madness.
Bernard explains that what Location Proposal #2 offers us is not an
experience of the film or of the Muir Woods sequence in particular.
Instead, it provides us with the tools to analyze practices of represen-
tation and looking and to consider the relationships between images
and their referents, images and the spaces they designate, and images
and the technologies out of which they are created. In their digital
remediation of Vertigo, they prompt the self-reflexivity and medial
awareness that marks the logic of hypermediacy. Location Proposal #2
is thus a work charged by a potent epistemophilia. Bernard’s own
desire to interrogate the nature of images and their effects structures
her work in a way that orients our experience of it in a conceptual
direction.25 This is not to suggest that epistemophilia overwhelms
the cinephilia with which it was initially aligned. Bernard’s cinephilic
motivations remain present and accessible in Location Proposal #2. So,
too, does the work’s potential to satisfy visitors in search of an affective
experience. As works that speak to what is past, lost, or never was, to
the legacy of myths both within and around Vertigo, Location Proposal
#2, like Ask the Dust: Vertigo 1958/1990, taps into our memories and
collective fantasies about the film and its sites.
A somewhat different kind of remediation and engagement with
intermediality structures the work of Palle Torsson, though in way
that also results in a reflection on collective memories and fantasies.
Torsson uses video games as the medium through which to remedi-
ate images from the cinema (as well as art and its institutions). This
approach has earned him a place among the pioneers of Game Art, a
genre defined by John Sharp as art created using video game technol-
ogy that emerged in the mid-1990s contemporary with the cinematic
turn but has since gone into decline.26 Torsson, in collaboration with
Tobias Bernstrup, created one of the early iconic works of the genre,
Museum Meltdown (1996), an interactive computer work tailor-made
for each institution in which it was exhibited. Museum Meltdown
was created using the level editor “Worldcraft” from the first-person
shooter video game Half Life. Level editors like “Worldcraft” are
often sold with the game and permit players to create their own lev-
els, thus extending the world and playing possibilities of the game.
Torsson and Bernstrup used Half Life’s level editor to meticulously
recreate the interior space and the artworks displayed in the museums
in which this work was installed. However, they preserved the artificial
intelligence of the monsters of the game, requiring those who played
80 Hi t ch co ck an d C on t e m p o r ar y A r t

to interact (i.e., shoot or be killed) with a series of different creatures

lurking throughout the (virtual) museum. As such, visitors inhabited
the physical and virtual space of the art museum simultaneously. They
could view the artworks as concrete material objects and as represen-
tations in a game. Indeed, they could also destroy these artworks, but
(hopefully) only in the space of the latter. This work was created in
part to demonstrate the affinities between the architectural space of
certain modern museums and the spaces constructed by computer
games.27 And, although it was developed during a period character-
ized by challenges to the institutions of art, something that is clearly
at work in this piece, this work is also governed by something of a
juvenile impulse. In the end, Museum Meltdown appears to do little
more than fulfill fantasies of destruction.
Torsson’s Evil Interiors (2003–) uses a similar approach in its pro-
duction, but does so in a way that poses some more interesting ques-
tions about remediation and intermediality. Initially conceived as a
“photographic” series of 12 images (digital prints), Evil Interiors uses
the level editor of Unreal Tournament, another first-person shooter
video game, to (re)create what appear to be “film stills” from 12
well-known horror and suspense films.28 Large images measuring
140  100 cm capture the bedroom in The Exorcist (1973), the hall-
way in The Shining (1980), the cell in Silence of the Lambs (1991),
the warehouse from Reservoir Dogs (1992), and, of particular interest
here, Marion Crane’s motel room in Psycho. Torsson aimed to rep-
resent as faithfully as possible the architecture of these spaces and to
preserve the sense of evil, dread, and fear that permeated them. In
some ways, this was rather easy to achieve. These settings are marked
by the (cinematic) events that transpired within them. In each case,
these sites were created and staged for horror and, unlike the places
photographed in Cindy Bernard’s Ask the Dust series, exist only within
their cinematic contexts. What Torsson brings to these sites is their
transformation into the visual style of video games and, specifically,
first-person shooter games, a genre in which fear and suspense mark
the playing experience.
As such, Torsson remediates a cinematic horror genre through its
video game counterpart, generating an image whose intermediality
foregrounds both the generic and aesthetic relationships between these
two media. The stylistic differences are immediately apparent in the
quality of the light and shadow, the depth of the image, and the gen-
eration of perspective. Unreal Tournament 1, for instance, describes
its world in a way similar to the highly artificial linear perspective first
 Rem e d i at i o n an d I n t e r m e d i al i ty 81

utilized during the early Renaissance. Indeed, there are some strong
visual affinities between the description of space in games from the
late 1990s and early 2000s and, say, a della Francesco or Masolino
work.29
As a project begun in 2003 using the early version of Unreal
Tournament, the aesthetic remove between Torsson’s images and the
films they cite, or indeed between Torsson’s “photographs” and pho-
tography, is rather vast. There is a distinct lack of definition, of detail,
and of refinement in the modeling of three-dimensional forms. The
rounded edges of folds in fabric are especially difficult to generate
and most objects are reduced to a series of flat, repetitive planes. This
is especially the case in Evil Interiors: Psycho in which the pillow on
the bed looks like a wooden block and the shower and window cur-
tains make use of a uniform patterning of folds that reads as distinctly
artificial. But these ostensible failures of verisimilitude nevertheless
have the capacity to draw you in. Their lack of refinement is curious
enough to sustain attention and challenge us to reflect on just how
much detail we remember about these sites. In some ways, this lack of
detail finds a parallel in the imprecision of memory itself. While we do
not remember Psycho looking like a video game, we might remember
as much detail as a video game aesthetic provides.
From the perspective of the present, these images read as consistent
with other deliberately archaic visual practices, that is, visual practices
that use the aesthetics of old media forms to construct their repre-
sentations. This is something we see both in film (Far from Heaven’s
[2002] recreation of the look of a 1950s Sirkian melodrama, The
Good German’s [2006] use of 1940s cameras to look like the film was
shot in 1940 or, more recently, Hugo’s [2011] recreation of a two-
strip Technicolor aesthetic) and in video games (the Bioshock [2007–]
series mélange of various decade references from the 1920s through
to the 1950s). Although Unreal Tournament was certainly new in
2003 and much newer than the films it describes, the past ten years
have seen such remarkable transformations and advancements in the
quest toward “realism” and high-resolution sharpness in video games
that Torsson’s images now read as extremely antiquated. Indeed, the
remove between the first version of Unreal Tournament and Unreal
Tournament 3, released just four years later in 2007 is akin to the
aesthetic remove between, say, Jaws (1975) and The Hobbit (2012),
the latter of which was shot with a high-resolution camera at 48 fps.
The technologies used to produce these images are markedly different
and, as a result, so too are the texture, sharpness, and our experience
82 Hi t ch co ck an d C on t e m p o r ar y A r t

of these films. In some ways, the history of video game development

over the past ten years provides us with an accelerated if not hyper-
evolution of the aesthetic of a specific type of medial image. As a
result, Unreal Tournament appears more antiquated in relation to the
medium that produced it than Psycho does in relation to film. And,
because of the imprecision of the video game image in relation to the
celluloid image, in Evil Interiors, the former seems to predate the lat-
ter, an impossibility that complicates our experience of intermediality
in this series. As in Location Proposal #2, it is again the medial relation-
ships and media histories that are evoked and foregrounded in these
digital remediations, ones that effectively complicate the temporality
of what is being subjected to this repurposing.
In certain respects, this low-resolution remediation of cinema looks
amateurish and, as a result, speaks to the process by which it was cre-
ated, something that returns us to cinephilia and what may be the
counterpart in the world of video games—gameophilia.30 As previ-
ously noted, level editors exist to satisfy fans’ desire to extend their
game play and the reaches of the video game world. Indeed some level
editors are created by fans when the application is not readily avail-
able for a particular game. They are designed to extend the player’s
engagement with a game beyond its (narrative) completion, in much
the same way certain fan practices are pursued to extend a cineph-
ile’s engagement with a particular film.31 Level editors give players the
opportunity to use the code of the game to recreate the architecture
of its spaces by selecting the patterns, structures, and textures used by
the developers and by populating these spaces with monsters exhibit-
ing the same artificial intelligence as those encountered in the original
game. Speaking from experience after an embarrassingly long infatu-
ation with Doom (1993–) and the creative possibilities opened up by
its level editor many years ago, I can attest that this is a time-intensive
activity. What Torsson does in Evil Interiors is participate in a gameo-
philic practice—creating a new world with a level editor—in order to
participate in a common cinephilic one, namely, committing a creative
act devoted to a film.32 As such, Evil Interiors not only brings the
cinema into contact with video games in a new way, but also merges
cinematic and video game fan practices.
There is a further connection to be made between Psycho and
Unreal Tournament here, or film and video games, more broadly,
and that is the tendency to excise still images from these otherwise
moving-image media. Thinking about the film still or frame enlarge-
ment in cinema and the screenshot in video games provide us with an
opportunity to explore the types of marginal image production that
 Rem e d i at i o n an d I n t e r m e d i al i ty 83

accompany more major media. It also initiates discussion about the

relation between the still and the moving image and thus introduces
vectors of temporality in an analysis of Evil Interiors that otherwise
orients itself toward space and place. And in the case of both Bernard
and Torsson’s images, it encourages us to ponder their curious habit
of erasing the human presence from their stills.
As Steven Jacobs points out, even a cursory glance at academic and
popular discourses reveals that the terminology around still images
extracted from films is far from established. He explains that “film
still” tends to refer to “an image taken on the set with a still camera
and to an extraction of the sixteen or twenty-four frames that together
make up a one-second piece of film.”33 The former may not necessar-
ily be an actual moment from the film, nor replicate the vantage of the
movie camera. They typically required actors to halt their movements
and pose following the completion of a scene. These film stills, which
often resembled studio portraits, would later be used for publicity
purposes.34 The latter type of film still is derived from the actual filmic
text and is more accurately labeled a “frame enlargement,” a type of
image that, for technological reasons, is often grainy.35 While the for-
mer definition of the film still describes a practice historically situated
in the classical Hollywood era, the latter understanding of a film still
as a frame enlargement now dominates current uses of the term.
Despite the semantic conflation of film still and frame enlargement,
the aesthetic differences between the two as practices are of interest to
this discussion. While the former tends to have a distinct stillness that
permeates the image, a staged, tableau-like quality, the latter often
retains the blur of movement. As such, for Jacobs, some film stills have
more in common with painting, and specifically nineteenth-century
academic painting, than even snapshot photography. This particular
type of film still, like academic painting, sought to capture the “mean-
ingful instant . . . a constructed or fictitious moment, a kind of image
synthesis of the entire action.”36 But they were also tasked with tell-
ing a story. That is, by virtue of their connection to a film, they were
seen to have a narrative function. Torsson’s images can be understood
in relation to certain facets of this tradition, but whereas such film
stills aimed to replicate a meaningful instant, Evil Interiors offers us
what might be more accurately described as a meaningful space. For
here, the onus is on the space (and its aesthetic description through
the language of video games) rather than the actor’s gesture or pose
to convey something about the film. By stripping away the human
presence, Torsson takes away what was traditionally the source of the
film still’s power to sell the film and entice its future audiences.37 And
84 Hi t ch co ck an d C on t e m p o r ar y A r t

through this gesture, Torsson reverses the temporal thrust of the film
still. For whereas film stills were initially conceived to be suggestive of
what audiences could expect from the film it was tasked with selling,
Torsson’s images are reflective and retrospective, asking their viewers
“do you remember what happened here now that the actors are long
gone?”
As a series, Evil Interiors allows us to tap into this history of the film
still, its function, features, and evolution. It departs from the high-
standard film still for which Jacob provides an important aesthetic and
institutional history, but is still, at base, an image extracted in a way
that preserves something of the feel of the film, in this case its horror
and suspense, and which forces us to confront how spaces have been
structured and encoded in order to accomplish this. It also prompts
us to consider what extraction itself entails, for Torsson’s images are at
once from specific films, but also decisively not. Evil Interiors: Psycho is
an important part of this series and one that lends itself to discussion
of two historical realities to which it is connected: Hitchcock’s own
use of stills, which deviated from normal practice at the time, and the
historical moments when the nature of the film still itself was radically
transformed. In the context of the Hollywood studio system where
stills were often considered an afterthought on the part of the direc-
tor, being a still photographer was a thankless job. However, accord-
ing to Jacobs, Hitchcock was an exception. For him, postproduction
and publicity were always concerns and the stills that accompanied his
films were of generally high quality.38 Moreover, Hitchcock wanted
his stills to capture the mood, emotional resonances, and charged
atmosphere of the film as a whole. As Jacobs explains, “Hitchcock
clearly preferred the staging of stills completely independent from the
films. Striking publicity photographs accompanying films such as The
Wrong Man (1957), Vertigo (1958), or Psycho (1960) do not attempt
to convey a specific scene, but rather try to summarize the atmosphere
of the entire moving image into a single still.”39 In some senses, this
is what Evil Interiors: Psycho accomplishes by means of its description
through the visual language of video games.
Hitchcock’s Psycho is also important to the history of the film still
because its release coincided with a sea change in the form, specifi-
cally the replacement of the high-standard still with the “action still,”
an image characterized by what Jacobs calls a “snapshot aesthetic.”40
Torsson’s Psycho also alludes to, if not enacts, another more recent
change in the nature of the film still, the emergence of the digital
image, which has all but effaced the distinction between film still and
frame enlargement.41 In other words, the aesthetic inferiority of a
 Rem e d i at i o n an d I n t e r m e d i al i ty 85

celluloid frame that made the extraction of a still from the actual film
an undesirable option ceases to be an issue with digital cinema, making
such extractions for the purpose of publicity, for instance, a real pos-
sibility. The video game aesthetic in Torsson’s image ­self-consciously
announces the new digital regime by offering us an image unmistak-
ably digital in its aesthetic orientation and exclusively digital in its
ontology.
But in the end, its digital nature is perhaps the only thing we can
be sure of. Otherwise, it remains an image whose (medial) ontology
is elusive and indeterminate. The images that constitute Evil Interiors
approach a number of forms, always to retreat again due to some fairly
marked and inexcusable differences. They are not quite film stills, not
quite frame enlargements, not quite screenshots, and not easily or
comfortably situated in the realms of photography, cinema, or video
games. This indeterminacy returns us again to the questions of inter-
mediality, how connections between media are alluded to, called
upon, or otherwise staged in order to address mediality itself over and
above the referential content of the image. For instance, Evil Interiors:
Psycho speaks to the relationship between the film still and the film,
the video game and the screenshot or, in other words, still images
excised from their moving-image sources. It is a film still insofar as
it is an image derived from a film—Psycho—but it is also a screenshot
insofar as it is derived from the technology of a video game. It is an
image derived from the world of video games in aesthetic terms too,
but only up to a point. For whereas video games of the variety that
Torsson appeals too are invariably in color, Psycho is obviously not.
With this, Evil Interiors: Psycho tips to scale back to the cinematic (or
even television). Much, of course, has been made of Psycho’s black-
and-white aesthetic and Hitchcock’s reasons for it, and within Evil
Interiors, this monochromatic aesthetic isolates Torsson’s Psycho from
the rest. And yet, its dominant video game look marks it as less a film
still than a type of screenshot, an image capture from a computer or
television screen. Screenshots are the film stills of video games insofar
as they too are used to sell the game and, like contemporary film stills,
are sometimes extracted from the game itself. Those used for publicity
purposes are often called “bullshots” because they misrepresent the
aesthetic quality of the game in a way similar to how film stills exag-
gerate the drama of the film they are tasked with selling.42 By consid-
ering the screenshot in relation to the film still, we come upon their
shared heritage of embellishment, if not outright deception. As such,
Torsson stages an intermedial relationship that leads us to the visual
and textual discourses that circulate around these types of images. But
86 Hi t ch co ck an d C on t e m p o r ar y A r t

once more, Evil Interiors approaches a form, only to retreat again,

for Torsson’s images are definitely not bullshots, nor do they feature
the embellishments that attend to video game or film publicity. Evil
Interiors: Psycho, for instance, offers us a crude image, in part because
level editors do not allow for any kind of aesthetic refinement.
Torsson has also introduced two video versions of Evil Interiors
that animate each of his images in a montage of horror, surveying
and traversing the cinematic spaces captured in the photographic
stills. One runs four and a half minutes and concludes with Psycho,
while the other runs eight minutes and begins with a slightly lon-
ger animation of his recreation of Marion’s hotel room. In both, the
“camera” starts in the shower, pulls back through the bathroom and,
after a cut, surveys the bedroom space. The camera movements do
not replicate Hitchcock’s cinematography, nor do they approximate
the mobile views afforded during video game play. They read instead
as the type of animation sequence one might encounter in model-
ing software, of the kind Bernard first employed in the creation of
Location Proposal #2. While the image achieves a new level of inde-
terminacy in this respect, these video versions of Evil Interiors erase
some of the medial complications that defined its original version as
prints, showing, in the process, how stillness is responsible for many
of its conceptual operations.
Although Evil Interiors addresses certain facets of the film still,
Torsson’s approach departs in marked ways from other artistic explo-
rations of this form. It also departs from other practices that seek
to still Hitchcock’s image, including those discussed at the start of
this chapter as well as works like Cindy Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills
(1977–80), or Gregory Crewdson’s Beneath the Roses series (2003–5).
For Jacobs, works like Sherman’s or Crewdson’s are now one of only
two places we are likely to encounter the traditional high-standard
film still. The other is in historical collections (personal and public)
that aim to save this remnant of cinema’s past. For both artists and
collectors, these film stills, which extended the life of the film in time
and into other spaces, practices, and institutions, became an impor-
tant cinephilic object. Torsson’s project too reads as a cinephilic one,
as does Bernard’s, but both go beyond the mere collection or repre-
sentation of a film still; they also carve out a space for the cinephile
viewer. They do so by erasing the actor’s presence—Jimmy Stewart
and Kim Novak in the case of Bernard’s and Janet Leigh and Anthony
Perkins in Torsson’s—to make space, quite literally, for the viewer
to inhabit the image. I want to conclude by considering what this
gesture accomplishes in the case of Evil Interiors, for this omission
 Rem e d i at i o n an d I n t e r m e d i al i ty 87

of the human figure in the interest of accommodating the cinephile

advances Torsson’s intermedial practice to think through the relation-
ship between cinema and video games.
In Evil Interiors, the removal of the actor’s body to make way for
viewers’ projections of themselves into the image is effected through
more than the framing of the image or its perspectival depth (however
awkwardly or rudimentarily conceived). This invitation to enter the
image is issued by the video game aesthetic itself, which transforms
Torsson’s still from a snapshot of a film world, into the type of world
made to be navigated and interacted with according to the inclinations
of the player. Video games, and first-person shooter games especially,
work very hard to convince gamers that they are part of the world cre-
ated by the game, that they can exercise a degree of control over how
it is experienced, and that they have agency within it. Consider, for
instance, the viewpoints created for players by the games that Torsson
mines for his practices. The traditional first-person shooter perspective
tends to include only the barrel of the gun as in the Doom franchise,
perhaps with a hand on it as in Bioshock Infinite (2013), emerging
from the bottom center or diagonally from the bottom right hand
side of the screen. Variations of this include the over the shoulder
view that shows an avatar from the shoulders up and the back of the
head as in the earlier incarnations of Resident Evil (1996–). In each
of these views, the frame of the screen represents the gamer’s field of
vision, over which they have a fair bit of control. Their gaze is what
controls the “camera” and thus what parts of the world come into
view. As such, they possess a degree of mastery over what they see
and, through game play, a degree of mastery over their (narrative)
destiny too. Torsson uses the video game aesthetic to carry these pos-
sibilities forward into a new configuration that positions gallery goers
as both viewers and players and all that this entails. This gives viewers
the sense that they might inhabit Psycho, control the experience of its
space, and thus satisfy a chief cinephilic desire.
This positioning as both viewer and player also activates the inter-
medial nature of the image, reminding us that the aesthetic conven-
tions of the first-person shooter genre have their origins in the cinema.
Game designers looked to Hollywood action films and transplanted, in
necessarily modified forms, the strategies for generating identification
and mobilizing the gaze to contribute to feelings of dominance over
the gaming world and other characters within it. The gamer is posi-
tioned as the protagonist whose actions advance the narrative through
conflicts, ultimately concluding with some kind of resolution. As the
first-person shooter genre advanced, cinematic cut scenes became
88 Hi t ch co ck an d C on t e m p o r ar y A r t

interspersed with game play and more opportunities emerged for the
physical customization of avatars to bolster feelings of identification.
In this respect, video games continue to advance one of the chief aims
of the cinema and satisfy one of the main desires of the cinephile—the
desire to inhabit the cinematic world. This is precisely what Torsson’s
remediation brings to light. More specifically, Evil Interiors shows us
not only how video games seek to emulate the cinema but also how
video games achieved in a virtual way what much mainstream cinema
strives to do psychologically, to draw spectators into the diegesis.43
There is something more that Evil Interiors: Psycho accomplishes
that the other images in Torsson’s series do not. The space repre-
sented in this image is the interior of Marion Crane’s motel room. It
is thus a borrowed space of a kind only temporarily inhabited. Much
like the cinema or video game itself, we enter into a realm constructed
and defined by someone else and then leave again. What remain are
memories, visual and experiential in nature, that form the basis of our
narratives of encounter. Whether intentional or not, Torsson’s selec-
tion of this type of space offers us a chance to touch on how the cin-
ema and video games share a similar kind of temporality with regard
to experience, offering opportunities to inhabit an elsewhere, a space
other than our own, for a brief amount of time.
As we can see from the seemingly simple act of remediating cin-
ema through the aesthetic lens of video games, the points of contact
between these two media are many and complex. But remediation
itself only takes us so far, focusing on the act of translation rather
than the series of relationships generated through Torsson’s repurpos-
ing of the film still. These relationships are forged on many levels—
temporal, spatial, historical, technological, and aesthetic. Cinema and
video games are also united in Evil Interiors by their shared aim to
pull spectators/gamers into their fictional worlds and by the resulting
creative cinephilic and gameophilic gestures that such investments and
meaningful identifications yield. By foregrounding these medial rela-
tionships, the images that constitute the Evil Interiors series generate
what Bennett would call an intermedial aesthetic. But they are also
intermedial in the sense defined by Jens Schroetner who characterizes
such practices as ones in which the “normal states of being are defamil-
iarized or transformed.”44 This is especially the case for Evil Interiors:
Psycho. While it certainly defamiliarizes and transforms the media and
aesthetic forms it engages, as a work whose monochromatic palette
breaks with the visual scheme of the other images and thus with video
games themselves, it also defamiliarizes the Evil Interiors series. It does
so in aesthetic terms and thus in a way that forces us to rethink the
 Rem e d i at i o n an d I n t e r m e d i al i ty 89

medial relationships established by Torsson’s other images. But it also

does so in historical terms, by reminding us of Hitchcock’s film stills,
which deviated from typical Hollywood practice, and by pointing to
the two historical moments of transformation for the film still itself.
Evil Interiors: Psycho not only points back in this regard and as a way to
further problematize the practice of generating a still image to stand
in for a moving one, of giving permanence to an ephemeral aspect of
the cinema whose consumption was fleeting at best, and to reveal the
ontological (and indexical) indeterminacy of this overlooked aspect
of the cinema. Torsson also points the way forward by highlighting
the new ways in which digital technologies can mediate and alter our
experience of films, enable analytical responses to them, and stretch
the possibilities of what constitutes an aesthetic intervention.
 4

Spatial Montage, Temporal

Collage, and the Art(ifice) of
Rear Projection

F ilm may be classified as a temporal art, but many artists have sub-
jected it to deconstructive maneuvers aimed at revealing the spatial
dynamics operative within it. In the art practices at issue here, the way
space is foregrounded has taken many forms, due in part to artists’
attempts to reveal the sophisticated spatial constructions of interior
and exterior realms in Hitchcock’s films. One of the most prevalent,
however, involves the creation of spatial montage. At its simplest,
spatial montage describes the juxtaposition of more than one image
within a frame.1 What constitutes a frame, however, can be subject to
a great range of interpretation. It may describe the edge of a screen
onto which multiple images are projected. It may also describe the
outermost edges of a series of monitors stacked on top of one another
or placed in a row. It may even describe the physical limits of an
installation.
This is not to suggest that all spatial montages are necessarily
focused on the problem of space. Time cannot but be a concern in an
exploration of an image that moves. I would also suggest that there
are limits to what spatial montage can describe and the accuracy of
the term seems in question in practices where an investigation of the
temporal takes precedence or in works that are structured by a res-
olute stillness.2 In such instances, I am tempted to assign the label
“temporal collage.” For me, the distinction between spatial montage
and temporal collage is not based in technical specificities. It is also
less a sharp distinction than a set of terms that bookend a continuum
of actual practices. Broadly speaking, spatial montage might best be
applied to works exhibiting a primary concern with space and tempo-
ral collage to practices in which a concern with time predominates.
We might also suggest that spatial collage involves practices that tackle
92 Hi t ch co ck an d C on t e m p o r ar y A r t

problems of space in time-based art while temporal collage mobilizes,

in very literal terms, otherwise still images. In the end, however, the
difference is one based more on a sense of what is privileged in the
operation of a work rather than on the media used or their historical
uses and classification.
It is within expressions of spatial montage (and, to a lesser extent,
temporal collage) that we find many Hitchcock-fueled practices. But
rather than simply look at how these works might fit such a label,
I also want to explore the ways in which these works, by virtue of
their engagement with Hitchcock’s own complex constructions of
space and, by extension, memory, aesthetics, and time, expand the
purview of spatial montage itself. For what we find in many of these
Hitchcockian works are creative and critically productive ways of rei-
maging spatial montage and thus space itself. They are ways that take
us outside the two- or three-screen format favored in many filmic
art practices. They also take us beyond the digital realm with which
spatial montage is becoming increasingly aligned and thus remind us
of how this aesthetic strategy works in other media and technological
domains. I will begin by briefly introducing a range of artists that have

Figure 4.1 J. Tobias Anderson, Nine Piece Rope, 2002, film still (courtesy of the
artist).
 S p a t i al M o n t a g e , T e m p or al Co l l a g e 93

dealt with Hitchcock in these terms, but then focus my attention on

how Mark Lewis’s work which, though it only obliquely touches on
Hitchcock, nonetheless gives us the best way yet to see how a certain
kind of artist has appropriated, understood, and transformed tech-
niques and themes from Hitchcock’s work into his own practice.
J. Tobias Anderson’s Nine Piece Rope (2002) presents us with
one of the more straightforward interpretations of spatial montage.
Anderson cuts Hitchcock’s frame into nine equal pieces and ran-
domly rearranges them, thereby breaking up the filmic image (see
figure 4.1). Over the course of the nearly two and a half minute film,
each section offers a highly sped-up version of Rope (1948). The film
unfolds sequentially, but the nine sections present an image out of
order. By subjecting the film to both temporal condensation and spa-
tial re(or dis-)organization, we see little more than flashes of frag-
ments. Background becomes foregrounded through this procedure
and the seemingly insignificant components of the mise-en-scène start
to demand attention simply by virtue of the fact that they take up
screen space. What is visually dominant in this respect becomes the
only thing on which we can fix our gaze as the film, in an antinarrative
gesture, flits by at an unrelenting pace. For instance, the architectural
qualities of the vast glass window of the apartment and the artificial
cityscape beyond come into consciousness as does the preponder-
ance of men’s dark suits, bookcases, and lamps. We are left with an
impressionistic view of what visually dominates the frame, including
also favored shot distances, the restrictedness of the color palette, and
a sense of just how much this film relies on the interaction between
characters.
Les LeVeque’s 2 Spellbound (1999) and 4 Vertigo (2000) also offer
a highly sped-up version of Hitchcock’s Spellbound (1945) and Vertigo
(1958), respectively. However, their articulations of spatial montage
provide a different kind of information about the original than Nine
Piece Rope. In 2 Spellbound, LeVeque generated an algorithm that
condensed the film’s running time by sampling one image frame from
every two seconds of the original film and then by doubling the filmic
image (see figure 4.2).3 These were operations that tapped directly
into Spellbound’s narrative concerns with psychoanalysis and, specifi-
cally, Freud’s concept of condensation. LeVeque explains,

the structurally duplicated and the reversed repeating of each frame

to generate a flickering “Rorschach” doubling was an approximant
articulation of Lacan’s notion of the “Mirror” and the “gap.” In 2
Spellbound the frames are not layered, they are temporally next to each
94 Hi t ch co ck an d C on t e m p o r ar y A r t

other—distinct and separate—ruptured in their relational orientation,

but connected by the 29.97 frame rate. By way of this destabilized
flickering the viewer perceptually generates the mirroring. When Ingrid
Bergman and Gregory Peck gaze lovingly into their own eyes and kiss
themselves we feel the “gap” interlaced into our physical perception as
spectators.4

LeVeque’s 2 Spellbound offers a vision of its source material that

remains fairly easy to identify. We still recognize Bergman and Peck
as they lean toward each other for a kiss. Such legibility is crucial to
the work and indeed required if we are to gain access to the psycho-
analytic concepts at issue in Spellbound and ingrained in the structural
logic of LeVeque’s film. In 4 Vertigo, legibility is compromised at cer-
tain points but for good reason, as we shall soon see when considering
the rationales for his choice of Hitchcock. This film is comprised of
four condensed versions of Vertigo edited together in a nine-minute
array of richly patterned images, pulsating to a remixed version of
Bernard Hermann’s Overture (see figure 4.3).5 LeVeque’s aim was to
create something that was “delirious, troubled and claustrophobic.”6
And indeed, it is through the generation of a kaleidoscopic aesthetic

Figure 4.2 Les LeVeque, 2 Spellbound, 1999, film still (courtesy of the artist).
 S p a t i al M o n t a g e , T e m p or al Co l l a g e 95

that mesmerizes rather than analyzes, collapsing (cinematic) space and

time in a way that seems to unmoor them from their image anchors.
LeVeque selected these two films for a number of reasons stemming
from curiosity and interest rather than any kind of Hitchcockian obses-
sion. They appear to “uneasily move though multiple discourses and
spectator relations” in a way so often the case in Hitchcock’s cinema.7
As such, they permit LeVeque to pursue what he calls a “poetics of
discursive destabilization.”8 He explains that he also chose Spellbound
and Vertigo for their narrative structures, historical resonances, and
physical construction. With respect to the latter, this involved a con-
cern with Hitchcock’s tendency to frame his subjects symmetrically in
Spellbound and with Vertigo’s “fantastic Technicolor that suggested it
as material for the accelerating quadrupling algorithm.”9 While such
interventions into the materiality of the films allowed him to exercise
a degree of control over them, he also acknowledges a loss of control
that stems from this particular type of computational procedure. As
he puts it, he is “never sure of what will happen.” This is a process
contingent on chance and on outcomes that cannot be predicted in
advance. It “necessitates many experiments and numerous versions”
which, for LeVeque, is part of the pleasure of the process.10

Figure 4.3 Les LeVeque, 4 Vertigo, 2000, film still (courtesy of the artist).
96 Hi t ch co ck an d C on t e m p o r ar y A r t

For Sharon Lin Tay and Patricia Zimmerman, this algorithmic

retooling performs a specific function, that is, “to rid the psychoana-
lytic from the image by investigating and then releasing its materiality
from the immobilized shrouds of identified and eroticized models.”
They continue, “often producing a visual field that is not inscribed in
the original films, algorithms function not as inscriptions or decon-
structions, but as an alchemy to release the unexpected.”11 There are
two things released here, neither of which I would suggest is wholly
unexpected: new image configurations generated by LeVeque’s algo-
rithms and facets of the original film that cannot survive this kind of
operation. For Tay and Zimmerman, an example of the latter in the
case of 4 Vertigo is the male gaze, which is deleted and replaced by a
“new digital gaze . . . one that exists in social exhibition space rather
than psychic space.”12 In 4 Vertigo, the male gaze is certainly undone
for the body of the female star is no longer accessible or fetishized.
The mechanisms for identification are dismantled, as are the frames
that circumscribe Madeleine/Judy in image regimes for the produc-
tion of visual pleasures. And yet, the film remains about looking. As
LeVeque puts it, 4 Vertigo is a film that is “very much about watching,
voyeurism and the possibilities of activating that as a physical percep-
tually aware experience for a viewer.”13
Benjamin Samuel also subjected Hitchcock’s films to a specially
designed computational algorithm for Hitchcock30 (2011). This algo-
rithm was designed to extract a certain number of frames depend-
ing on the length of the film. In total, 283,500 frames were excised
from 30 films and then transformed through a secondary algorithm
that vertically compressed and arranged them according to color for
presentation in a temporal collage inside a large backlit light box.14
According to Samuel, the structure of the work was inspired by
Vertigo’s Muir Woods sequence and in particular the ways in which
the sequoia’s rings function as markers of a long history, as a timeline
of sorts. In the same way, the frames within Hitchcock30 chronologi-
cally mark moments in Hitchcock’s American career from Rebecca
(1940) to Family Plot (1976).15 Each image in this collage of a vast
cinematic output reads like a ring, imprecise in terms of what is signi-
fied, but one whose function as a signifier with a connection to its ref-
erent remains intact and accessible. That is, we understand that each
trace of a frame points to a specific moment in time, even though the
film from which it was taken cannot be discerned.
Such difficulties in discerning the image also mark various uses
of superimposition, a practice that we might call a relation of spa-
tial montage and thus another aesthetic strategy that revamps space
 S p a t i al M o n t a g e , T e m p or al Co l l a g e 97

in ­often-dramatic ways. For instance, Jim Campbell’s Illuminated

Average #1: Hitchcock’s Psycho (2000) superimposes every frame of the
film on top of one another.16 In what we might therefore more accu-
rately call a temporal collage, the visual link to Psycho (1960) is gone.
Campbell’s source is really only accessible though the title of the work
or its companion video piece, Accumulating Psycho (2004), which
documents the process of making Illuminated Average. Christoph
Draeger relies on a more conventional act of superimposition for his
work. He layers Gus Van Sant’s remake of Psycho (­1998)—purportedly
shot-by-shot—over top of Hitchcock’s original to reveal differences
between the two.17 Although both depart in marked ways from how
superimposition is used in the cinema itself, even accounting for
the many shifts of its expressions across the twentieth century, both
Campbell and Draeger’s works return us to Germaine Dulac’s sug-
gestion that this aesthetic device functions as a form of “thinking,” of
attending to the capabilities of the camera.18 For in each instance, the
layered effect is revelatory, of the nature of cinematic time compressed
into a single image in Campbell’s case and of the effects of time’s
expanse between cinematic eras in Draeger’s.
Superimposition and more conventional forms of spatial mon-
tage are effectively mobilized in Laurent Fiévet’s Continuations of
Hitchcock (2003–10) series, in particular Infrastructure (2003) and
Circulations (2008). These are mixed media installations that aim to
reveal the extent to which Hitchcock was influenced by a range of
artistic traditions and how he made use of certain painterly styles and
strategies in his films. Infrastructure focuses on how painting from the
Dutch School influenced Hitchcock’s Marnie (1964) on both an aes-
thetic and thematic level. To illustrate this, Fiévet superimposes works
by Rembrandt, Saenredam, and van Beyeren on sequences from the
film to show the depth of their formal connections and the strategies
by which each engages similar concerns around spirituality and mate-
rialism, for instance. Fiévet explains that “by superimposing images
in such a way that motifs of the painting take precedence through
the exposure of more and more specific details shown at ever larger
scales, the montage follows a logic of profusion which enables the
treasures of the pictorial composition to invade the entire frame.”19
For instance, Saenredam’s architectural image initiates a consideration
of Hitchcock’s interior spaces, Rembrandt’s staircases prompt us to
reflect on those in the Rutland residence, and van Beyeren’s still life
encourages us to acknowledge the significance of Hitchcock’s charged
props. Fiévet sees superimposition in the service of spatial montage
as a strategy with the capacity to instigate analytical processes, to
98 Hi t ch co ck an d C on t e m p o r ar y A r t

encourage viewers to consider what might be revealed and learned

about the operation of images broadly and Hitchcock’s cinematic
images specifically.
In Circulations, Fiévet takes a different approach to spatial mon-
tage, eschewing superimposition for a slightly more traditional mul-
tiscreen orientation, though with one exception. In this work, five
monitors are mounted on a wall. Each plays in extreme slow motion
an excerpt from North by Northwest (1959). These altered sequences
appear and disappear, generating different sets of juxtapositions. At
one point, Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint’s romantic embrace on
the bottom screen appears along with Grant’s run through the corn-
stalks. At another, this romantic interlude shares space with the tanker
explosion, the image of a coastal sunset, and a close-up of Saint in
conversation. However, the screens themselves are organized accord-
ing to a particular logic. The top two showcase scenes of pursuit, con-
frontation, and danger. The two middle screens are reserved for Grant
and Saint, respectively, and their interactions, which can be read as a
conversation or, because of their spatial orientation, confrontation.
The bottom screen, centered beneath the other four, features the
actors’ romantic embrace. All five are linked thematically through the
image that appears on the floor beneath them (or on the ceiling above
depending on the installation of the work). Here, we find a 30-minute
projection that roves over J. W. M. Turner’s Snow Storm—Steam Boat
off a Harbour’s Mouth (1842). Again, the link between Turner and
Hitchcock is both aesthetic and thematic. Fiévet explains that the cir-
cular lines of force in Turner’s painting “affect the composition of the
shots playing out on the screens,” while the subject of the storm finds
its echo on several registers within Hitchcock’s scenes of tumult and
confrontation.20
In Infrastructure and Circulations, various forms of spatial mon-
tage are used to activate the space of the films, the paintings, and the
gallery in which these works are installed. In Circulations, encounter-
ing a projection of Turner’s painting on the floor (or ceiling) draws
special attention to the physical structure and realities of the institu-
tional space that mediates the art contained therein and establishes a
temporal gap between film and painting. And, like the ever-shifting
spatial montage on the wall, this maneuver prevents us from getting
lost in the subject of the painting or narrative of the film. Instead, it
prompts us to read both as carefully constructed images with histories
and alliances, contexts and intentions. Infrastructure accomplishes
much the same thing through superimposed images that spur sur-
face oscillations between the painted and the filmic image. However,
 S p a t i al M o n t a g e , T e m p or al Co l l a g e 99

the image that blends Saenredam’s church interior with Hitchcock’s

interiors in an effort to suggest how depth of space is manufactured
differently is back projected on a large screen, a decision that brings an
ostensible concern with surface into collision with the effect of depth.
And however much the reality of these spaces is elided by their super-
imposition, it nevertheless reads as an image into which the viewer
could conceivably enter. This is an effect of back projection and one
that accounts for its popularity in much filmic installation art where
the aim is to open up representational space for the viewer.
Back projection or, more specifically, rear projection in a different
sense is also put to use in the service of spatial montage by Lewis. While
the gallery presentation of Lewis’s films often involves their back pro-
jection onto a large screen, a recent series of films grapples with rear
projection as its subject and of the kind once employed by Hollywood
and especially Hitchcock. But unlike Fiévet’s explorations, Lewis’s
works, while certainly driven by cinephilia and epistemophilia, are not
explicit interventions into Hitchcockian film. As we shall see, their
motivations lie elsewhere. Nevertheless, I want to turn my attention
to some of Lewis’s rear projection films in order to see how practices
not ostensibly concerned with Hitchcock can, by virtue of the critical
discourses imposed upon them, lead to productive analytical encoun-
ters with Hitchcockian cinema. In fact, I will argue that Lewis’s works
can activate and refresh our engagement with Hitchcock by pointing
to aspects of his filmmaking practice that have received surprisingly
short shrift in the scholarship on his films. In short, there is much we
can learn about Hitchcock from Lewis, even though Lewis did not set
out to teach us about Hitchcock.
Lewis’s films, shot using an array of cinematic technologies, are
typically short, devoid of sound, and imagined only for exhibition in
gallery spaces. They engage with histories of painting, architecture,
and film, often bringing all three to bear upon one another, as we
shall soon see in the works in question here. The titles of Lewis’s
films are almost never cryptic, but privilege the geographical sites
at which they were filmed and alert us in advance to the syntax or
trajectory of the camera. They prepare us for what we are about to
see and, to varying degrees, focus our attention on content and/or
structure: Algonquin Park, Early March (2002), Rush Hour, Morning
and Evening, Cheapside (2005), Spadina: Reverse Dolly, Zoom, Nude
(2006), and Willesden Laundrette; Reverse Dolly, Pan Right, Friday
Prayers (2010). His practice is one conceptually aligned with certain
principles in structuralist filmmaking and informed by a deep commit-
ment to investigating the connections between aesthetics and politics.
100 Hi t ch co ck an d C on t e m p o r ar y A r t

For instance, Children’s Games: Heygate Estate (2002) offers much

more than a dolly ride through the elevated walkways of this con-
demned south Elephant and Castle housing complex. It is also an
intervention into the architectural legacy of modernity, confronting
the site’s history and future as ruin, as well as the public and critical
discourses about the regeneration scheme under which it is set to be
demolished.
According to David Campany, Lewis’s works possess what
Raymond Bellour has called a “Lumière drive,” a tendency on the
part of contemporary visual artists to explore the aesthetic hallmarks
of the earliest films and to recreate for the viewer the excitement of
seeing something for the first time.21 Works exhibiting this drive are
defined by their “preference for the long take, simple apparatus and
almost forensic attention to duration and movement.”22 They return
to the very basics of camera movement by isolating pans or zooms
for analysis in order to affirm the impact such devices have on our
experience of space, time, and subject. But for Lewis, these analyses
can reveal something about the histories of image making, the social
effects of technologies of vision, and the cultural experience of time,
space, and the built environment.23 Lewis has encouraged this asso-
ciation between his films and those of the Lumière brothers, evok-
ing their name and work in reflections on his practice. For instance,
Lewis’s structural decision to make many of his earlier films the length
of a roll of 35mm film, to capture and project unedited what crosses
the camera’s path and ultimately “to see what things look like as film”
harkens back to the Lumières’s early cinematic experiments.24 Critical
commentary on Lewis has attended to how this is writ large across his
films, recalling often and in great detail the visual poetry and analytic
impetus behind these very first films. This deep connection between
the two filmmakers has prompted Phillip Alain Michaud to describe
Lewis’s work through the Lumières’s films:

The Lumière cameramen tried less to capture images of the world around
them than to use these as a touchstone, in order to analyze the power
of the moving image. The endless processions of animals, soldiers and
vehicles, of people entering and leaving ports, factories and stations, the
erratic movements of passers-by and the general movement of objects
across the field of vision, or even the imperceptible movement of foli-
age enlivening the background of the Lumière brothers’ images free
them from photographic inertia and become the means for presenting
filmic devices and structures. The Lumières’ cinema is about construct-
ing a field of vision where moving objects or people tell a story and
 S p a t i al M o n t a g e , T e m p or al Co l l a g e 101

provide a sense of proportion. It is the cameraman’s task to show the

space in which the action is set, being crossed by an activity, event or
movement that materializes the surface, albeit imperceptibly.25

This Lumière drive is strong in Lewis’s practice, governing the cre-

ation of his formal analytical gestures. However, if, in the interest of
symmetry, we wish to invoke a connection with yet another early film
pioneer, we might select Georges Méliès. I certainly wouldn’t go so far
as to say that a Méliès drive propels Lewis’s more recent work with rear
projection or with composite spaces as in Outside the National Gallery
(2011), nor would I want to position these two pioneers at opposite
ends of a cinematic continuum as is often done. Rather, I invoke the
magician-filmmaker to acknowledge the visual trickery and plays with
illusionism that have entered into Lewis’s latest projects. This new
impulse does not replace the more straightforward Lumièresque filmic
grammar, which remains the dominant structuring force. Instead,
when the Lumières meet Méliès in Lewis’s films, we are made privy to
a kind of visual syntax of illusion. But it is illusion of a very specific kind
that involves experimentation with spatial montage, temporal collage,
and the intersection of these models in rear projection itself.
In what follows, I want to focus on what Lewis’s experiments with
rear projection accomplish by pointing us back to Hitchcock. I want to
consider how Lewis’s films might refocus our approach to Hitchcock
and direct us to consider the image histories, methods for construct-
ing illusion, and self-reflexive modernity that lie at the heart of some
of his classical Hollywood films. This feat is perhaps even more aston-
ishing given the fact that the works in question here, Rear Projection
(Molly Parker) (2006) and Nathan Phillips Square, A Winter’s Night,
Skating (2009), are not, as mentioned previously, overt engagements
with Hitchcock and that any influence, according to Lewis, is sub-
conscious and minor at best.26 In fact, what seems to be a strong
connection between Lewis and Hitchcock was first manufactured by
reviewers and is thus borne out of critical discourses and not out of
the fabric of his creative practice. It is a connection foisted upon the
works after rather than before the fact. As such, Lewis’s cinephilia
and epistemophilia are of a different order than those operative in the
other case studies discussed here. Given Lewis’s approach to cinema,
his dedication to the art as well as his practice of viewing and discuss-
ing films with Laura Mulvey, it is rather evident that he is a cinephile.
Given the Lumière drive that structures so many of his films, his is
a practice also motivated by a strong epistemophilia.27 His work is
102 Hi t ch co ck an d C on t e m p o r ar y A r t

defined by a commitment to the critical analysis of what film is, how

it functions, how it describes and structures our world, and how it
transforms physical reality into an image. And despite interests that
lie elsewhere, Lewis’s rear projection films have the capacity to initiate
a meaningful, critical engagement with Hitchcock’s inventive use of
rear projection.
Rear projection (also referred to as back projection or process pho-
tography) was first used in Hollywood films during the 1930s and
was eventually replaced by more sophisticated technical methods by
the 1970s.28 Footage shot on location elsewhere was projected on a
screen in front of which actors would play out a scene. These filmed
images replaced painted backdrops and were thus intended to appear
more convincing. It was a special effect that also permitted films to be
made more cheaply and safely by keeping stars in the studio. Faraway
places came to the actors rather than the actors going to faraway
places. And in dangerous car chases, it was images of city streets or
vistas off plunging cliffs that moved, not the car in which the actors
sat. But, as Julie Turnock explains in one of the very few pieces of
scholarly literature on the subject, the use of rear projection had far
reaching implications for the aesthetics of classical Hollywood film:
“Rear projections affected, and to a great degree controlled, many
aspects of production, including arrangement of mise-en-scene, size
of the studio, staging of the actors, camera movement, focus, light-
ing, and sound recording.”29 Basic methods of filming had to change
in order to accommodate the transparencies or process shots used.30
This led to what Laura Mulvey identifies as one of rear projection’s
inherent paradoxes: while the use of images filmed in actual locations
was supposed to imbue the scene with a degree of authenticity, it
forced actors to make what appeared to be very artificial movements
as they walked on treadmills, simulated driving, or pretended to battle
a range of harsh climatic elements. The result is often quite jarring
for this reason and for the simple fact that the rear-projected image
was often noticeably different from the filmed image of actors in the
foreground. It was typically grainer, seemingly flatter, and defined by
a different quality of light. Generally, it possessed a different aesthetic
character.
Rear projection also revealed fractures in the Hollywood system.
As Turnock explains, the flawed aesthetic of rear projection tended to
be a bigger problem for studio technicians who were often unsatisfied
with their own results than for directors or audiences.31 This disagree-
ment was especially pronounced in the case of the production of some
of Hitchcock’s films. Production designer, Robert Boyle, took issue
 S p a t i al M o n t a g e , T e m p or al Co l l a g e 103

with the look of the rear projection in Marnie, despite Hitchcock’s

insistence that it “looked fine.”32 In response to his experience work-
ing as chief set designer on The Birds Boyle suggested that, “if he
could have, [Hitchcock] would have done everything in studio, with-
out ever going outside.”33 But these kinds of fractures, more pro-
nounced with Hitchcock than perhaps any other director, points to
Hitchcock as a kind of special case in the history of rear projection.
For whereas other directors used rear projection for expediency and
as a matter of common institutional practice, Hitchcock used it for
aesthetic purposes and for a much longer period than others, a period
spanning the history of the technology itself and even beyond, well
into the 1970s when it was all but abandoned by other directors for
other more convincing visual effects that had by then become readily
available.
It is perhaps for these reasons that Hitchcock has become more
closely associated with rear projection than any other director, the
paradigm case and the name invoked almost without fail whenever
rear projection is, however infrequently, addressed. Hitchcock shows
us what rear projection can accomplish beyond its original purpose, a
capacity brought to light in the scholarly responses to damning reviews
of The Birds and Marnie. For instance, Robin Wood surmised that
Marnie’s overtly artificial backdrops—painted and rear projected—
were used very much intentionally to show that the “constrictedness of
Marnie’s life belongs essentially to the world of unreality.”34 Likewise,
Christopher Morris suggests that The Birds’ use of rear projection,
along with other noticeable visual effects called attention to itself in
order that audiences recognize those avian menaces as constructed
visual effects. He argues that Hitchcock “wanted to call attention to
[rear projection], to flaunt it subtly.”35 In this way, the rear-projected
image, its status as both belonging and not belonging to the diegesis,
its spatial and temporal disjunctions, its artificiality in the context of
narrative fiction, and its reality effects that stem from its documentary
nature, inform various Hitchcockian scenes and narratives in complex
ways. According to Dominique Païni, Hitchcock’s rear projections
worked this way since he started using them in the early 1930s. In a
catalog essay for his exhibition, Hitchcock and Art: Fatal Coincidences,
cocurated with Guy Cogeval, Païni itemizes the use of rear projection
across Hitchcock’s oeuvre, offering astute analyses of the complex and
creative ways in which the device was put to work. He too argues that
“the frequency and manner in which [Hitchcock] uses it points to
a significance that goes beyond mere technical convenience.”36 He
also shows how Hitchcock’s use of rear projection was not consistent,
104 Hi t ch co ck an d C on t e m p o r ar y A r t

but tailored to the concerns of each individual film. In some films,

Hitchcock appealed to its visual instability, while in others its overt
artificiality, capacity for distraction, or the unease generated through
the creation of an aggregate space.37
Because of the strong link between rear projection and Hitchcock,
it is unsurprising that Hitchcock should be invoked in the reviews
of Lewis’s recent rear projection works. For example, Sarah Milroy
reads Rear Projection (Molly Parker) as homage to Hitchcock while
Michelle Jacques uses Hitchcock as her example of rear projection’s
original form.38 Likewise, Hitchcock is invoked in several Lewis
catalog essays, including Michael Connor’s contribution to Mark
Lewis: Essays and David Campany’s addition to the Cold Morning
catalog.39 However, the most interesting connection is elucidated
and even somewhat metaphorically enacted in Laura Mulvey’s article
“A Clumsy Sublime?”40 Here, she addresses Hitchcock’s uses of rear
projection and Lewis’s rear projection works in a way that masterfully
mimics rear projection itself. Each filmmaker occupies his own space
in the analysis and it is through their proximity that connections
emerge. Lewis’s use of rear projection is not considered as a response
to Hitchcock’s (except for Mulvey’s brief mention that Saboteur’s
(1942) dance sequence made an impression on him, something I
plan to pursue in a moment).
While Hitchcock is invoked as a matter of course in discussions
about Lewis’s rear projection films, Lewis himself does not acknowl-
edge an influence. Instead, he identifies Tay Garnett’s Her Man (1931)
as the film that sparked his interest in this outmoded technology.41 In
fact, he explains that he is “not so interested in Hitchcock or at least
not interested enough to quote or cite [him].”42 He acknowledges
why the interest in Hitchcock among artists is so prevalent, attribut-
ing it to the visibility of the director’s hand, which has transformed
filmic moments into “kinds of readymades for thinking about the rela-
tionship of film and art,” but still believes that his films are “a bit too
mannered.”43 I mention this because I want to stress again that it
is through discourse, through critical reviews and commentaries on
Lewis’s work that a connection between Lewis and Hitchcock has
been forged. But by bringing Lewis and Hitchcock into close contact
with one another, it becomes apparent that the former’s practice can
shed much light on the latter’s. In fact, Lewis’s rear-projected works
do more than share an investment in a particular cinematic technol-
ogy. They reveal the possibilities of rear projection as a technology and
as an aesthetic strategy in Hitchcock’s films. Moreover, Lewis’s films
also intersect with other facets of Hitchcock’s filmmaking practice,
 S p a t i al M o n t a g e , T e m p or al Co l l a g e 105

other formal innovations, and with some of the art historical influ-
ences that have imprinted themselves on Hitchcock’s oeuvre.
For Lewis, rear projection is a “form of montage, bringing two
different kinds of images together with their own time, their own
spatial organisation, their own history, etc.”44 It is also a technology
that heralded the modernity of film. He argues that film “only became
fully and definitively ‘modern’” when “someone had the great idea to
actually put film inside of film.”45 Put another way, this is the moment
when “film films itself” and thus adopts the kind of reflexivity and
awareness of its own condition of being at the heart of a Greenbergian
modernism.46 Moreover, it is the moment when film joined the other
arts in their formal experiments with the acknowledgment of surface
and the destruction of the illusion of depth.47 As Lewis explains,

montage is very much a concern for art of the early twentieth century
and the emphasis on this was very much part of the emphasis on the
material of picture making and the dissolution of the figure ground
relationship. This is what is happening in parallel with film that by the
late 1930s had more or less settled into conventional story telling with
conventional composition. Rear projection, invented perhaps out of
economic and technical exigencies, introduces into mainstream film a
trace or mark of this other history of picture making.48

Such traces or marks can be found in uses of rear projection throughout

the 1930s. In a film like Her Man, for instance, Lewis sees how “two
types of film—documentary and fiction—are montaged together.”49
Such traces are also evident in Lewis’s films, Rear Projection (Molly
Parker) and Nathan Phillips Square, A Winter’s Night, Skating.
However, here they are put to work in the service of a much more
sophisticated engagement with the image, one that complicates dis-
tinctions between documentary and fiction and reflects on space,
time, and the cinema.
Rear Projection (Molly Parker) continues to abide by Lewis’s earlier
structural limit of using the length of a roll of film to determine the
length of the work. Shot on 35mm film and then transferred to high
definition, it comes in at just under four minutes. It features Canadian
actress Molly Parker standing, arms folded, in front of a rear-projected
image of the abandoned, boarded-up roadside café and gas station,
the Howlin’ Wolf (see figure 4.4). As the rear-projected image zooms
out to reveal more of the landscape, the studio camera zooms in on
Parker. Subtle patches of red among the foliage indicate that fall is just
around the corner. However, at the halfway mark, the rear-projected
106 Hi t ch co ck an d C on t e m p o r ar y A r t

Figure 4.4 Mark Lewis, Rear Projection (Molly Parker), 2006. 35mm transferred to
2K, 3'54", film still (courtesy and copyright of the artist).

scenery changes to a winter landscape and the camera in both the pro-
jection and the studio reverse their trajectory—the landscape comes
closer to us while Parker’s image recedes.
As in most of Hitchcock’s use of rear projection, there is no
attempt to hide the illusion. The two planes are aesthetically dis-
tinct. Furthermore, Parker’s clothing does not change. What seems
somewhat reasonable attire for the early fall scene—a short-sleeved,
printed, brown dress—is jarringly out of place in a winter landscape.
There is no attempt on her part to pretend to respond to her environ-
ment. She acknowledges it neither through her gaze nor by shivering
when ostensibly surrounded by snow. For the duration of the film, her
gaze remains fixed solely and intently on the camera and thereby on
us.50 So what is Molly Parker’s role in all this? Perhaps paradoxically,
to simply be herself. Which is to say to be an actor in order to alert us
to the simple fact that here, an “actor” appears in a “film.”51 But what
this simple signifying gesture accomplishes is deeply important, as it
constructs for us an exploration of a cinematic device used in fiction.
Whereas the syntax of camera movement activated in Lewis’s earlier
 S p a t i al M o n t a g e , T e m p or al Co l l a g e 107

films could constitute an engagement with a range of film genres,

practices and traditions, filming an actor in front of a rear-projection
screen narrows the referential possibilities, albeit to the still consider-
ably vast pool where this strategy was once employed: narrative fiction
film from the period of classical Hollywood cinema.52 But by virtue of
the alignment of rear projection with Hitchcock as well as two addi-
tional points of intersection with Hitchcockian cinema, this zone of
engagement begins to narrow even further. This is not to say that Rear
Projection (Molly Parker) becomes exclusively about Hitchcock. Lewis
would object to this—and rightly so—for it is a work that deals in
very precise and directed ways with a range of other formal problems
and possibilities, artistic practices and traditions, and perhaps above
all, visual expressions of modernity. Nevertheless, I want to focus on
how, perhaps in spite of itself, Rear Projection (Molly Parker) encour-
ages us to think through no less than three distinctive Hitchcockian
threads in very productive ways: rear projection, the Vertigo zoom,
and Hitchcock’s painterly influences.
The rear-projected image is unmistakable and immediately appar-
ent, perhaps the very first thing we notice about Rear Projection
(Molly Parker) even if we skip the didactic panel that announces its
title. As such, Lewis revives an obsolete image technology, bringing
it out of the past and into the present, thereby bringing cinema’s past
and present into collision. It is a nostalgic maneuver, not necessarily
with an affective charge, but an aesthetic one (as is now commonly
the case in contemporary cultural expressions of the sentiment). It
is what Marc LeSueur describes as a deliberately archaic gesture, the
creation of a new image using the strategies and tools and thus the
“look” of now antiquated cinematic technologies.53 Such revivals
of the past tend to evoke criticisms of depthless allusion or the cre-
ation of pastness without historical substance. However, as Mulvey
argues, Lewis’s particular use of rear projection is best evaluated
with recourse to the idea, originating in the work of André Breton,
that the outmoded may in fact contain revolutionary energies. As
she explains,

rear projection . . . shares, if only coincidentally, modernism’s predilec-

tion for producing a tension between representations and their material-
ity. A reflection on this kind of coincidence at the current technological
moment . . . raises questions about time and its passing: for instance,
how an aesthetic of the past, however archaic, might still resonate in
the present, how rethinking the past through the present alters its sig-
nificance without distorting its historical specificity.54
108 Hi t ch co ck an d C on t e m p o r ar y A r t

Lewis’s use of rear projection during the first decade of the twenty-first
century further fuels its revolutionary potential for it brings to light
some of “the utopian aspirations of modernity [that] have seemed
relegated to an absolute past.”55 For Mulvey, it is especially ironic
that “as the financial and political structures of ‘post-modern’ neo-
liberalism come crashing down, the questions and principles posed
by modernity return, ghost-like, into the present conjuncture.”56 In
other words, Lewis picked an opportune moment to revive a practice
deeply informed by the concerns of modernity but which also speak
to the uncertainties and disruptions of the present. Past and present
collide, as do the spaces and temporalities contained within the rear-
projected image.
Once the rear projection cues us to think of Hitchcock, it becomes
difficult to banish his specter from our experience of Lewis’s film. For
what we might notice next as the image begins to move is a version, in
extreme slow motion, of what is often called the Vertigo zoom. Both
cameras—in studio and on location—operate with carefully planned
symmetry, mimicking in a deliberate way the dolly zoom closely iden-
tified with Hitchcockian cinema. As Lewis explains, this effect is gen-
erated by

dollying against the zoom, in one instance, and in the second instance by
zooming against the dolly. Effectively using a motion control machine,
I calibrated these two movements (one inside the lens, the other the
real spatial move of the camera on tracks), so that they cancelled each
other out. What this means is that the object in the middle-ground
stays in exactly the same position but the foreground and background
are either stretched or flattened (depending on which of the two above
you are doing).57

In Rear Projection (Molly Parker), however, the vertigo effect this cin-
ematographic strategy was originally intended to instill in Hitchcock’s
audiences is effaced by Lewis’s temporal manipulations. Lewis’s “dolly
zoom” is protracted and studied, while Hitchcock’s happens in a flash
or, rather, “flashes” as we follow Scottie up the stairs of the tower, to
be made privy to his experience of vertigo. Thus, while we still con-
ceivably feel or react somewhat viscerally to the spatial disjunctures
produced by rear projection in Lewis’s film, it is difficult to feel the
spatial disorientation of the Vertigo zoom as acutely as we would in
Vertigo or, also, Marnie, for instance. For the dolly zoom, a change in
speed effects a shift from an affective to a conceptual response, from
feeling to thinking about spatial disorientations and their operations.
 S p a t i al M o n t a g e , T e m p or al Co l l a g e 109

After all, Lewis’s interest lies less in the psychological effect of this
strategy and more in “the basic optical effect, how it demonstrates the
way in which perspectival depth and foreshortening are achieved.”58
This comparison of two very different uses of this cinematographic
strategy makes us aware of the importance of time to the generation
of this otherwise spatial special effect and the ways in which a tempo-
ral collage might be masquerading here as a spatial montage.59
As in many of his other films that explore the syntax of camera
movement, Lewis lays bare the mechanics of a shot, exposing how it
is constructed in order to see how it operates in film and on us. He
breaks the illusion down to its constituent components so that we
might understand how it was manufactured. This, of course, is a very
modernist gesture and of the variety that Lewis sees at work in rear
projection itself. In Rear Projection (Molly Parker), he filters a mod-
ernist trope through a modernist exercise. Armed with this knowl-
edge, we might then return to Hitchcock to see where Hitchcock’s
own modernisms lie. We might see more clearly the modernity inher-
ent in rear projection itself, the modernity of Psycho as revealed by
Mulvey, and those modernist influences that Windhausen argues are
exposed by The Phoenix Tapes.60 We might see that Lewis’s camera
is not a tool for the creation of illusion, but works to maintain our
disillusion, to reinforce the disillusion initially manufactured by rear
projection. In this way, rear projection and the Vertigo zoom work in
tandem. But they are also linked by their overt relation to Hitchcock.
We might even go so far as to suggest that they function in the way a
particularly charged object synecdochally stands in for an entire film,
standing in for what defined Hitchcock’s cinematographic inventive-
ness. Next, I want to consider a less direct connection between Lewis
and Hitchcock, and one that carries with it a certain poetic poignancy,
namely, their revival and reimagining of the same painterly traditions.
However, to do so, I need to say something more about the history of
Rear Projection (Molly Parker) and a tendency in Lewis’s practice to
remake his own films, something else he shares with Hitchcock.
Despite the marked differences between Algonquin Park, Early
March (a short silent film from 2002 of a winter landscape that
eventually reveals people playing hockey on a frozen lake) and The
Pitch (a short sound film from 1998 featuring Lewis standing in a
train station making an argument for the importance and value of
extras in film), the former is a remake of the latter.61 He remade the
film in an effort to find the “right” subject for his cinematographic
investigation. This involved putting the camera through its full focal
range, from maximum telephoto to maximum wide. He felt that
110 Hi t ch co ck an d C on t e m p o r ar y A r t

the content of The Pitch obscured what the camera did, but that the
landscape of Algonquin Park permitted its formal operations to stand
out. However, as Lewis himself admits, you cannot create an image
of the landscape of Algonquin Park without at the same time situat-
ing yourself in a much longer and well-entrenched image tradition.
It is a highly coded, charged, and mediated landscape that cannot
escape its previous representations by the Group of Seven and the
multiple, political discourses that swirl around them and their images.
And I would argue that Rear Projection (Molly Parker) cannot escape
this history either, nor Lewis’s own history of production for it too,
appears to be a different kind of remake of both Algonquin Park,
Early March and Algonquin Park, September (2001). We might even
think of it as a composite of the two that, in the spirit of rear projec-
tion, brings together the spaces and times of year referenced in these
two films. For one thing, the rear-projected footage was also filmed in
Algonquin Park. The Howlin’ Wolf sits on the side of Highway 60, the
only major road that traverses the park and the main point of access
for visitors to this highly popular camping and hiking destination. For
another, the fall scene could have been shot in September while the
winter scene in early March. Rear Projection (Molly Parker) also shares
with Algonquin Park, Early March an interest in visual trickery and
in camera’s capacity to generate spatial dislocations. Algonquin Park,
Early March begins with a blank screen. As the camera zooms out,
we recognize the white as first a sky given the tree tops at the bot-
tom of the image and then as a snow-covered lake when more trees
suddenly appear near the upper register of the frame. But just as Rear
Projection (Molly Parker) engages with a (cinematic) image history,
Algonquin Park, Early March and Algonquin Park, September engage
histories of painting. And it is here that we find our third connection
to Hitchcock, for what Lewis evokes is the very same painterly tradi-
tion that inspired Hitchcock and, conceivably, Hitchcock’s approach
to rear projection—German Romanticism.
The final image of Algonquin Park, Early March featuring skat-
ers on a makeshift rink bears a striking compositional resemblance to
Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s Hunters in the Snow (1565), a work that
influenced Lewis. However, it is Caspar David Friedrich who is most
often invoked in discussions of both Algonquin films. In Algonquin
Park, September, the connection to the German Romantic painter is
clear on the level of subject and composition. Lewis’s depiction of
a foggy lakescape recalls not only the iconic Wanderer Looking over
the Sea of Fog (1818) but also lesser-known works like Fog (1807)
and later works like Boat on the Elbe in the Early Fog (1820–25).62 In
 S p a t i al M o n t a g e , T e m p or al Co l l a g e 111

Algonquin Park, September, the wanderer may be missing, but by vir-

tue of its exhibition on a large screen often flush with the gallery floor,
we, as spectators, stand in for this figure. We look out over the screen
as Friedrich’s Ruckenfigure does. But, as Bernard Fibicher observes,
Wanderer Looking over the Sea of Fog can also be considered a precur-
sor to Algonquin Park, Early March. Fibicher explains that location
shots taken for this film echo Friedrich’s painting, one that Lewis has
closely studied. But by removing the “wanderer”—Friedrich’s human
observer—from both Algonquin Park, Early March and Algonquin
Park, September, and by replacing this figure with the camera “an
objective recording supplants the subjectively Romantic contempla-
tion of nature.” Fibicher continues, “no human figure stands in the
picture—the landscape presents itself without an intermediary. The
camera defines the fixed point of the image, while the zoom motion
defines the axis to the viewer. The focal point of Friedrich’s painting
is the wanderer, while Lewis’s film envelops the viewer so completely
that the viewer can interpret it as a painting.”63 Fibicher also argues
that in Algonquin Park, Early March, Lewis channels Friedrich’s Monk
by the Sea (1808–9) by recreating a sense of unlimited space before the
gaze of the viewer, represented in Friedrich’s painting by the monk.
Space seems unlimited in Algonquin Park, Early March too, or rather
limitless in its unfolding and constant redefinition as the camera pulls
back. Here, background becomes foreground that becomes back-
ground again, unsettling our sense of spatial relations. The camera’s
trajectory does not expose, but obscures reality until the final frames.
But even at this point, when all is ostensibly revealed and our gaze can
settle on the skaters, further doubt is introduced. For it seems wholly
unlikely that a group of people would assemble in such a remote place
to play hockey—unlikely even for Canadians.
Just as Lewis’s work can be understood, in part, through recourse
to German Romanticism, Dominique Païni seeks to understand
Hitchcock’s use of rear projection through the very same German
Romantic painters. He explains the ways in which, to quote Schlegel,
Hitchcock adopted their “habit of treating landscape as remote, not
just in geographical terms, but as though it were a distant part of the
picture, occupying the farthest visual point.”64 He continues, “when-
ever there are figures in Friedrich’s paintings, the landscape is merely
background, in every sense of the word. Instead of physical space, we
notice the space conveyed by the person’s gaze as he stares into the
distance, and this impression is similar to the one elicited by land-
scapes created using transparencies in Hitchcock’s films.”65 I would
add too that even in works where the human presence is absent, as
112 Hi t ch co ck an d C on t e m p o r ar y A r t

in Friedrich’s Fog, the distinction between the rock outcropping

that occupies just a small portion above the bottom frame and the
misty, barely discernable seascape appear markedly removed from one
another, in terms of space, quality of light, and time of day. The split
here between foreground and background is so sharp that it relegates
each plane to a different world.
But what these worlds are or, rather, how we read these worlds
because of this aesthetic differentiation can result in some interest-
ing conceptual trajectories. In some instances—and to transpose
Baudrillard’s assessment of the role of Disneyland in American life—it
seems as though the background exists in Friedrich and Hitchcock’s
works simply to convince us that the foreground is real. And yet, the
irony of this with respect to Hitchcock is that it ought to be the other
way around. As Païni suggests, rear projection amounts to “a minia-
ture documentary in a fictional whole.”66 In Rear Projection (Molly
Parker), however, something altogether different happens. Fiction
and documentary seem to collapse in both planes. As noted above,
Molly Parker is an actress and a figure from the world of Hollywood
fiction. But in Lewis’s film she does not act, she does not pretend to
be anyone else. Instead, she simply appears. The Howlin’ Wolf is not
a stage set; it is a real abandoned place on Highway 60 in Ontario.
(I know this for certain, I have driven past it many times on my way
into the Algonquin backcountry.) And yet, the abrupt seasonal shift, a
trick of the cinema, effaces its documentary force and imbues it with a
sense of fiction. Lewis thereby turns the fiction/documentary distinc-
tion at issue in Rear Projection (Molly Parker) on its head, alerting us
to the potential paradoxes that emerge when two spaces and times are
forced together in this way. And, like Hitchcock, he shows us how
productive these paradoxes can be.
Something similar happens in Nathan Phillips Square, A Winter’s
Night, Skating (see figure 4.5). However, something more happens
here too in a way that leads us directly back to Hitchcock and, in par-
ticular Saboteur. This work also comes in at four minutes and consists of
a 35mm image and 4K image transferred to 2K for presentation. The
background was filmed on location in Toronto with approximately
60 skating extras while the foreground was filmed in a Los Angeles
studio. The two protagonists, whose feet we do not see, are skating
against the rotation of a slowly revolving plastic rink.67 Unsurprisingly,
this results in a distinct difference in image quality between the two
planes. For instance, the background looks considerably “older” than
the foreground, as though filmed many years earlier. In this way, it
is suggestive of a temporal collage and we cannot help but see the
 S p a t i al M o n t a g e , T e m p or al Co l l a g e 113

Figure 4.5 Mark Lewis, Nathan Phillips Square, A Winters Night, Skating, 2009.
Single screen projection, 35mm and 4K transferred to 2K and 35mm, 4', film still
(courtesy and copyright of the artist).

different times or eras encoded into the grains of the aesthetically

distinct images. In Lewis’s film, the rear-projected image captures the
cityscape that constitutes the perimeter of Toronto’s Nathan Phillips
Square outdoor skating rink. The studio footage tracks two skaters,
both professionals hired by Lewis, as they dance on the ice. Here it
is not nature that is made remote through rear projection, but other
people and the iconic elements of Toronto’s “modest” modern archi-
tecture, about which I will say more in a moment. In this way, Nathan
Phillips Square, A Winter’s Night, Skating points back to a specifically
and uniquely Hitchcockian use of rear projection, one not determined
by travel budget or safety concerns, but by purely aesthetic goals in a
scene involving a dancing couple.68 In Lewis’s film, like Hitchcock’s
Saboteur, the rear projection is wholly unnecessary, for it would
have been just as easy, if not easier, to film Lewis’s skating couple or
Hitchcock’s dancing couple on location. In what follows, I want to
tease out the significance of their formal decisions and consider what
Lewis’s aesthetic pathways back into Saboteur allow for. Païni’s assess-
ment of what rear projection accomplishes in Saboteur is a useful start-
ing point, for it could apply equally well to Lewis’s film. For Païni, the
sequence in question, which features (Pat) Priscilla Lane and (Barry)
Robert Cummings dancing at a spy-infested party from which they
seek to escape, is “a perfect example of the dramatic, poetic and visual
114 Hi t ch co ck an d C on t e m p o r ar y A r t

power of Hitchcock’s transparencies.” He explains that “the trans-

parency that suddenly appears isolates them, spirits them away from
the surrounding action and characters. This cinematic sleight-of-hand
lends the situation an air of enchantment and, assisted by the tender
words Cummings murmurs to his partner (“This moment belongs
to me”), speaks to the viewer’s subconscious.”69 I would argue that
Hitchcock’s self-reflexive use of rear projection is even more pro-
nounced and intricately layered than what Païni suggests and that
there are even more ways in which he primes the audience to acknowl-
edge rear projection’s many narrative and affective uses.
An example shows this. After Pat and Barry descend the staircase
into the ballroom, Pat alerts us to the “unreality” of the situation and
the people that occupy that space. She says, concerned, “This is awful.
It’s like a bad dream. All these people here, isn’t there anyone we can
trust?” It is quickly established that the answer to her question is a
resounding “no.” The people that ostensibly surround them might as
well not even be there. They are out of reach, removed and remote, for
no one is able to assist them in their escape. Indeed, these people are
literally removed from the space inhabited by Pat and Barry because
they belong to the rear-projected image. As Pat and Barry search out
potential helpers, the other partygoers move in and out of the front
plane and thus the space of narrative action in a dizzying array that
destabilizes space and often makes it difficult to discern one image
plane from another. The couple is rebuked at every turn, with each
rejection reinforcing what is happening aesthetically in this sequence.
First, Barry is accused of being drunk and thus in a different mind
space. He is also chastised for not even being dressed (in a tuxedo)
and thus for appearing to be visually out of place. Finally, when Barry
is knowingly addressed by one of his potential saviors as Mr. Kane, the
background that frames his shocked expression is so out of focus that
the figures are barely discernible. At this point, he might as well be
alone in the room. Barry then has an idea and exclaims, “I know where
we’ll be safe,” and whisks Pat onto the dance floor. As such, he appears
to attempt to escape one image plane by crossing over into another,
the background world of the rear projection. Pat’s remark that this
situation is “so unreal” seems to confirm that they successfully made it
into this new realm. Indeed, it is “so unreal” to her because the people
who inhabit this world are unaware of the drama unfolding in the
other parallel one and are simply “dancing and having a good time.”
At this moment, the situation also seems “unreal” to the audience as
Pat and Barry start to do precisely the same thing—dance, kiss, and
engage in small talk. As such, they become part of this background
 S p a t i al M o n t a g e , T e m p or al Co l l a g e 115

realm, removing themselves from the frantic pursuit in which they had
just moments earlier found themselves. But as they continue to dance,
and the world spins around them, it becomes clear that they have yet
again been pushed to the foreground, a foreground, once again, spa-
tially and temporally removed from the rear-projected background.
It is at this point that Barry utters the line, “This moment belongs to
me,” seemingly unaware that the space he occupies is no longer the
one he thinks he is in and that both this space and “his” moment are
about to be intruded upon. And as the rear-projected image disap-
pears, so too does Pat as she is whisked away by one of the villains.
Païni argues that rear projection is all about time. Time is certainly
key here, but as Saboteur’s scene reveals, so too is space. Here fore-
ground and background enter into a carefully choreographed dance
that destabilizes the image in wholly self-conscious and deliberate ways.
Such spatial destabilizations also operate in Nathan Phillips Square, A
Winter’s Night, Skating, a film in which the image planes are less dis-
tinct than they are in Rear Projection (Molly Parker) and in which the
limits of the planes are more difficult to identify. As in Saboteur, cer-
tain dancers cross over into the couple’s foreground. Moreover, the
couple also seems to react to the rear-projected world when the young
woman mimics a spin performed behind her. Likewise, the snowflakes
that fall in the background crossover into the realm inhabited by the
skaters, though falling rather flatly as a single curtain of flakes. At
times, the cameras appear to lose sight of the plot, as it were, with the
rear projection camera performing its own feats irrespective of what
is happening in the foreground and the studio camera losing sight
of its stars who disappear beyond the frame. At these moments, we
might start to think that the camera has its own mind, its own pre-
determined track to follow, and one that fails to regard the position
of its subject. At other points, it seems distracted by something in
the rear-projected image. Nathan Phillips Square, A Winter’s Night,
Skating thus trades in a degree of spatial uncertainty reminiscent of
Saboteur’s dance sequence. However, it also differs in two marked and
important ways. For one, it lacks the romance of the Hitchcockian
scene, however mannered this romance might appear to us now. For
another, Lewis relies on the architectural structures captured in the
rear projection in a way that implicates them in the work’s overall
conceptual program. And, the way into both of these issues is through
the film’s title.
In many ways, the title Nathan Phillips Square, A Winter’s Night,
Skating is the most romantic thing about the Lewis’s film. It har-
kens back to titles of landscape painting in its poetic reveal of subject,
116 Hi t ch co ck an d C on t e m p o r ar y A r t

conjuring for the imagination winter scenes populated with ice

skaters from seventeenth-century Dutch genre paintings or various
nineteenth-century Canadian traditions. It might also conjure up
childhood memories of nighttime skating in Nathan Phillips Square
or elsewhere, memories likely tinged with nostalgia. Lewis explains
the intent behind this work: “Whenever I am in Toronto in the win-
ter now I still skate there, and one of the things I really enjoy about
that is that when you skate at night you experience the city in a very
special romantic kind of way. As you glide across the ice you can have
the impression that you might be a movie camera mounted on a dolly
with the city appearing and disappearing through the arches above,
a montage of composition and decomposition.”70 He explains that
he wanted his films to replicate the optical intensity of the montage
effect generated by skating beneath the arches. And indeed, he does.
There are moments in the film when the arches demand our focus as
they frame and reframe the cityscape behind them. But while Nathan
Phillips Square, A Winter’s Night, Skating offers a visual intensity, it
lacks the affective intensity promised by its title and subject of two
lovers skating. This, I think, is a consequence of the rear projection
that constructs an image or, rather set of image relationships, that
are overtly artificial. In this context, the kiss shared by the skaters
also reads as cinematic rather than authentic. Their interactions appear
staged rather than sincere, harkening back to the more mannered
romantic exchanges that date some—but certainly not all—classical
Hollywood films for contemporary audiences. Their romance, like the
scene itself, is a distinctly cinematic one. Film history trumps whatever
personal history may have generated the creation of this film in the
first place and thus despite its setting in Toronto, it returns us again
to Hollywood and, by virtue of its other features and allusions, to
Hitchcock.
The second difference between Nathan Phillips Square, A Winter’s
Night, Skating and Saboteur lies in the former’s rear projection, which
features not only other people, but also Toronto’s distinctive archi-
tectural landmarks. As such, it is part of a large group of Lewis’s films
that engage with architecture and, in particular, with what he calls the
“modest” modernism of certain mid-century building initiatives. He
finds these structures in places like Toronto and in England where
designs did not strive for the limits of a modernist expressivity, but
nevertheless contained within them the impulse to be modern, to
be international. In many ways, Nathan Phillips Square, A Winter’s
Night, Skating also translates into filmic terms Lewis’s observation
that the shifting perspectives generated by moving through modern
 S p a t i al M o n t a g e , T e m p or al Co l l a g e 117

architectural spaces feels distinctly cinematic, pointing to what he

calls “a kind of strange attraction between the mobility of the moving
image and the very complex planar geometric forms that modernist
architecture has employed.”71
Something of the spirit of Lewis’s rear projection films lives on in
his most recent work, but in a way that returns us to superimposi-
tion and the distinction between spatial montage and temporal col-
lage noted earlier in relation to Anderson, LeVeque, Campbell, and
Fiévet. In Outside the National Gallery, for example, Lewis continues
his project of exploring composite or aggregate spaces. However, in
this short film, which I introduce briefly here by way of conclusion,
Lewis abandons outmoded technologies in favor of the very latest
digital tools to create a seamless and virtually undetectable temporal
collage inside of a spatial montage. The film appears to be a single
shot, but is composed of several separate elements. The right side of
the image featuring a building is one shot, the left featuring a sidewalk
another, and the sky a third. When the film begins, we see cast on
the building a shadow of a few birds perched on a small tree. As the
film progress, many more birds arrive, but curiously very few leave.
Lewis’s film may be shot outside the National Gallery, an institution
that collects images, but inside the frame of this image we witness
the collection, not just of birds, but different moments in time. This
image is not fiction in the sense that the birds we see did actually land
on that tree. It is just that they did not accumulate in that space within
the six-minute temporal frame of the film. And although this film
represents an extension of Lewis’s concerns with time, space, fiction,
cinema, and painting begun in his rear projection work, the subject of
Outside the National Gallery, the ominous accumulation of birds, the
feeling that something is not quite right, not entirely believable, well,
with apologies to Mark Lewis, I suspect you know by now where we
could go with this.
 5

The Acoustics of
V e r t i g o : Soundtracks,
Soundscapes, and Scores

P icture Scottie pursuing Madeleine up the stairs of the bell tower,

forcing himself to move against the instincts of his acrophobia. Fear
grips harder the higher he climbs and, although he knows better, he
succumbs to the temptation to look down. As the camera assumes his
viewpoint, it enacts Hitchcock’s signature Vertigo zoom, that optical
effect designed to instill in us the same dizzying disorientation expe-
rienced by Scottie. It is a jarring moment that unsettles looking itself,
making us doubt our vision. Now imagine this scene silent. Imagine
it without Bernard Herrmann’s score that builds the suspense and,
crucially, without that jarring shock chord that strikes at the moment
the image seeks to induce us with vertigo. This little anecdote should
reveal an obvious fact, one stressed in the literature on the film: the
soundtrack is incredibly important. Indeed, it is so central to Vertigo
(1958) that a number of artists have devoted their attention to this
aspect of the film alone, shunning its otherwise rich and complex
images. This is the subject of the present chapter, which explores how
these artists have engaged with the uses and significance of sound-
tracks, soundscapes, and scores in Hitchcock’s films and Vertigo in
particular.
Following a brief discussion of how the exceptionality of Vertigo’s
score is in large part responsible for its status as a favorite object
among artists interested in sound, I will purse two sets of case stud-
ies. The first will provide a cursory look at the variety of approaches
taken in explorations of sound in Hitchcock and include mention
of Les LeVeque’s 4 Vertigo (picking up on the analysis begun in
the previous chapter), Gregory Chatonsky’s Vertigo@home (2007),
and Rea Tajiri’s Hitchcock Trilogy (1987). Then, I will offer a more
120 Hi t ch co ck an d C on t e m p o r ar y A r t

in-depth commentary on Christian Marclay’s Vertigo: Soundtrack for

an Exhibition (1990) and Douglas Gordon’s Feature Film (1999) to
consider the complex ways in which each artist makes use of Vertigo’s
soundtrack and score, respectively.
Vertigo has emerged as the clear favorite among artists who wish
to explore all facets of cinematic sound.1 Very few look elsewhere
in Hitchcock’s oeuvre for acoustic materials to generate works that
address a range of issues including the relationships between sound
and image and sound and space as well as the mnemonic power of
music. There are several reasons why Vertigo has achieved this privi-
leged status and why, for contemporary artists, Vertigo represents
sound in the way that Hitchcock represents the cinema. While the
popularity of the film as a whole has much to do with this, so too do
the specific attributes of Bernard Hermann’s score.
Herrmann’s composition is highly distinctive and recognizable and,
like Hitchcock’s iconic images, has been appropriated and repeated
in several contexts and with a good degree of regularity.2 According
to Jack Sullivan, Vertigo is a film “driven by music practically from
beginning to end,” with a degree of complexity and overabundance
of musical “ideas” that could have sustained three or four movies.3
As Sullivan notes, right at the start of production, Hitchcock warned
Herrmann that this film would need “an unprecedented amount of
music.”4 Music is certainly a force to be reckoned with, a continual
presence that often dominates. But it also makes itself felt because,
according to critics, it is, quite simply, good and interesting, “a score
that would be groundbreaking” even on its own.5 New York Times
writer Joseph Horowitz claimed that “the Vertigo score was a greater
achievement than that of many composers seeking to write the Great
American Symphony.”6 Musically, it signifies a turning point in the
history of film scores, not only looking back to classical Wagnerian
impulses but also pointing the way forward to more pared down
modernist forms of expression, as we see come to fruition in the very
minimalist score that Herrmann composed for Psycho (1960). Indeed,
much of the appeal that Vertigo’s score holds can be located in its
structure and what it brings to the film by way of its emotive affect,
capacity to reinforce narrative themes, to assume the role of narrator,
and, quite crucially, to sometimes tell a story different than the one
we are seeing.
Vertigo’s score has been subject to some of the most detailed
analyses of film music. David Cooper’s book, Bernard Herrmann’s
Vertigo: A Film Score Handbook offers a comprehensive musicological
 T h e A co u s t i cs o f V e r t i g o 121

analysis, accounting for every bar in relation to every scene in the

film.7 Two years later, Cooper published a more condensed analysis
and one accessible to nonmusic specialists that convincingly spelled
out the score’s narrative function. He explains that Vertigo’s score
“involves a subtle process of variation and transformation of a small
group of related ideas, which gives the impression of their being con-
stantly relit or reframed rather than being thematically developed in a
rigorous manner.”8 This heightens the sense of repetition and return,
suggesting a failure to advance in keeping with Scottie’s own inabil-
ity to break free from his doomed, repetitive behaviors. It is a kind
of cycling back that underlies the film on several registers, including
aesthetically through its many visual spirals. For Cooper, “Herrmann
thus promotes the higher-level sense of structure that spectators may
perceive in this film.”9 He echoes and foretells musically what tran-
spires narratively and what appears visually in Vertigo.
This synchronicity between what happens musically and narratively
is especially apparent with respect to Madeleine, but only up to a point
when the music starts to exceed the image in terms of what is revealed.
Images of Madeleine are scored with a particular theme that, accord-
ing to Jochen Eisentraut, reaches across two octaves in an effort to
“make a connection here with Vertigo’s concern with heights, dizzi-
ness and fear.”10 While this helps to establish Madeleine’s role in rela-
tion to the theme of the film, other cues—both cinematographic and
musical—establish her connection to Carlotta. However, the music
makes this connection sooner when, at key points, Madeleine’s theme
transforms into the theme reserved for Carlotta’s portrait.11 This con-
firms the artifice that is Madeleine, her status as an image, a represen-
tation, even before we are made aware of her deceits. For Stan Link,
Madeleine’s distinctive theme functions as a leitmotif by calling on “a
musical work’s own powers of memory, anticipation, reflection and
reaction.”12 Indeed, it anticipates what is to come in other ways too,
offering premonitions in a way that the images do not. For instance,
as Link observes, the Hispanic cultural associations of the Habanera
rhythm early in Vertigo and associated with Carlotta “help generate
a kind of fate in foretelling the later importance of the old Spanish
Mission.”13
Herrmann’s score emphasizes what we see not only in the service
of narrative but also in the service of affect. For instance, as noted, the
famed Vertigo zoom would not have the same disorienting effect were
it not for the shock chord composed to accompany it. Link describes
this shock cord as the musical equivalent of a cartoon eye-popping
122 Hi t ch co ck an d C on t e m p o r ar y A r t

moment, which “intensifies the seeing-hearing relationship” at this

moment. Indeed, it is a moment defined by both the eye and ear, for
whereas the eye registers Hitchcock’s cinematic induction of vertigo,
the ear, responsible for vertigo and balance in the first place, must reg-
ister a dissonant sound that “engenders Scottie’s point of view both
objectively as an actively selected ‘sight’ and subjectively in his patho-
logical response to it.”14 For others, this zoom engenders such visceral
responses because of the vertical montage to which it is subjected,
that is, borrowing from Eisenstein, a “layered mirroring of different
artistic strata of the filmic text, such as image and music” in a way that
adds density to the scene.15
Because Vertigo’s soundtrack, and especially Herrmann’s score,
play a central role in articulating the film’s themes, characters, and
even narrative moves, they are of great interest to artists invested in
Vertigo, film sound, and sound, more generally, in relation to space
and memory. The creative practices borne out of these interests
reflect in sophisticated ways on the function of sound and our rela-
tion to it in different types of spaces—the cinema theater, the gallery,
the auditorium, and the home. Many are situated somewhat uniquely
between existing cultural practices, drawing variously from histories
of sound art, experimental music, found footage, and even the more
conventional uses of sound in the cinema. What they reveal, in the
process, are the discourses that attend these histories and the some-
times very different ways of conceiving sound in the domains of art,
music, and film. For instance, as David Ryan explains, “when video
or sound installations exist in a gallery, they bypass the conventions
of the theater, TV, the cinema, the auditorium—contexts where they
must convince over time.”16 The linearity of sound, or what Ryan
calls its “wholeness” is no longer as much a factor in a space where
visitors might enter at any point during the performance of the work.
As such, expectations of, and critical responses to, sound practices
shift quite drastically as types of sound migrate from one space to
another.
However, what we find in the sound works devoted to Hitchcock is
a subtle undermining of some of the facets of sound art as articulated
by critics like Ryan. For in sound art practices that take Vertigo as their
subject, making use of the entire soundtrack or significant portions
of it in ways that preserve its acoustic integrity, conventions of film
spectatorship do persist. In certain respects, they even continue to
structure how one ought to ideally engage with the work, namely, by
starting at the beginning, watching an accompanying moving image,
 T h e A co u s t i cs o f V e r t i g o 123

and consuming the work in a darkened room. Furthermore, whereas

works in the sound art tradition, especially those associated with
Fluxus, were performative in nature and accompanied by sculptural
components, those that explore the components of film sound are
often aligned with the moving—though not necessarily cinematic—
image. Instead, we might be tempted to locate art historical ante-
cedents for the works in question here in Futurist and Dada sonic
experiments. But in these too, sound was secondary to the image.
However avant-garde in its conception, sound in these two traditions
was not the primary and determining material.17
As such, and despite the art institutional contexts in which we find
the sound works at issue here, the competing art historical lineages
that either evacuate the image entirely or relegate sound to a second-
ary role might help us less with situating these practices than look-
ing to the world of film. While we certainly also ought to look to
experimental music to deal with “found sound,” a strategy locatable
in earlier musique concrète practices, in spirit, the case studies here
have a greater affinity with found footage filmmaking. By looking at
these works through the lens of found footage, some rich possibili-
ties (but also important differences) for conceptualizing this practice
start to become apparent.18 When critics of sound art speak of found
sound or sounds as objets trouvés, they are typically referring to sounds
in our environment that have been prerecorded. For the most part,
this does not include music or sound effects composed for another
cultural artifact. As such, the commentary tends to focus on the rela-
tionship between a sound and its source and the “perceptive reality of
sound.”19 But the “found sounds” in the works under consideration
here are ones that have been crafted to serve a purpose, attached to
a narrative and image track. They carry with them not only the per-
ceived source that generated them—a car engine revving, footsteps
clacking—but also the filmic context in which they were mobilized.
The same is true for images in found footage film, a strategy of appro-
priation deeply entwined with concerns about memory and history. In
both found footage and the Hitchcockian sound works, portions of
the image or soundtrack are appropriated and reconfigured in some
way. Sound effects might be isolated and scores manipulated, though
typically not to the point that they lose their familiar sonic signature
and thus capacity to evoke their original source. This is because the
original is still very important to the practice at hand. The works
under consideration here are not about generic film sound, but about
Hitchcock and, more specifically, about Vertigo.
124 Hi t ch co ck an d C on t e m p o r ar y A r t

The kaleidoscopic effect achieved through spatial montage in

LeVeque’s 4 Vertigo is duplicated in the algorithmically modified
score that accompanies this work. In other words, LeVeque subjects
Herrmann’s composition to an equation similar to that which he
used to restructure the images. As LeVeque explains, “The sampled
Overture was duplicated four times and sequentially reassembled at
1/30 of a second interval so that each 1/30 of a second of sound
repeats four times. The sound track was then re-mixed boosting the
bass frequencies and panned from left to right at one second inter-
vals generating a physically audible space that references the drama
of the original but out of sync.”20 The result of these operations is a
score whose dominant notes are protracted, but that reverberate in a
way that betrays their digital manipulation. And while these modifica-
tions produce a new score, the new sound seems, at times, at less of
a remove from the original than the images, which are often unread-
able. In other words, Herrmann’s score does a better job at resisting
the transformative effects of LeVeque’s algorithm than Hitchcock’s
images. Although both sound and image unfold in a linear fashion
that respects the trajectory of the original, the sound more than the
image holds onto and thus makes accessible this continuity. In this
way, save of course the title, it is the sound more so than the image
that assures us of LeVeque’s source material.
In this way, LeVeque’s work brings to light one of the primary
functions of a score: to link a film together, to provide continuity
between scenes and moments that might otherwise feel disjointed.
LeVeque’s “digital alchemy,” as Tay and Zimmerman call it, may well
succeed in purging from Hitchcock’s film its original dramatic force,
grounded in part in its engagements with scopophilic drives and the
gaze.21 It may also help to “dislodge the authority of the narrative”
and “the authority of desire” offering, in the process, “an exit point
from ideological baggage and the spectatorial regime.”22 But it does
not, I would argue, succeed in dislodging the “authority of linear
coherence.”23 In fact, the modified Overture helps to preserve some-
thing of the linear coherence that is no longer contained in the new
image regime foisted on us by LeVeque. It works against this new
regime in very precise ways, tempering it and reeling it in so to speak.
For whereas the refracted images flit by with great speed, the long held
notes that emerge from the din of layered sounds and the sustained
vibrations that persist as ghostly aftereffects of the original chords, are
suggestive of slow motion. They pull back against the rapid advance
of images, anchoring and grounding them.
 T h e A co u s t i cs o f V e r t i g o 125

Vertigo’s soundtrack—this time unaltered and complete with sound

effects—also provides continuity to Gregory Chatonsky’s Vertigo@
home. Over the course of approximately nine minutes, this virtual
cinephilic pilgrimage leads us through Scottie’s San Francisco, fol-
lowing his route and visiting the very same sites he did in the film.
However, Chatonsky neither filmed the journey itself, nor were any
sequences appropriated from Hitchcock’s original. As the title indi-
cates, Vertigo@home was created by Chatonsky at home, a feat made
possible by the use of Google Streetview. A function of Google Maps,
Streetview offers navigators a car’s–eye view of the roads they plan to
travel, offering a fairly clear picture of structures, landmarks, and, as
privacy advocates have lamented, people in compromising situations.
Chatonsky matches his route to Scottie’s as closely as possible, “edit-
ing” as Hitchcock did, in order to sync the soundtrack with the action
(i.e., pace of travel). When Scottie goes indoors, the screen turns black
and our only stimuli are sound effects such as Scottie’s footsteps and
a car door slamming. At these moments, the work of the Foley art-
ist becomes most apparent. We become aware of the occasional and
uncharacteristic minimalism of Vertigo’s soundtrack and the function
of its erasure of ambient sound. The sound effects are isolated from
their attendant images and from the fullness of the score that typi-
cally subsumes these sounds. In this instance, we hear only the sounds
Scottie makes, suggesting all his energy is being marshaled into look-
ing and thus signifying the interiority of his state of mind during this
pursuit.
Chatonsky’s use of appropriated sound here also raises another set
of interesting issues with respect to fact and fiction, the real and the
virtual. Specifically, it encourages us to think about fiction and artifice
in relation to sound, something we may be unaccustomed to doing.
We might readily assess the veracity of the image when confronted
with visual effects while watching a film, but rarely do we subject
sound to such scrutiny. In Vertigo@home though, such an exercise is
seemingly encouraged. Although Google Streetview offers us a virtual
tour of San Francisco, its images are read as real. They are outside the
domain of fiction and as part of a mapmaking endeavor must, by defi-
nition and necessity, reflect real physical space, real geography. This is
not to say that these images are not mediated by their technology or
aesthetic markers, something we will address in just a moment, but
that all things point to Chatonsky’s images as unmistakably “real.”
The sounds, by contrast, read as fake on every level. Sounds do not
belong in Google Streetview, which is, of course and expectedly,
126 Hi t ch co ck an d C on t e m p o r ar y A r t

silent. And indeed, the sounds we hear seem manufactured when we

concentrate on their acoustic quality alone rather than interpreting
them as sonic reflections of Scottie’s actions. In the context of Vertigo,
these sounds make enough (acoustic) sense that we readily attribute
them to Scottie. But when divorced from their image track, we come
to realize just how fabricated they are. Isolated, these sounds might
prompt us to visualize a Foley artist stomping on a stage as much as
Scottie walking down a street.
Whereas the image in Vertigo@home helps us recognize the artifice
of the sound effects, the score helps us imagine movement in the image
where none exists. As we advance down San Francisco’s streets, new
views materialize with each leap forward along the prescribed route,
coming into focus one image quadrant at a time. When accompanied
by the score, or the “binding veneer that holds a film together” as
Herrmann calls it, these continual reconstitutions of the photographic
image start to read as movement.24 This illusion of movement may
also be a byproduct of our visual memory of Vertigo, evoked by the
score as a mnemonic trigger. Images from the original might oscillate
with Chatonsky’s new images, leading us to imagine Scottie ascending
the steps of the Legion of Honor as Chatonsky instructs Streetview to
bring this structure into its sight. Such oscillations and acts of mental
superimposition are encouraged throughout Vertigo@home, though
it is our memory of Vertigo alone that is called upon as the screen
fades to black when Scottie enters the Legion of Honor or the flower
shop.
When the images of Vertigo and Vertigo@home come into contact
with one another in this way, the particular aesthetic character of
Google Streetview becomes readily apparent, something we are per-
haps unlikely to acknowledge if using this program for its intended
purposes. Setting these images to Herrmann’s score promotes their
reading through the conventions of cinema, illuminating their for-
mal quirks including jarring leaps forward, disorienting spins, skewed
perspective and depth of field, obtrusive directional lines, arrows
and notations, and the continual reformation of images that start
out blurry but gradually, quadrant by quadrant, regain clarity in a
way that betrays their digital foundation. It is a stumbling aesthetic
attached exclusively to a certain kind of space, the world of the streets,
that outdoor realm Hitchcock preferred to avoid. Yet, until recently
and before the introduction of its mobile application, Streetview was
something that could only be accessed from home, recalling the fact
that now, Vertigo too is most likely only to be consumed at home.
 T h e A co u s t i cs o f V e r t i g o 127

Like Chatonsky’s Vertigo@home, Rea Tajiri’s Hitchcock Trilogy main-

tains the integrity of Hitchcock’s soundtracks and aligns them with
newly created footage. In Tajiri’s case, this is video footage parceled
out into three separate films titled Vertigo, Psycho, and Torn Curtain.
As such, they are named for the sources of their sound and not for the
images, which allude to a variety of different genres and incorporate
a range of cinematic references. In Tajiri’s Vertigo, subtitled “Three
Character Descriptions,” the footage is comprised entirely of scroll-
ing text. It is subdivided into three sections dedicated to describing
postcards that represent Cristofano Allori’s Judith Holding the Head
of Holofernes (1613), famed Chinese writer Lu Hsun on his way to
deliver a speech at Kwanghua University in 1927, and a jewel box from
1900 manufactured by Liberty and Company and held in the design
collection of the Museum of Modern Art. The textual descriptions of
these postcards give us a fairly good sense of the subject and composi-
tion of each image. The postcards are representations of a painting, a
man walking, and a small object and thus all things we might strive to
associate with Vertigo. And yet, because they are evoked only through
textual description, we are left to do the work of conjuring up an
image. This process is guided by the soundtrack and thereby speaks to
the contextualizing force of the music to guide the formation of men-
tal images. It also speaks to its emotive power and capacity to trigger
memories, in this instance of Hitchcock’s film.
In the second and third films that comprise this trilogy, Tajiri takes
up the idea of secrets in relation to Psycho and of beginnings in rela-
tion to Torn Curtain (1966). Psycho offers us a double video portrait
of two women stealing sideways glances at each other. The image
shifts between color and black and white, evoking Psycho’s aesthetic
with the latter. Indeed, Psycho itself is also evoked through a close-up
shot that foregrounds the eye. This portrait is interrupted by brief
glimpses of a woman dancing, among other things, and reads, by the
end, like a catalog of experimental filmmaking techniques that make
use of repetition, montage, and slow motion. Torn Curtain, subtitled
“Endless Beginnings,” begins with a black-and-white image of three
heavy stage curtains parting. This footage repeats several times, always
stopping short of revealing the contents of the stage. Eventually, we
do see behind these curtains and so begins a found footage com-
pendium featuring curtains and what they conceal from Funny Girl
(1968), Meshes of the Afternoon (1943), Top Hat (1935), The Wizard
of Oz (1939), and even a cartoon. For Tajiri, then, Hitchcock’s scores
provide a cinematic soundtrack to a set of experiments with the image
128 Hi t ch co ck an d C on t e m p o r ar y A r t

and with memory, the latter being a key concern across the artist’s
practice. The scores anchor as cinematic three disparate attempts to
grapple with looking and revealing. But they also, each in their own
way, maintain an engagement with the original Hitchcock film, allud-
ing to, on different levels, themes prevalent in Vertigo (the invention
of characters and questions of appearance), Psycho (the protection of
personal secrets), and Torn Curtain (new beginnings and artifice).25
In LeVeque, Chatonsky, and Tajiri’s work we see how sound both
anchors and determines our reading of its associated ­images—images
provided by the work and evoked mentally by sonic triggers. The
familiar sounds of Hitchcock, and Vertigo in particular, ground
image tracks that are either a highly modified version of the original
(LeVeque) or entirely dissociated from it (Chatonsky and Tajiri). In
each case, sound is a dominant force that compels us to consider its
relation to the image, its original source as a score for a Hitchcock
film and, in the case of Chatonsky’s piece, the perceptive reality of
sound. Next, I want to look at two case studies in greater detail to
pursue issues around sound and space and, specifically, around the
transformation of a soundtrack into a soundscape and the score into
an installation.
Although a new set of interests is indicated by his blockbuster work,
The Clock (2010), Christian Marclay has been experimenting with
sound and music culture for the full span of his 30-year career as an
artist. Despite this, he rejects the label “sound artist,” suggesting that
such a designation misrepresents his practice, one in which sound is
simply a tool.26 Instead, he prefers the designation “sound sculptor,”
a label that speaks to an investment in the relationship between sound
and space, the material and the acoustic. Take, for instance, Tape Fall
(1998), involving a reel-to-reel recorder placed atop a 20-foot lad-
der that spills its magnetic tape onto the floor where it accumulates
against the acoustic backdrop of a recorded drip. Or the sculpture,
Virtuoso (2000), an altered 25-foot long accordion. Even such cur-
sory descriptions of these works reveal a practice with roots in Fluxus,
Cageian aesthetics, musique concrète, and Duchampian strategies of
appropriation.27 As several critics have pointed out, he treats music as
a readymade, something to be plucked from its original context, and
remade under the auspices of a newly conceived creative gesture.28
According to Liz Kotz, “by systematically adapting, misusing, and
destroying musical and non-musical materials . . . Marclay explores
the permeable boundary between notation and instrument, between
music as a set of materials and sound sources and music as a form
 T h e A co u s t i cs o f V e r t i g o 129

of writing.”29 In many ways, his lineage reads as more art historical

than musical, confirmed by his own classification of himself as a visual
artist who works with music and not a musician, despite the many
and varied performances and compositions for which he is responsi-
ble.30 Certainly, the name of his band, The Bachelors, Even, confirms
his Dadaist heritage.
The majority of the exhibitions dedicated to Marclay foreground
the arguably dominant acoustic dimensions of his practice, his col-
laborative performances and acts of interjecting sound into gallery
spaces. By comparison and, again, with the exception of The Clock, his
cinematic works, which consider sound in relation to the cinematic
image, tend to receive considerably less attention. Among the best
known of these are Telephones (1995), a seven-minute compilation
of clips involving the use of telephones and Video Quartet (2002),
an installation of four screens showing scenes derived from seven
hundred films of people playing instruments or otherwise generat-
ing noise. Included here is Janet Leigh’s “scream” in Psycho. In both
cases, these works follow a narrative trajectory of sorts. The fragments
that constitute Telephones progresses from characters dialing phones,
to phones ringing, to characters picking up receivers, to a series of
“hellos,” to snippets of conversation, to a series of good-byes (includ-
ing Tippi Hedren’s “Goodbye Mitch”), to, finally, characters hanging
up the receiver. Video Quartet begins with the tuning of instruments,
followed by their playing and, in the process, the creation of a new
score that follows a musical structure one might expect from a single
composition with variations in tempo, richness, and complexity. The
resulting score is less cacophonic and more harmonious than what
one might expect just reading a description of the work, thanks to
Marclay’s deft editing and the odd moment when all four screens sync
on a single image, note, or sound. In these works, found footage is
structured according to the logic of sound. The order of the images
is determined by the sounds associated with them and the result is a
new soundtrack for Telephones’ catalog of its subject and a new score
for Video Quartet’s spatial montage.
While Telephones and Video Quartet remix cinematic sound and the
clips to which they belong, another current in Marclay’s cinematic
works involves the separation of film image and film sound and their
reconstitution in new configurations. Up and Out (1998), which com-
bines the footage of Michael Antonioni’s Blow Up (1966) with the
soundtrack of Brian de Palma’s Blow Out (1981) is one example of this
strategy. And although this work continues to be a staple exemplar of
130 Hi t ch co ck an d C on t e m p o r ar y A r t

this form of sonic détournement in surveys of Marclay’s work, another

more radical and arguably interesting gesture of this kind has been all
but ignored in both exhibitions and catalogs.31 Vertigo: Soundtrack
for an Exhibition receives hardly a mention anywhere and its exclusion
is all the more puzzling given the expressed commitment by galler-
ies to forge bravely ahead in accommodating sound in their usually
quiet sites. Perhaps ironically, Vertigo: Soundtrack for an Exhibition,
has not made it into sound-centered shows because it has no visual
component whatsoever, no associated sculptural objects, images, text,
or notations for viewers to look at (and, thus, nothing for catalogs
to reproduce).32 It is a work, as its title clearly reveals, that offers
the sounds of Vertigo as a soundtrack to accompany a gallery visitor’s
experience of an exhibition.
In Vertigo: Soundtrack for an Exhibition, Marclay samples the
multiple components that constitute the film’s soundtrack: Bernard
Herrman’s score, the film’s sound effects, and characters’ dialogue.
He remixes, layers, and reorders these sounds, but maintains enough
of their signature and iconic features that any listener possessing even
a passing familiarity with Vertigo would be acutely aware of their
original source. The soundtrack is not continuous, but interjects at
random intervals, disrupting the ambient soundscape of the gallery
space. Kerry Brougher, who included the work in Art and Film since
1945: Hall of Mirrors, notes that these spaced out sonic intrusions
had the effect of startling the unaware gallery visitor.33 The work
intrudes on the contemplative reverie in which these visitors might
find themselves and, in so doing, brings the multisensory experience
of watching a film to bear on the experience of looking at art.34 The
interruptions enacted by Marclay’s work also engage the nature of
sensory experience itself, reminding us that while looking at some-
thing is, for the most part, a choice, and especially so in the context
of a museum, listening, often, is not. In this way, the work confronts
us with the inescapability of sound and the impossibility of shutting it
out for those who are not hearing impaired.
Marclay’s gesture here to broadcast sounds from Vertigo into the
exhibition space also plays with the notion of a soundtrack, bringing
its function, effects, and permutations into stark relief. Despite the
modifications inflicted on Vertigo, Marclay’s piece continues to func-
tion as a filmic soundtrack would, providing us with aural cues that
color how we experience and interpret what we see. Depending on
when portions of this soundtrack are heard, it can also function as a
hinge, connecting the acts of looking at two disparate works as a filmic
 T h e A co u s t i cs o f V e r t i g o 131

soundtrack might bridge two distinct images or scenes in the interest

of narrative continuity. It thereby remixes or curates the art as well,
uniting works that may otherwise have little relation. In so doing, it
brings together two typically distinct discourses—sound in art and
sound in (narrative fiction) film. Marclay’s work makes clear how the
institutional spaces that house each, the museum and the theater, have
a fairly substantial role to play in how sound is conceived and experi-
enced and thus encourages consideration of the extent to which space
shapes sound’s function and effects. It also encourages reflection on
the experience of the gallery space. As a distinctively cinematic set of
sounds, Vertigo: Soundtrack for an Exhibition “scores” the visitor’s
physical journey through the gallery, transforming this space into a
navigable film set and positioning the visitor as a potential actor, extra,
or even protagonist. Indeed, such a space is often highly constructed
and one’s movements carefully scripted in the interest of the narrative
coherence demanded by a curatorial program.
But Marclay’s work also performs another function that engages
more directly with Vertigo itself, reminding us of the power and uses
of sound in this film, specifically in relation to the film’s investments in
memory and the act of looking. In other words, Vertigo: Soundtrack
for an Exhibition activates our memories of a film about memory and
engenders awareness of our acts of looking in relation to a film about
scopophilia and the power of the gaze. Sound (and music especially)
is a potent mnemonic trigger. But memories evoked are always neces-
sarily imperfect and inaccurate, clouded and shaped by present cir-
cumstances, anxieties, and desires, a point Marclay seems to stress by
offering a disjointed and reconfigured version of Vertigo’s sounds.
Indeed, his soundtrack is structured in such a way that it mimics the
function of memory itself, intruding into our consciousness with
random fragments of scenes or dialogue without respect for linear-
ity or continuity. In this instance, the sound signature of Madeleine
functions very much like her Proustian (and culinary) counterpart. As
Peter Wollen rightly suggests in his brief musing on the piece, we may
readily associate the fragments of Marclay’s sampled soundscape with
specific scenes and images, but his creative intervention into Vertigo’s
soundtrack along with the fragility of memory necessarily “creates a
very different version of the film in our imaginations.”35 However, this
version of the film conjured up by Marclay is very much in keeping
with what we might recall if simply prompted to “remember Vertigo.”
We might flash between the Golden Gate Bridge and the green glow
of the Empire sign, between the portrait of Carlotta Valdez and the
132 Hi t ch co ck an d C on t e m p o r ar y A r t

trees in Muir Woods, between Midge’s apartment and the Vertigo

zoom as Scottie ascends the tower. We might remember chases and
deaths, Hitchcock’s highly charged objects and motifs, Scottie’s hal-
lucinatory sequence or the mid-century modern furniture in Elster’s
office.
As scattered amalgams of Vertigo’s moments slip in and out of
(mental) focus, we might also start to question their accuracy. Do I
really remember mid-century modern furniture in Elster’s office or
am I importing a remembered image from yet another film? (For the
record, this is completely false as Elster’s office is unfailing traditional
in every aspect of its decor.) Does my memory of the Vertigo zoom
exaggerate the effect? Such second-guessing is encouraged by the
combinatory and random structure of Marclay’s soundtrack. We may
also question if the musical prompt evokes for us the scene to which it
actually belongs or a completely unrelated image. That said, we may
be correct more than we think given the clever ways in which Bernard
Herrmann’s character and site signatures are repeated and thus per-
haps firmly embedded in our subconscious. Still, Vertigo: Soundtrack
for an Exhibition is a work that lays bare the vicissitudes of memory
and in a way that echoes how Hitchcock himself dealt with this murky
terrain in the original film. After all, Vertigo is about the past, its intru-
sions in the present, its manipulations, and its invention.
Vertigo, of course, is also about looking and, more specifically, sco-
pophilic drives and desires and the power of the gaze. This too is not
lost in Marclay’s sound work. It is the absence of Vertigo’s image or
any image whatsoever that initiates a search for one. This search is
futile and doomed to fail, but it makes us acutely aware of our quest,
our desire to see something that corresponds to what we hear or at
least to discover its source. Like Scottie, we are looking for something
that is not there and cannot be found. What we and Scottie see instead
are representations and illusions. While Scottie pursues the artifice that
is Madeleine, we too encounter illusions manufactured to be looked
at: art. It is solely by virtue of our desire to look at art, to travel to
a gallery in pursuit of objects upon which to exercise our gaze, that
we encounter Vertigo: Soundtrack for an Exhibition. In this way, the
work is always implicated in our pursuit to look. Indeed, these paral-
lels are further reinforced by the nature of the exhibitions in which
we find Marclay’s work. Art and Film since 1945: Hall of Mirrors is a
particularly apt exhibition for which Marclay supplies the soundtrack,
one invested in the links between histories of painting, photography,
and cinema and in which questions of illusion loom large. Marclay’s
 T h e A co u s t i cs o f V e r t i g o 133

soundtrack also accompanied a solo exhibition of his work at Gairloch

Gardens (part of Oakville Galleries), which included Up and Out and
Blind Televisions (2000), an installation of television sets from which
sound but no image emanates. Though structurally similar to Vertigo:
Soundtrack for an Exhibition, Blind Televisions is conceptually quite
different, in part because the physical apparatus of the medium is pres-
ent and in part because the television screen is replaced by a concave
mirror that reflects images of visitors back to themselves.
For my final case study, I want to return to the artist responsible for
giving us the example par excellence of Hitchcockian artworks. I’m
speaking, of course, of Douglas Gordon and his now iconic 24 Hour
Psycho (1993). However, I do not plan to give further attention to this
installation for much superb scholarship exists on its temporal, visual,
and conceptual investments.36 Indeed, it would hardly make sense to
consider it in a chapter devoted to sound unless I plan to advocate for
the significance of its silence. Instead, I want to look at—and listen
to—another work by Gordon, one deeply concerned with (cinematic)
sound, Feature Film. Feature Film occupies an important position in
Gordon’s oeuvre not just for its acoustic focus, but also because it rep-
resents his directorial debut, the first time he sought to create his own
film rather than appropriate and work with existing footage. Despite
this apparent shift, the work remains a definitive act of appropriation,
for what he borrows is Herrmann’s score in its entirety.
For Feature Film, Gordon enlisted conductor James Conlon and the
Orchestra National de Paris to perform Herrmann’s score for Vertigo.
This recording fills the space of the gallery while a large screen with
a 16:9 aspect ratio, usually suspended from the ceiling, shows only
close-ups of Conlon’s hands, arms and face in the process of conduct-
ing for the duration of the score. This film was composed by editing
together footage obtained by three fixed and two moving cameras and
shot over two days in September 1998. There are two versions of this
work. One, destined for screening venues, is 75 minutes in length and
consists entirely of Conlon’s gestures. Another, destined for gallery
installation, is longer, running the length of the original film. In this
version, gaps in the score are accompanied by slow pans of an empty
auditorium and barely audible fragments of dialogue and sound
effects emanating from the video of Vertigo that share Conlon’s space.
A “formatted for television” version of the original film plays on the
periphery of this exhibition and without sound. Feature Film has been
installed in several major venues and often with slight modifications.
At the Block Museum, for instance, the film of Conlon occupied two
134 Hi t ch co ck an d C on t e m p o r ar y A r t

screens instead of one with the images mirroring one another along a
horizontal axis.
The initial installation of the work at the Atlantis Gallery in London
is perhaps the most interesting because of how Gordon activated fea-
tures of the space. First, a physical demand was placed on visitors who
were required to ascend several flights of stairs to view the work. They
were put into Scottie’s place as it were, forced to experience the strain
of his ascent during his pursuit of Madeleine up the bell tower. When
visitors reached the mezzanine level, they would come upon windows
with the curtains left open, granting a view of the rooftops that har-
kened back to the opening scene in Vertigo. The exhibition was open
each night until midnight, in part so that one might behold this view
in the dark for added effect. Then, at the top of the stairs, green gels
covering the lights recreated yet another aspect of the film, the eerie
glow cast by the Empire sign, a strategy, as noted earlier in this study,
adopted by Gordon in Empire and David Reed in Judy’s Bedroom
(1992). All these attempts to situate the visitor within the film, to pro-
vide opportunities for a somatic experience of Vertigo’s mise-en-scène,
were carefully orchestrated by Gordon.37 These immersions in a kind
of approximated cinematic space prepared visitors for their encoun-
ter with Feature Film once they reached the final vantage point of
the exhibition proper. Here, Vertigo’s soundtrack filled the cavernous
interior of the Atlantis Gallery, providing another form of immersion,
this time of an acoustic kind.
These visual and aural cues work hard to situate us within the world
of Vertigo. However, the title, Feature Film, points to something much
more generic, evoking in very broad strokes a narrative fiction film.
For Raymond Bellour, this prompts questions about what level and
plane such an engagement with fiction will happen. To this, he has no
answer, suggesting that only uncertainty prevails in Gordon’s work.38
However, while music’s relation to fiction is, depending on how you
look at it, either a nonstarter or an intractable philosophical problem,
the entirety of Gordon’s installation seems to flaunt this uncertainty as
a productive way to grapple with registers of reality and artifice. And
this is where Conlon comes in. Conlon is not an actor, but an actual
conductor, and a highly acclaimed one at that who currently holds the
directorship of the Los Angeles Opera. But in the context of Gordon’s
work, he is both performing the labor of his profession and acting. He
did indeed conduct the orchestra, which performed the rendition of
Herrmann’s score that fills the gallery, but what we see on screen is
Conlon without an orchestra and without an audience.39 We also see
 T h e A co u s t i cs o f V e r t i g o 135

him in close-ups that suggest a camera whose presence would have

made the actual act of conducting impossible. Furthermore, Conlon
was “cast” by Gordon after the artist looked at over a hundred poten-
tial conductors for the “part.” Gordon explained to Claire Bishop in
an interview that he wanted a conductor “who needn’t necessarily
‘pass’ as looking like a conductor” and one who cast doubt on his
own status, prompting viewers to ask, “Is he a conductor? Is he an
actor?”40
Feature Film offers footage of Conlon conducting to his own pre-
recorded music. Thus, as much as the images appear to be documen-
tary, a film that shows, in real time, the very gestures required to lead
an orchestra through Vertigo’s entire score, artifice remains an impor-
tant component of what we see. Indeed, there is a degree of artifice
that surrounds the whole process of scoring here. For Feature Film,
again despite its titular nod to narrative fiction, reverses the order of
image-sound creation. Here, the image is essentially scored to match
the sound, rather than following the conventional mode of film pro-
duction where the soundtrack is recorded after the footage has been
filmed. The ostensible hierarchy of sound and image that dominates
how film is made, consumed, and discussed is reversed here. And it is
a reversal that reveals the importance of sound to film in general and
Hitchcock in particular, a filmmaker whose visual components have
always been at the forefront of analyses.
Gordon’s work also grapples with questions of the real through
attendant concerns about the original versus the copy. Again, we
might return to Benjamin and responses to his essay on reproduction
when assessing whether or not we should speak of an “original” work
that is based on a notational scheme.41 In such practices, every work is
an original. However, Feature Film tempts us to revisit this assertion
with respect to film music to ask whether there is indeed an original
(or real) version of a score to be found in the “original” film. Indeed,
Conlon’s version of Herrmann’s score is very different from the one
we hear throughout Vertigo and it is difficult not to be aware of this.
By virtue of its installation in a gallery space, and its dissemination
by speakers technologically distinct from the ones initially (and even
subsequently) used in film theaters, the quality of the sound is mark-
edly different. So too, arguably, is the quality of the musical perfor-
mance between the many recordings that now exist of Herrmann’s
composition. There is the very same gulf between sound quality in the
“home” version of Vertigo and the “home” version of Feature Film.
The sound we hear on a VHS or DVD copy as well as any of the many
136 Hi t ch co ck an d C on t e m p o r ar y A r t

downloaded copies viewable through our computer screens will not

stand up to the quality of the DVD of Conlon’s recording that accom-
panies the book version of Feature Film, a hybrid catalog-companion
piece to Gordon’s installation.42 Feature Film might also caution us,
by virtue of its own musical virtuosity, not to exalt the original record-
ing. For Bernard Herrmann hated how his composition sounded in
Vertigo. He found it substandard, “sloppy and error ridden.” He also
deeply lamented the fact that he did not conduct it himself, citing this
missed opportunity as one of his “keenest disappointments.”43
Thus, in some ways, Feature Film is a work that pays homage to
Bernard Herrmann as much as it does to Alfred Hitchcock. It gives
Herrmann a version of his score that he may well have approved and
in a way that trumpets the achievements of the sonic and reminds
us of the importance of sound to film.44 It certainly alerts us to the
determining effect that accompanying sound has on what we see and,
as Andy Birtwistle suggests, the key “role played by sound in creating
a sense of the cinematic.”45 In this way, Gordon and the other art-
ists considered in this chapter, represent a departure from the filmic
art practices that, since the 1990s, have relegated the acoustic to the
margins, focusing instead on the visual as the privileged determinant
of the cinematic. But for Birtwistle, the sonic is not elevated at the
expense of the visual in Feature Film. Instead, he sees Douglas’s ana-
lytical gesture as an exercise in pure “cinematic audiovisuality,” one
that reveals in quite precise ways the relationship between sound and
image.46 This is achieved in part through the perfect synchronicity
between sound and image, between Conlon’s gestures and the musi-
cal composition that they not only match rhythmically, but which they
also determine. This pure cinematic audiovisuality is also achieved in
large part because, as Birtwistle asks, “What could be more cinematic
than a Bernard Herrmann score?”47 He notes that Vertigo’s score has
the capacity to signify the cinema in broad terms, and explains that
Feature Film permits us to “taste cinematic experience all the more
keenly, setting up a direct encounter with both the cinematic image
and a sonic vocabulary guaranteed to provoke an almost Pavlovian
response in the listener.”48
This equation between Herrmann’s score and “the cinema” is what
motivated Gordon in the first place. At one point, Gordon explained
that, for him, Vertigo’s score was “the single most generic sound I
could associate with the cinema. I tested it on people . . . Everyone
knew that it was not written by a classic composer, and that it was a
cinema score. But no one could place it as Vertigo. It was what I was
looking for. It was the sound of cinema for an entire generation.”49
 T h e A co u s t i cs o f V e r t i g o 137

Later, Gordon qualified this somewhat, revealing further motivations

and nuancing his remarks about the recognizability of the score. He
explains that this project emerged from his habit of listening to film
scores and acknowledging the way in which this music evokes a set
of images. This prompted him to ask, “If I dislocated the score, how
much of the original image would you still ‘see’?”50 Those unfamiliar
with Vertigo may indeed peg it as a generic score and respond to the
Hollywoodesque spirit of the music. Those familiar with Vertigo, on
the other hand, may find that the music evokes images, sequences,
and moments from the original film. As such, he recognizes the capac-
ity of a score to function as a “common denominator” and thus to
essentially be about “looking, remembering, thinking forgetting, sup-
pressing, elevating, focusing, blurring.”51 However, he also admits
that “these films I use are absolutely appropriate for appropriation
because they have a status in the world that allows one person to talk
to another about their experience. They are the icons of a common
currency.”52 In short, they are well known and part of an instantly
recognizable cultural landscape.
What both the generic and the particular share here is their capacity
to trigger memory, be it more generally of a Hollywood classical age
or the specific aspects of Vertigo. In this way, Feature Film is not just
a work about pure cinematic audiovisuality, but about the power of
sound to trigger memory and affect, as we all well know, and about
sound’s ability to help retrieve fragments from our stores of remem-
bered cultural images. Indeed, this is precisely what happened to visi-
tors of the exhibition. Gordon recounts that

some people who saw [Feature Film] had asked me questions like how
many little images did you slip in from Vertigo because they really think
that they saw James Stewart or Kim Novak in my film. And that never
happened. But the cinematic experience and the music obviously was
powerful enough that images were coming from inside of their head
and they were projecting their images onto my film and I thought that
that’s an incredibly sophisticated and perverse thing to happen.53

Sound’s function as a mnemonic trigger and its capacity to evoke

affect, emotion, and nostalgia is well studied and documented.54 Less
so is its ability to evoke images, to trigger the remembrance of char-
acters, scenes, and moments from the film. But that is precisely what
Feature Film does. And it does so in a way that reminds us of how the
nature of memory cues—in this case, a film score—play a determining
role in what is ultimately remembered. If asked to “remember Vertigo”
138 Hi t ch co ck an d C on t e m p o r ar y A r t

without any cues, a rather different set of images is likely to emerge

from memory than if prompted to remember Vertigo while listening
to its accompanying music. It may generate memories of dialogue,
actions, moments, and character encounters long ago supplanted by
the visually or narratively more dramatic sequences of the film.
In Feature Film’s Atlantis Gallery installation, music may be the
dominant mnemonic trigger, but it certainly is not the only one. The
ascent up the stairs, past the open window, and under the green glow
of the lights sets up the conditions for an embodied memory, one
generated through somatic identification with Scottie. And by offer-
ing us a silent version of Vertigo on a monitor, Gordon also provides
a visual trigger. But here the original film is relegated to the periphery
of the exhibition. It operates as little more than a reference—a “foot-
note” as Gordon calls it—in order to confirm our memory should
we feel the need to.55 We can check it to see if our memory serves us
correctly, if we remember Madeleine’s visit to the Legion of Honor
when we should. Of course, such an exercise might also reveal the
importance of the score in foretelling what happens later in the film,
exposing truths that the image conceals. Feature Film shows how, in
Hitchcock’s film, music and narrative are arranged in a complex dance
charged by moments of alliance and divergence. Music and image too
are choreographed in this way in a film that is about memory and
which puts demands on our own memory during the viewing process.
For Royal S. Brown, “both the film and the music offer ‘texts’ that
provide more puzzles than they solve, that circle around a core mys-
tery that ultimately has neither solution nor resolution.”56 Gordon’s
installation acts like a puzzle too, but one with a possible solution.
In Feature Film, the picture that emerges when we think carefully
through the relationships forged between its many components and
gestures is of a better understanding of cinematic sound. This analytic
capacity is not lost on the work’s critics. For Birtwistle, “the tech-
niques used by Gordon—in particular multiple projection and use
of slow motion—lay the films bare to a new kind of scrutiny: that
previously associated with the art object rather than cinema.”57 For
him, Feature Film is thus not a “cinephilic celebration,” but a seri-
ous examination of complex ideas. However, this position rehashes
the old mantra that a strong analytical drive is somehow necessar-
ily incompatible with an engagement borne from affect and admi-
ration. Fortunately, other reviews recognize how the analytical and
affective—driven respectively by epistemophilia and cinephilia—can
happily coexist, as in Adrian Searle’s observation that Feature Film is
“a piece of art to dissect and be swept away by.”58 This sentiment is
 T h e A co u s t i cs o f V e r t i g o 139

a reflection of Gordon’s own assessment of the work, one that nicely

captures the spirit of most, if not all, of the works considered in this
study. He writes that through his attempt to reconfigure the cinema,
to offer it up in new ways and refracted through new forms, he hoped
to “reveal the mechanism of how we look.”59 For Gordon, this kind
of creative intervention amounted to “an attempt to simultaneously
deconstruct the magic of the cinema yet allow the aura to remain”;
even in these reimagined forms, the cinema “still casts some kind of
spell.”60
 C o n c l usio n

Repossessing Cinema

T he installation of Douglas Gordon’s Feature Film (1999) at Atlantis

Gallery represents a growing trend in the art world, namely, the ten-
dency to eschew the isolation of a work or collection of works in space
in favor of activating space in such a way that the exhibition, in its
entirety, becomes as much and as significant a creative gesture as the
works contained within it. Mieke Bal refers to this as “self-conscious
curating,” a practice that leads to “the creation of something like a
Gesammtkunstwerk of a specifically designed combination of artistic
objects, sometimes with the building and the spaces therein as active
participants.”1 Feature Film’s demand on the visitor to ascend several
flights of stairs, peer out over East London’s rooftops, pass under
the green glow of gelled lights, watch a film on screen suspended in
a cavernous space filled with darkness and sound, and search out a
somewhat hidden monitor screening a silent version of Vertigo (1958)
certainly qualifies as this kind of Gesammtkunstwerk.
For Bal, this type of practice raises three issues that have long been
of interest to her and of central importance to this study. First, creative
and self-conscious curating speaks to “the undoing of the autonomy
of the art object and subsequently an emphasis on the dependency
of the object on conditions of presentation.”2 Certainly, art objects
have sustained repeated challenges to their autonomy since the early
twentieth century, altering our perception of art in highly significant
ways. Conditions of presentation have been changing for some time
too, but what Bal attends to later in this essay is the way in which the
presentational structures of other media and cultural practices are
informing curatorial strategies. For instance, she speaks to the use
of cinematic effects in exhibitions to produce what she calls “a cin-
ematic vision of art presentation.”3 Again, Feature Film is useful here
for considering how exhibitions aim to create a “sense of fictional
space” or adopt cinematographic strategies for effect. Shot length,
142 Hi t ch co ck an d C on t e m p o r ar y A r t

for instance, translates into prescribed distances between visitor and

art object or other components of the exhibition in order to generate
particular experiences. We have little choice in how close we come to
those green lights or to that suspended screen. It is not just art that
has taken a cinematic turn, but exhibition practices too.
This emerging cinematic vision of art presentation relates directly
to another issue cited by Bal: the end of the white cube. This too
has been a long time coming with practices that shun, engage, or
expose the ideologies governing gallery space emerging alongside
written critiques, most famously Brian Doherty’s assessment of the
various forces that underpin the supposed neutrality of the mod-
ern white-walled gallery.4 He shows how such spaces actually func-
tioned in political and economic terms as well as revealed the myriad
benefits to the art market of situating art objects in such a carefully
manufactured context. However, eschewing the white cube in favor
of the black box as is necessary for many cinematic artworks does
not permit an escape from ideology. As Volker Pantenburg reminds
us, the “black box” is as much an ideological framework—as much
of a determining if not overdetermining context—as the “white
cube.”5 It is a framework that retains traces of the ideological func-
tions of the film theater, the cinematic apparatus broadly defined
and, still, the fundamental underlying ideological facets of the white
cube. After all, turning off the lights does not rid the space of its
ideology. This is something that becomes especially evident if we
survey the range of Hitchcock-inspired artworks that incorporate
traditions of painting, photography, sculpture, installation, video,
and film. By virtue of their link to Hitchcock and thus a particular
mode and history of filmmaking, the cinema is brought into contact
with the exhibitionary practices that attend these media and high-
light through juxtaposition the strategies governing their display.
For instance, a painting like Inghilleri’s that is both about painting
and cinema makes us acutely aware of how the content of her image
is shaped not only by its medium and treatment, but also by the
contextualizing forces of the spaces in which it is exhibited and with
which it is aligned.
The third issue raised by creative curatorial practices or exhibitions
as Gesammtkunstwerke returns us to one of the key premises of this
study and to our earlier discussion of Bal, specifically the idea “that
visual art, just like philosophy, has a way of thinking.” As Bal con-
tends, “the best of these exhibitions stage a dialogue between the art
and the viewer as thinker in which the art has its own power to speak,
and speak back.”6 But as much as art has the capacity to speak for
 C on cl u s i o n 143

itself and on its own terms in this way, what it says can be harnessed
by a strong curatorial program in the service of an altogether different
conversation. Of course, any curatorial program uses the art selected
to advance an idea, to illustrate a thesis, or to chart a historical trajec-
tory. Typically, this idea or thesis is one already deeply embedded in
the fabric of the work, and the work stands as an exemplar of what
the curator hopes to reveal about the artistic movement or moment
to which it belongs. What I would like to look at now, though, is how
both the art and the exhibition think, how a particularly strong cura-
torial voice can, through a Gesammtkunstwerk composed of dispa-
rate Hitchcockian-inspired practices, advance a compelling argument
about Hitchcock.
RePossessed, shown at several venues in England between 2005 and
2007 is an interactive exhibition whose design/curatorial team, led
by Chris Lane, included Nick Haeffner, Tony Cryer, Che Guevara
John, Anne Robinson, and Souli Spiropoulou.7 Taking Vertigo as
its subject, the show includes a range of multimedia works that
have been creatively curated to function like a Gesammtkunstwerk
and in a way that blurs the distinction between artwork and exhi-
bition. But it is an exhibition that blurs a series of other boundar-
ies too and in ways suggestive of new directions in art production
and exhibitions, ones sure to inform and alter how engagements
with the cinema, however defined, might take shape. One bound-
ary very much blurred was that between artist and curator. Many
of the installations that constituted RePossessed were collaborative
efforts. The same individuals who participated in the creation of the
artworks also curated the exhibition and wrote critically and theo-
retically about the issues it raised. They wore multiple hats in this
respect and were also informed by multiple histories of art produc-
tion, film and art theory, film and art education, programming and
composing. Two contributors, Robinson and Spiropoulou, were
students enrolled in the practice-based PhD program at London
Metropolitan University. A growing trend, such programs offer doc-
torates in studio that require the completion of a range of activities
from making to curating to writing. They are in keeping with the
promotion of the “artist-researcher,” a figure invested in research as
a component of making and a position now officially recognized by
major funding bodies. We see the effect of these blurred boundary
positions writ large across RePossessed, a carefully researched, metic-
ulously constructed, and designed exhibition that aims to shed as
much light on Hitchcock’s Vertigo, to engage in as nuanced a way as
the best-written scholarship on the film.
144 Hi t ch co ck an d C on t e m p o r ar y A r t

Indeed, it is clear that the works in RePossessed are united by more

than their origin in artist-researcher practices, collaborative endeavors
by artist/curators in the pursuit of self-conscious creative curating.
These works are united not only by their common subject, but also
by the ways in which they satisfy the aims of the exhibition as a whole,
namely, to confront two enduring myths. The first is about Hitchcock
as a control freak and the second about freedom and power in rela-
tion to Hitchcock, Vertigo, and new media technologies themselves.
RePossessed signals a new direction in Hitchcockian art and cinematic
art more generally and as such warrants attention here. However, its
individual works also provide an opportunity to reflect on some of the
concerns that determined the practices in the previous chapters, from
cinephilic pilgrimage to spatial montage to sound.
RePossessed aimed to dispel the myth that Hitchcock was obsessed
with achieving complete control over his productions.8 This is a
well-entrenched myth and admittedly there is plenty of evidence to
support claims that Hitchcock had very specific visions to which he
wanted his film to conform. However, as Haeffner convincingly argues
in his catalog essay, there is also evidence to suggest that Hitchcock
took efforts to perpetuate this myth himself. He notes the apocry-
phal nature of the oft-told story that every sequence in Hitchcock’s
films was storyboarded. This was something “eagerly perpetuated by
Hitchcock himself who even went so far as to fake storyboards for
North by Northwest’s (1959) crop duster sequence after it had been
shot.”9 Haeffner also argues that Hitchcock regularly welcomed
“chance, chaos and collaboration” in the production of his films, that
he was open to experimentation and viewed each cinematic venture
as an adventure. By assuming Hitchcock’s need for control over every
detail, suppositions about correct readings of his films start to emerge,
readings that give perhaps too much weight to authorial intention.
And for Haeffner, this myth of control becomes ever more troubling
because it “failed to allow that audiences indulge in active specta-
torship, creatively producing their own narratives and interpretations
from the films.”10
This is what RePossessed aimed to rectify. Certainly, the artworks
surveyed in this book suggest a range of attitudes toward either pre-
serving or challenging the sanctity of the Hitchcockian filmic object,
with some respecting its integrity and Hitchcock’s vision and oth-
ers using his films as raw materials out of which to construct some-
thing altogether different. And indeed, the artworks that constitute
RePossessed represent this spectrum of engagement as well. However,
 C on cl u s i o n 145

as an exhibition, RePossessed not only features artists’ methods of cre-

atively producing something out of a Hitchcock film, but also gives
this power to the gallery’s visitors. This is where the second myth—
and theme—about freedom and power comes into play. As we know,
freedom and power loom large in Vertigo itself.11 For Scottie, they are
assumed to be held, but are in fact not. Their attainment is little more
than an illusion, one ultimately dispelled. Questions about which char-
acter enjoys the most freedom or holds the most power have dogged
commentators on the film for decades. But in RePossessed, the param-
eters of this question have been expanded to include other players as
well, namely, Hitchcock, the artists, the technology they use, the cura-
tors, and, crucially, the visitors themselves. As Haeffner explains,

RePossessed has been built on the principle that the audience can take
possession of images and narratives, normally sold to the public as
a locked down assemblage in DVD format. In Vertigo (1958), the
narrative structure of this assemblage has been sanctified by no less
an authority than the greatest auteur in the history of film, Alfred
Hitchcock, while the DVD itself has been encrypted so that the viewer
can’t modify it without breaking the law. Our audience is invited to
re-think, re-experience, re-shoot and re-assemble parts of the film for
themselves.12

In short, RePossessed functions as an exhibition that gives audiences

the tools and means to make their own content. However, it became
quickly apparent that there are limits to the visitor’s “freedom and
power.” Haeffner discovered that new Digital Rights Management
legislation meant that some of their initial plans for the exhibition were
illegal and they had to write their own special software for ReFrame,
for instance, to prevent the violation of copyright when visitors exper-
imented with the commercial DVD version of Vertigo.13 Likewise,
there are limits to the technologies themselves. How much freedom
do they indeed offer us to construct something new out of existing
cultural material? How much power do we really exert through the
actions and what effect does it ultimately have? That is, who or what
is affected by exertions of power over culture?
These are questions that can be answered in part by looking
at the individual works in the exhibition that fall under the head-
ings ReConstructed, ReFramed, ReMixed, RePlayed, ReTurning,
ReViewed, and ReVisited. In ReConstructed, we are made privy
to the ways in which the small-scale devices we use to watch
film—mobile phones, widescreen televisions, and standard ratio
146 Hi t ch co ck an d C on t e m p o r ar y A r t

televisions—modify the image by cropping it and transforming its

color. Here, dimensions of the “original” image of Vertigo are com-
pared to its appearance on smaller and portable devices in an effort
to show us both the “imperatives and constraints” imposed by new
technologies.14 In ReMixed, the issue of technological accessibility
is foregrounded. This work presents the visitor with a DVD library
and computer to play a collection of Hitchcock’s films. However,
both are sealed inside a Perspex box and reachable only through
rubber gloves attached to the front pane. This interactive work,
which permits users to load and unload DVDs of Hitchcock’s films
but little else, speaks to the restrictions imposed on us by paranoid
rights holders that limit how we can interact with a film. As noted
above, copyright infringement was also a real concern for the design
of Reframe, a software program that is now also available online
under the title Re-edit.15 This program permits users to create their
own film and thus content out of Vertigo. It gives those wishing to
engage on a material level with the film the means to do so, some-
thing that commercial DVDs do not permit. It thus expands the
possibilities of engagement beyond the mere stilling, freezing, skip-
ping, or returning that are available to Mulvey’s pensive spectator.
It offers a much broader range of possible creative interventions to
the cinephile and puts the more complex tools used by artists in the
creation of their works into the hands of audiences.
ReFramed, not to be confused with the software Reframe, features
a short film by Spiropoulou, ReFramed 1 . . . inVertEgo (2005), which
recuts Vertigo in order to destabilize gender dynamics in the film. More
specifically, the dynamics of power played out through Scottie’s male
gaze is undone through digital manipulations that change the relation-
ships between characters. As Spiropoulou explains, this film “aims to
re-frame gender, using the techniques of found footage and the under-
pinning of theoretical research.”16 The theoretical research in question
here is Mulvey’s work on Vertigo, which analyzes the active/looking,
passive/looked-at dynamic, work central to her conception of the
gaze and which in turn generated much debate. But as Spiropoulou
suggests, “it is not the purpose of the project to simply translate or
illustrate gender and film theory, but to use found footage as a tool
to generate ideas that subvert and prevent re-circulation of [quoting
Judith Butler] the ‘compulsory order of sex/gender/desire.’”17
RePlayed remediates Vertigo using the video game, Grand Theft
Auto—San Andreas (see figure C. 1). However, this ­remediation
is more complex and more interactive than those discussed in
Figure C.1 RePlayed, 2005 (courtesy of Nicholas Haeffner).
148 Hi t ch co ck an d C on t e m p o r ar y A r t

chapter 3. Grand Theft Auto requires players to spend a good deal

of time driving and thus offers a point of connection with Scottie’s
pursuit of Madeleine. What we have here is not a representation of
Vertigo through the aesthetics of video games, but an opportunity to
drive Scottie around, albeit very slowly, using the platform of Grand
Theft Auto. However, the visitors/players’ actions control not only
the image, but a physical manifestation of Scottie’s pursuit too in
the form of vintage toy cars on a racetrack. RePlayed also sets up a
series of comparisons between film and video games, comparisons
that reveal differences in the navigation of space, the construction of
point of view, and the reverse shot which, in film, switches between
characters and what they see, but here between the onscreen action
and a view of the visitor engaged in play. That is, visitors can see
themselves play the game as they move Scottie and a toy car through
virtual and physical space, respectively.
Whereas RePlayed permits us to inhabit and, to a degree, deter-
mine Scottie’s travels through San Francisco, Robinson’s ReTurning
explores Madeleine’s route and her role as a wanderer. Here, we are
presented with a spatial montage composed of screens offering both
still and moving images. The images, refilmed to the point of obscu-
rity in some instances, offer barely decipherable and highly illuminated
silhouettes of Madeleine as she wanders through space. It is a work
governed by the question, “What are the possibilities for visual artists
of the space between frames in digital video as an imaginative space
for artist and spectator?”18 For Robinson, these digital freeze frames
are liminal spaces that speak to the relationship between the languages
of still and moving images and, I would argue, to the liminality of the
spaces occupied and traversed by Madeleine herself. They also permit
us to reflect on the nature of daydream space, consciousness, time
and, citing Mulvey, a technological uncanny or “sense of uncertainty
and disorientation that accompanies a new technology that is not yet
fully understood.”19 In Robinson’s work, this uncertainty is located
in the material ambiguity of a digital freeze frame, especially when
considered in relation to the celluloid film still and in relation to the
moving image against which it is juxtaposed in this installation. But
this uncertainty and ambiguity is what grants Robinson access to the
nature of daydream spaces in Vertigo as well as those generated out
of our own remembrances of the film. In this way, Robinson’s work
activates memory itself and specifically those filmic fragments of inter-
est to Burgin that intrude, out of sequence and often out of context,
into our consciousness.20
 C on cl u s i o n 149

Designed by Richard Stevens and David Raybould, ReViewed

engages explicitly with voyeurism and surveillance. First, visitors are
asked to watch Vertigo while eye tracking technology charts the tra-
jectory of their gaze, documenting what they look at and for how
long.21 Then, this information is stored in a database and retrievable
for visualization and comparison with the data generated by up to
seven additional participants. Several goals structured the design of
this installation. The artists aimed to “discover the attentional land-
scape of a scene by monitoring the areas where the eye pauses or
‘fixates.’”22 They also sought to examine the impact of cuts, graphic
matching, and, ultimately, to “test” Mulvey’s theoretical work on the
gaze. With this information in hand, they surmise, we can evaluate the
extent to which Hitchcock managed to achieve control over how we
look. According to Stevens and Raybould, this eye tracking technol-
ogy lets us “explore the amount of freedom that the individual retains
within the control of the cinematic constructs, and what implications
this might have for visual storytelling.”23 These visualizations were
used to generate a soundtrack as well, one also contingent on the gaze
enacted by the participants. As Stevens and Raybould explain, “the x,
y coordinates and the fixation duration from the eye tracking data file
were mapped onto synthesis parameters to produce an evolving sonic
landscape. The vertical position of the fixation was used to control the
pitch of a triangle waveform generator whilst the horizontal position
controlled the spatial position of the sound.”24 In this way, sound
too was customized based on the individual participant’s experience,
determined by an algorithm as in the case of Les LeVeque’s 4 Vertigo
(2000). But unlike 4 Vertigo, it was the individual act of looking rather
than a mathematical operation divorced from the logic of the film that
determined what was heard.
In the installation ReVisited, a (cinephilic) pilgrimage on the part
of Chris Lane to film the sites of Vertigo in San Francisco served as the
initial step in devising an installation that put visitors into the picture.
Unlike Reed, who constructed an actual physical space to inhabit, Lane
used green screen technology to insert them into Vertigo’s locations
(see figure C.2). Participants could follow in Scottie or Madeleine’s
steps through the graveyard, for example, seeing what they saw, or
they could chart their own course (see figure C.3). As such, they had
both the freedom to move around the “scene” as they wished and the
power to direct their gaze at whatever objects they chose. But, as the
exhibition makes clear throughout, this freedom and power is limited
by the technology and as such their experience of Vertigo is limited
150 Hi t ch co ck an d C on t e m p o r ar y A r t

Figure C.2 ReVisited, 2005 (courtesy of Nicholas Haeffner).

Figure C.3 ReVisited, 2005 (courtesy of Nicholas Haeffner).

too. They may indeed make the film their own in very literal terms
by inhabiting it, and thus satisfying one of the overarching desires
of the cinephile, but they do so only according to the strict terms
imposed by the parameters of the installations. In this way, ReVisited,
 C on cl u s i o n 151

like the other works in RePossessed, demonstrates both the possibili-

ties and restrictions that determine how we and artists (and as artists)
might engage with film. But, in the process, the works that constitute
RePossessed also do much to engage in sophisticated ways with Vertigo,
Hitchcock, cinema, spectatorial experience, memory, and media. And
they also, as comments by the artists and the catalog essays make clear,
engage in meaningful ways with the theoretical work of Mulvey, both
on the gaze as we saw in ReFramed 1 . . . inVertEgo and in ReViewed,
and especially on the pensive and possessive spectator, two figures
that loom large in this exhibition and return us to cinephilia and
epistemophilia.
The works in RePossessed, and indeed most of the works covered
in this study, delay cinema. For Mulvey this “delayed cinema makes
visible its materiality and its aesthetic attributes.”25 Artists extract
images and scenes, slowing them down and stilling them in order
to explore, intervene, modify, reimagine, or otherwise engage with
Hitchcock’s films. For Mulvey, this is a consequence of the spread
of digital technologies that make it easier for us, as viewers, to sub-
ject films to fragmentation. And although these artists have shown
us that digital technologies are not the only means by which film can
be broken open in this way, digital devices do permit a much broader
general audience to access film in more personally determined ways.
She writes that “in this context textual analysis ceases to be a restricted
academic practice and returns, perhaps, to its origins as a work of cine-
philia, of love of the cinema.”26 Indeed, as we have seen, cinephilia
has been a motivating factor across a range of artistic practices deeply
invested in Hitchcockian cinema. For Mulvey, though, there are two
types of cinephilia that seem to drive audiences’ and, I would argue,
artists’ relationships to films that have been purposively delayed to be
consumed or created anew. There is a “cinephilia that is more on the
side of a fetishistic investment in the extraction of a fragment of cin-
ema from its context and a cinephilia that extracts and then replaces a
fragment with extra understanding back into its context.”27 Although
“fetishistic fascination” and “intellectual curiosity” tend to be imbri-
cated according to Mulvey, and these drives register the “pleasures of
both the possessive and pensive spectators,” there is arguably a strong
alignment between possessiveness and fetishism and pensiveness and
curiosity.28
The possessive spectator is then one who aims to take back (per-
haps we could say “repossess”?) the cinema previously encountered
through technologies available that help one excise and save favored
moments.29 This is certainly the labor of the cinephile who aims to
establish a meaningful connection with a film through its objects or
152 Hi t ch co ck an d C on t e m p o r ar y A r t

images. The pensive spectator, on the other hand, desires to still the
image just long enough to study it better, to gain a deeper appreciation
for and understanding of it. For Mulvey, this spectator is propelled by
curiosity and, if we return to Mulvey’s earlier work on the curious
spectator, this spectator is propelled by epistemophilia too.30 As she
explains, “curiosity, a drive to see, but also to know, still marked a
utopian space for a political, demanding visual culture, but also one in
which the process of deciphering might respond to the human mind’s
long-standing interest and pleasure in solving puzzles and riddles.”31
Many of the Hitchcockian artworks discussed here function like
puzzles, riddles whose solutions (or propositions for solutions) take
us one step closer to understanding their subjects, from singular ele-
ments in a Hitchcock film to broader tendencies in the cinema itself.
We see this in not only works of film and video but also other media
(and intermedial) practices and through curatorial and presentational
strategies in ways that show how the “cinematic turn” initiated in the
mid-1990s exceeds the scope of gallery films or cinematic art installa-
tion. Thus, we see how these artworks can be more than simply “per-
sonal rewards” for artists themselves who are engaged in introspective
practices as Fowler argues. There are the larger social rewards of aes-
thetic and analytical pleasures, a deeper understanding of Hitchcock
and cinema, and a greater appreciation of a series of cinematic and
artistic problems, issues, and commitments. Although many creative
gestures borne out of a love of cinema may be less critical in a nega-
tive, faultfinding sense than their antecedents in appropriation art or
experimental film, for example, they are not necessarily less critical
in an analytical sense for they continue to offer astute interventions
into questions of ontology, phenomenology, effects, affects, aesthet-
ics, expressions, and relationships with other media. As we have seen,
ideology continues to be a concern in several works and confronted
through constructions of gender, practices of looking, structures of
production, and consumption. Indeed, just because these works are
motivated by love—by cinephilia and, in some cases, a degree of nos-
talgia too—does not mean they lack the ability to teach us. As Adrian
Martin suggests, cinephilia and knowledge are intimately connected:
“Cinephilia is always about thought, always about theory, always about
criticism.”32 So too, I hope to have shown, are many of the art prac-
tices inspired by its forces.
Perhaps, one of the most important lessons to take away from this
is not just about the richness of cinema’s afterlife in the gallery and
beyond or the way in which artistic practices engage in meaningful
ways with issues around time, space, memory, and history. It is about
 C on cl u s i o n 153

the fact that there is much work still to be done in order to understand
cinemas of the past. What these Hitchcockian artworks do is open up a
series of questions about cinema and its operations, cinema and its sig-
nificance, cinema and its relations, questions that have yet to be fully
answered. Though in being propositional, as many of them are, lead-
ing us to think about things, to consider problems anew and through
different lenses, they suggest that whatever answers can be found may
only be relevant to their immediate present. They alert us to the con-
cerns we have about Hitchcock and, or as, cinema at the moment of
their production, but these concerns, like the moments themselves,
are forever shifting, changing, and advancing. In some ways then, art’s
aim to reveal something about cinema in its own terms is an ongoing
project. What Hitchcock means in relation to cinema will continually
change as cinema itself does and as our conceptions of the significance
of the classical era do too. Mark Lewis once stated that his interest lay
in the unfinished project of critical modernity. Perhaps, we could say
the artists considered here are interested in the unfinished product of
the cinema, of which Hitchcock is a particularly prime example.
 A p p e n d ix

List of Hitchcock
Artworks Cited

Gail Albert Halaban

Out My Window, 2007–
Hopper Redux, 2009–
Merry Alpern
Untitled # 28, 1994
J. Tobias Anderson
879, 1998
879 Color, 2002
Nine Piece Rope, 2002
Bodega Bay School, 2004
A North Window for the Man with Vertigo, 2004
Prairie Stop, Highway 41, 2004
Martin Arnold
Psycho, 1997
John Baldessari
Tetrad Series: To Be A, 1999
Tetrad Series: What Was Seen, 1999
Judith Barry
Casual Shopper, 1980–81
Aurélie Bauer
Rear Window, 2009
Cindy Bernard
Ask the Dust: North by Northwest 1959/1990, 1990
Ask the Dust: Vertigo 1958/1990, 1990
Location Proposal #2, 1997
Gregg Biermann
Spherical Coordinates, 2005
Pierre Bismuth
Respect the Dead, Vertigo, 2001
156 Appendix

Jean Breschand
Don’t They Ever Stop Migrating, 2007
Victor Burgin
The Bridge, 1984
Jim Campbell
Illuminated Average #1: Hitchcock’s Psycho, 2000
Accumulating Psycho, 2004
Steven Campbell
Strangers on a Train, 2003
Daniel Canogar
Dial “M” for Murder, 2009
Gregory Chatonsky
Vertigo@home, 2007
Gregory Crewdson
Untitled: Birds around Home, 1997
Philippe Decrauzat
Afterbirds, 2008
Brice Dellsperger
Body Double Series, 1995–
Stefan Demary
Birds, 1999
Stan Douglas
Subject to a Film: Marnie, 1989
Christoph Draeger
Schizo (Redux), 2004
Laurent Fiévet
Portrait a l’Ecume, 2007
Portrait a l’Helice, 2007
Lovely Memories, 2007
Continuations of Hitchcock: Ink Red, Infrastructures, De X con-
struction, Circulations, 2003–10
Alain Fleischer
Exhibition in the North of France, 1992
Christoph Girardet and Matthias Müller
The Phoenix Tapes, 1999
Bertrand Giraudeau
Cary Grant, 2001
Jean Luc Godard
Histoire(s) du Cinéma, 1988–98
Douglas Gordon
24 Hour Psycho, 1993
Psycho Hitchhiker, 1993
 Appendix 157

A Souvenir for Non-Existence, 1993

Empire, 1998
Airmail White Portrait, 1999
Feature Film, 1999
Surface Mail White Portrait, 1999
24 Hour Psycho Back and Forth and To and Fro, 2010
Rodney Graham
Fishing on a Jetty, 2000
Johan Grimonprez
Looking for Alfred, 2005
Double Take, 2009
Eva Grübinger
Ravenous, 2006
Martijn Hendriks
Untitled (Give Us Today Our Daily Terror), 2008
Pierre Huyghe
Remake, 1994–95
Isabelle Inghilleri
Theme Park, 2007
Holly King
Place of Desire, 1989
Peter Kogler
Tunnel, 1999
Wago Kreider
Between Two Deaths, 2006
Chris Lane, Nick Haeffner, Tony Cryer, and Che Guevara John
ReConstructed, 2005
ReMixed, 2005
RePlayed, 2005
ReVisited, 2005
Les LeVeque
2 Spellbound, 1999
4 Vertigo, 2000
Mark Lewis
Rear Projection: Molly Parker, 2006
Nathan Phillips Square, A Winter’s Night, Skating, 2009
Carlos Lobo
Imaginary Film Set #5, 2007
Christian Marclay
Vertigo: Soundtrack for an Exhibition, 1990
Chris Marker
La Jetée, 1962
158 Appendix

Sans Soleil, 1983

Immemory, 1997
David McDermott and Peter McGough
I Want You So, 1966, 2008
Janice McNab
The Bates Motel Tour, 2003
Paul Pfeiffer
Self-Portrait as Fountain, 2000
Daniel Pitín
Birds, 2004
Henry Plenge Jakobsen
Shower, 1998
David Raybould and Richard Stevens
ReViewed, 2005
David Reed
Judy’s Bedroom, 1992
Scottie’s Bedroom, 1994
Judy’s Bedroom, 2005
The Kiss, 2005
Scottie’s Bedroom, 2005
Anne Robinson
ReTurning, 2005
Benjamin Samuel
Hitchcock30, 2011
Cindy Sherman,
Untitled Film Stills, 1977–80
David Sherry
Psycho Birds, 2003
Souli Spiropoulou
ReFramed 1 . . . inVertEgo, 2005
Rea Tajiri
Hitchcock Trilogy, 1987
Palle Torsson
Evil Interiors: Psycho, 2003
Salla Tykkä
Zoo, 2006
Robert Whitman
Shower, 1964
 Notes

Introduction Alfred and the Art World

1. Lynne Cooke, “Through a Glass, Darkly: From Autonomous Artwork to
Environmental Spectacle, from Spectator to Specter—Robert Whitman’s
Art Practice in the 1960s,” in Robert Whitman: Playback, ed. Lynne
Cooke, Karen Kelly, and Bettina Funcke (New York: DIA Art Foundation,
2003), 66.
2. Ibid., 66.
3. Though Whitman himself never explicitly names the film in the context
of discussions about his Cinema Pieces, it is not much of a stretch to
assume that, as someone creatively invested in film in the early 1960s, he
might have seen Psycho during its initial theatrical release or, at the very
least, encountered promotional materials or subsequent news articles
about its controversies. But, even if he had not, this does not detract
from the fact that Shower allows us entry into discussions and analyses
about Hitchcock’s film.
4. I will consider RePossessed in more detail in the conclusion to this study.
5. See also, Steven Jacobs, The Wrong House: The Architecture of Alfred
Hitchcock (Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 2007).
6. Chris Dercon, “Gleaning the Future from the Gallery Floor,” Senses
of Cinema 28 (September–October 2003): n.p. Accessed October 27,
2009. http://sensesofcinema.com/2003/28/gleaning_the_future/.
7. See, for example, Rudolph E. Kuenzli, Dada and Surrealist Film
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996); and Angela Dalle Vacche, ed. The
Visual Turn: Classical Film Theory and Art History (New Brunswick, NJ:
Rutgers University Press, 2003).
8. For more on the “filmic” nature of Frank’s photography, see Ann Sass,
“Robert Frank and the Filmic Photograph,” History of Photography 22,3
(Autumn 1998): 247–53.
9. For an extended history of this, see Haidee Wasson, Museum Movies: The
Museum of Modern Art and the Birth of Art Cinema (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 2005). See, too, David Campany, ed. The Cinematic
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007); and Tanya Leighton, ed. Art and
the Moving Image: A Critical Reader (London: Tate Publishing, 2008).
160 Not e s

10. For a list of sources on this subject, see Christine Sprengler, “Cinema and
the Visual Arts,” in Oxford Bibliographies in Cinema and Media Studies,
ed. Krin Gabbard (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012).
11. Jonathan Walley, “The Material of Film and the Idea of Cinema:
Contrasting Practices in Sixties and Seventies Avant-Garde Film,” October
103 (Winter 2003): 15–30.
12. For more on this and other paracinematic works by Eros, see Bradley
Eros, “There Will Be Projections in All Dimensions,” Millennium Film
Journal 43/44 (Summer 2005): 63–100.
13. A “level editor” is a type of software used to design video game worlds. It
is sometimes released to the public for download, enabling fans to create
additional levels of play in their favorite games.
14. This question has only recently started to receive some attention in insightful
essays by Steven Jacobs and Erika Balsom. See Steven Jacobs, “The Video
That Knew Too Much: Hitchcock, Contemporary Art and Post-Cinema,”
in Framing Pictures: Film and the Visual Arts (Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press, 2011); and Erika Balsom, “Dial ‘M’ for Museum: The
Hitchcock of Contemporary Art,” Hitchcock Annual 17 (2011): 129–67.
Although scholarship on individual works or artists invested in Hitchcock
has been published over the years, Jacobs and Balsom’s essays (along with
Stéphane Aquin’s contribution to the Fatal Coincidences catalog) are
the only texts in English to deal with artistic responses to Hitchcock in
general and thus provide commentary on this phenomenon as a whole.
See Stéphane Aquin, “Hitchcock and Contemporary Art,” in Hitchcock
and Art: Fatal Coincidences, ed. Dominique Païni and Guy Cogeval
(Montreal: Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, 2001), 173–78. An essay by
Ursula Frohne, “Anamorphosen des Kinos: Hitchcocks Filme im Spiegel
zeitgenössicher Videoinstallationen,” also appears in a German collection
of essays that survey the various connections between Hitchcock and the
arts, not only broadly conceived to include other practices such as dance,
architecture, and theater but also more specifically in terms of Hitchcock’s
own integration of artistic traditions in his films. Frohne focuses specifi-
cally on a series works by Douglas Gordon and also includes mention of
Grimonprez’s two films. See, Henry Keazor, ed. Hitchcock und die Künste
(Marburg: Schüren, 2013).
15. See Balsom, “Dial ‘M’ for Museum,” 139–43.
16. Ibid., 137–39.
17. Other works about Vertigo include Pierre Bismuth, Respect the Dead,
Vertigo (2001) and Wago Kreider, Between Two Deaths (2006). Susan
Felleman offers a compelling analysis of Kreider’s work in “Remembering,
Repeating and Working Through: Three Screen Memories by Wago
Kreider,” in Film Trilogies: New Critical Approaches, ed. Claire Perkins and
Constantine Verevis (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 211–25.
18. For example, North by Northwest is explored in Laurent Fiévet’s Portrait
a l’Helice (2007) and J. Tobias Anderson’s 879 (1998), 879 Color (2002),
and Prairie Stop, Highway 41 (2004). Works dedicated to Psycho include
 No t e s 161

Laurent Fiévet’s Continuations of Hitchcock: De X Construction (2003),

Janice McNab’s The Bates Motel Tour (2003), Carlos Lobo’s Imaginary
Film Set #5 (2007), McDermott and McGough’s I Want You So, 1966
(2008), and an image from Brice Dellsperger’s Body Double Series (1995–).
Works dedicated to The Birds include Daniel Pitín’s Birds (2004), Eva
Grübinger’s Ravenous (2006), Philippe Decrauzat’s Afterbirds (2008),
and Martijn Hendriks’s Untitled (Give Us Today Our Daily Terror)
(2008). And, as the title suggests, David Sherry’s Psycho Birds (2003) con-
flates the two films. Anderson’s A North Window for the Man with Vertigo
(2004) includes reference to most of these popular films. This is not to
suggest that Hitchcock’s other films are neglected. Forty of them consti-
tute Christoph Girardet and Matthias Müller’s The Phoenix Tapes (1999).
Rodney Graham cites To Catch a Thief (1955) in Fishing on a Jetty (2006)
while Laurent Fiévet’s Lovely Memories (2007) deals with Frenzy (1972).
There is also Steven Campbell’s Strangers on a Train (2003) and Daniel
Canogar’s Dial “M” for Murder (2009). Family Plot (1976) is included in
Jean Breschand’s sound installation, Don’t They Stop Migrating (2007).
19. Jacobs, Framing Pictures, 156.
20. Robert Kapsis, “The Historical Reception of Hitchcock’s Marnie,”
Journal of Film and Video 40,3 (Summer 1988): 72.
21. Indeed, as we shall see throughout this study, it is common to equate
Hitchcock with classical Hollywood cinema, to see him and his films as
emblematic of this era. As such, we will see the ways in which interventions
into Hitchcock are also at once interventions into classical Hollywood itself.
22. See, for example, Balsom, “Dial ‘M’ for Museum”; and Catherine Fowler,
“Remembering Cinema ‘Elsewhere’: From Retrospection to Introspection
in the Gallery Film,” Cinema Journal 51,2 (Winter 2012): 26–45.
23. See, for instance, Paul Grainge, Monochrome Memories: Nostalgia and
Style in Retro America (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2002); and Vera Dika,
Recycled Culture in Contemporary Art and Film: The Uses of Nostalgia
(Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003). I have elaborated
on this position in some of my earlier work, Christine Sprengler, Screening
Nostalgia: Populuxe Props and Technicolor Aesthetics in Contemporary
American Film (Oxford, UK: Berghahn Books, 2009).
24. Unsurprisingly, artists have tackled this specific scene too. In a work that
echoes Robert Whitman’s Shower (1964), Henrik Plenge Jakobsen cre-
ated Shower (1998), which involved constructing a bathroom space with
a functioning shower. While real water streamed from a showerhead, a
filmed image of blood spiraling down the bathtub drain was projected in
the installation. Paul Pfeiffer’s Self Portrait as Fountain (2000) involves
a reproduction of the set of the shower scene whereas Martin Arnold’s
Psycho (1997) recreates this scene in a kind of trailer, but with the actors
removed. The camera remains fixed on the showerhead as a modified
score and scream plays out over the course of a minute.
25. See Chapter 1 (“Introduction: The Noise of the Marketplace”) and
Chapter 4 (“The Remembered Film”) for a fuller discussion of these
162 Not e s

issues in Victor Burgin, The Remembered Film (London: Reaktion Books,

2004).
26. See Jean Luc Godard, “4A,” in Histoire(s) du Cinéma (1988–98).
27. Burgin, Remembered Film, 14–22.
28. Cindy Bernard quoted in Douglas A. Cunningham, “Proposed
Locations: On Postmodern Tributes to Vertigo and Place: Cindy Bernard
in Conversation with Douglas A. Cunningham,” in The San Francisco
of Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo: Place, Pilgrimage, and Commemoration,
ed. Douglas A. Cunningham (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2012),
211–26.
29. See Christian Keathley, Cinephilia and History, or The Wind in the Trees
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), 30–36; Thomas Elsaesser,
“Cinephilia or the Uses of Disenchantment,” in Cinephilia: Movies Love
and Memory, ed. Marijke de Valck and Malte Hagener (Amsterdam:
Amsterdam University Press, 2005), 27–44; and Laura Mulvey, Death
24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image (London: Reaktion Books,
2006), 144–60.
30. Paul Willemen, Looks and Frictions (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1994), 239.
31. de Baecque and Frémaux quoted in Keathley, Cinephilia and History, 4.
32. Elsaesser, “Cinephilia or the Uses of Disenchantment,” 40.
33. Mulvey, Death 24x a Second, 161.
34. Peter Brooks, “Balzac: Epistemophilia and the Collapse of the
Reformation,” Yale French Studies 101 (2001): 120.
35. Peta Cox, “Epistemophilia: Rethinking Feminist Pedagogy,” Australian
Feminist Studies 25,63 (March 2010): 80.
36. Ibid., 79–81.
37. Mary Ann Doane, Femmes Fatales: Feminism, Film Theory, Psychoanalysis
(New York: Routledge, 1991), 1.
38. Laura Mulvey, “Pandora’s Box: Topographies of Curiosity,” in Fetishism
and Curiosity (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 62.
39. Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide
(New York: New York University Press, 2006), 98–99.
40. Robert Burgoyne, “Customizing Pleasure: ‘Super Mario Clouds’ and
John Ford’s Sky,” in Cinephilia in the Age of Digital Reproduction, ed.
Scott Balcerzak and Jason Sperb (London: Wallflower, 2009), 162.
41. Ibid., 163.
42. Ibid., 162.
43. Ibid., 164.
44. 24 Hour Psycho has had several incarnations, the most recent of which
introduced radical changes to its original form. In 2010, it returned to
the tramway venue as part of the Glasgow International Festival of Visual
Art as 24 Hour Psycho Back and Forth and To and Fro. In this iteration,
Psycho is shown on two screens simultaneously. On one, it plays forward
while on the other backward, with both converging on the same image
half way through for about a second.
 No t e s 163

45. See, for example, Philip Monk, Double-Cross: The Hollywood Films of
Douglas Gordon (Toronto: Power Plant and AGYU, 2003).
46. Thanks to Laura Mulvey for bringing this book to my attention.
47. Don DeLillo, Point Omega (New York: Scribner, 2010), 5. More specifi-
cally, he devotes 32 out of 117 pages to the work.
48. Ibid., 6.
49. Ibid., 6.
50. Ibid., 109.
51. Consider, for instance, the explosion in recent years of PhD programs in
art practice in which research and writing constitute a significant com-
ponent of the degree. It is also a very practical concern given present-
day funding structures in arts and humanities. This is particularly true
in Canada where the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council
introduced a funding competition for major “research-creation” grants.
52. Yves Alain Bois, Denis Hollier, and Rosalind Krauss, “A Conversation
with Hubert Damisch,” October 85 (1998): 8.
53. See Hubert Damisch, A Theory of /Cloud/ (Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press, 2002).
54. Ernst van Alphen, Art in Mind: How Contemporary Images Shape Thought
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), xiii.
55. Ibid., xvi.
56. Ibid., xiii.
57. Mieke Bal, Travelling Concepts in the Humanities: A Rough Guide
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002), 61.
58. Mieke Bal, “Narrative Inside Out: Louise Bourgeois’ Spider as Theoretical
Object,” Oxford Art Journal 22,2 (1999): 102–26.
59. Mieke Bal, Quoting Caravaggio: Contemporary Art, Preposterous History
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 117.
60. See, for example, Giovanni Careri, “Time of History and Time Out of
History: The Sistine Chapel as ‘Theoretical Object,’” Art History 30,3
(June 2007): 326–48; and Jill Bennett, “Aesthetics of Intermediality,”
Art History 30,3 (June 2007): 432–50.
61. Bennett, “Aesthetics of Intermediality,” 436.
62. For example, Angela Dalle Vacche, Cinema and Painting: How Art Is Used
in Film (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996); Susan Felleman, Art in the
Cinematic Imagination (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006); Brigitte
Peucker, The Material Image: Art and the Real in Film (Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press, 2007); Jacobs, Framing Pictures; Keazor, Hitchcock
und die Künste; James Bigwood, “Solving a Spellbound Puzzle,” American
Cinematographer 72,6 (June 1991): 34–40; Tom Gunning, “Hitchcock
and the Picture in the Frame,” New England Review 28,3 (2007): 14–31;
Brigitte Peucker, “The Cut of Representation: Painting and Sculpture in
Hitchcock,” in Alfred Hitchcock: Centenary Essays, ed. Richard Allen and
S. Ishii-Gonzalès (London: BFI, 1999), 141–58; and Marc Strauss, “The
Painted Jester: Notes on the Visual Arts in Hitchcock’s Films,” The Journal
of Popular Film and Television 35,2 (Summer 2007): 52–56.
164 Not e s

63. For a more complete, though by no means comprehensive, list see the
Appendix.
64. Burgoyne, “Customizing Pleasure,” 161.
65. Annette Michelson, “Gnosis and Iconoclasm: A Case Study of Cinephilia,”
October 83 (Winter 1998): 9.
66. Federico Windhausen, “The Parenthesis and the Standard: On a Film
by Morgan Fisher,” in Cinephilia: Movies Love and Memory, ed. Marijke
de Valck and Malte Hagener (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press,
2005), 206.

1 Cinephilic Pilgrimages and the

Reification of Profilmic Space
1. Although Albert Halaban located these houses through word of mouth
and blogs, she discovered that the Cape Ann Museum had started to
compile their own comprehensive list of these sites. Gail Albert Halaban,
email to author, August 12, 2012.
2. Killian Fox, “Through Edward Hopper’s Eyes: In Search of an Artist’s
Seaside Inspiration,” The Observer, August 12, 2012. Accessed August
12, 2012. http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2012/aug/12
/edward-hopper-photographs-albert-halaban.
3. Fox, “Through Edward Hopper’s Eyes.” Albert Halaban’s photographic
series Out My Window (2007–) speaks far more directly to Hitchcock’s
Rear Window (1954) than it does to Hopper’s canvasses. Some of the
images that constitute this series closely approximate the film’s atmo-
sphere, color palette, framing, and, as the title suggests, subject mat-
ter. At first glance, Chelsea, West 26th Street between Broadway and 6th
Avenue, Dance Studio (2009) could pass as a still from Hitchcock’s film.
4. Gail Albert Halaban, “Hopper Redux,” Edwynn Houk Gallery. Accessed
August 12, 2012. http://www.houkgallery.com/artists/gail-albert-
halaban/hopper-redux/.
5. Albert Halaban quoted in Fox, “Through Edward Hopper’s Eyes.”
6. However, in Albert Halaban’s case, the changes she introduced to light-
ing are influenced by cinematic lighting, a consequence of having learned
to light while living in Los Angeles where “it was hard not to absorb
cinematic tools.” Email to author, August 13, 2012.
7. Other examples of works involving cinephilic pilgrimages include Chris
Marker’s Sans Soleil (1983), which will be touched on in chapter 2 and
Chris Lane’s ReVisited (2005), which will be discussed in the conclusion
to this study.
8. Part of the motivation for this project involved seeing if she could detect
this growing cynicism in American life in the representations of land-
scapes in these films. Douglas A. Cunningham, “Proposed Locations:
On Postmodern Tributes to Vertigo and Place: Cindy Bernard in
Conversation with Douglas A. Cunningham,” in The San Francisco of
 No t e s 165

Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo: Place, Pilgrimage, and Commemoration, ed.

Douglas A. Cunningham (Lanham: The Scarecrow Press, 2012), 212.
And, as Martin Lefebvre points out, many of Bernard’s choices also coin-
cide with the end of the studio system and the rise of location shooting.
Lefebvre’s article on landscape in film departs from the aim here, but
it is worth mentioning for the way in which he uses Bernard’s Ask the
Dust as a “tool for thought” and an “interlude” to shed light on how
landscape in film functions and how it haunts film. Martin Lefebvre, “On
Landscape in Narrative Cinema,” Canadian Journal of Film Studies 20,1
(Spring 2011): 69–70.
9. Bernard’s titles are clearly important to how we, as viewers, interpret Ask
the Dust. However, as Bernard explains, she was initially hesitant to pro-
vide this information. See Bernard quoted in Cunningham, “Proposed
Locations,” 216.
10. Ibid., 215–16.
11. Ibid., 215.
12. Martha Langford, “Heaven’s Gaze: The Filmic Geographies of Cindy
Bernard,” Border Crossings 15,4 (Fall 1996): 54.
13. Ibid., 54–55.
14. Douglas Cunningham, “‘It’s All There, It’s No Dream’: Vertigo and
the Redemptive Pleasures of the Cinephilic Pilgrimage,” Screen 49,2
(Summer 2008): 126.
15. Ibid., 128.
16. David Reed, interview by author, New York, December 12, 2011.
17. Jonathan Walley, “The Material of Film and the Idea of Cinema:
Contrasting Practices in Sixties and Seventies Avant-Garde Film,” October
103 (Winter 2003): 15–30.
18. See Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 2001) for an elaboration of this way of looking at the structural
logic of cinema.
19. Reed is perhaps best known for large-scale abstractions, conceptual inter-
ventions into the history of painting that have prompted Mieke Bal to
propose a new genre into which to insert his work, namely, nonfigurative
narrative painting. Mieke Bal, Quoting Caravaggio: Contemporary Art,
Preposterous History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 176.
20. Reed is certainly not alone in his resurrection of a two-strip palette.
Martin Scorsese has been given to a similar type of deliberate archaism in
his revival of this aesthetic in The Aviator (2004) and Hugo (2011).
21. Reed prefers to characterize his bedroom pieces as “ensembles” rather
than “installations.” He explains that, for him, an installation requires
taking a piece of the real world and putting it into a museum. These
ensembles, on the other hand, involve “keeping the painting on the wall”
but then changing the room it is in. Reed, interview by author.
22. See David Reed with Carlos Basualdo, Two Bedrooms in San Francisco
(San Francisco: San Francisco Art Institute, 1992), for an account of
Reed’s pilgrimage.
166 Not e s

23. Consider, for instance, the “Bogart Luxe” furniture collection designed
by Thomasville to infuse living spaces with Hollywood glamour, Art
Deco style, and all that Humphrey Bogart himself connotes or British
Star Trek fan Tony Alleyne’s project to transform his apartment into a
faithful replica of the interior of the Starship Enterprise.
24. Many of these developments took place between Judy’s Bedroom’s
Cologne and Frankfurt installations. Other changes included lowering
the gallery ceiling, adding drapes, finding a room roughly the same size
as the bedroom space in Vertigo, and having the door to the room auto-
matically close behind visitors as they entered, much as a hotel room door
actually would. Reed, interview by author.
25. It cost Reed $10,000 to edit a VHS version of Vertigo.
26. Cunningham, “It’s All There, It’s No Dream,” 138.
27. Ibid., 127.
28. Such prohibitions against touching did not prevent people from physically
interacting with the work. Artists Ruben Ochoa and Joey Azul staged a
performance during Reed’s exhibition in La Jolla that involved getting into
the bed, removing their clothes, and kissing. The performance was halted
by museum guards but Reed explains that, had he been there, he would
have sanctioned its continuation. During the installation of Judy’s Bedroom
in Frankfurt, a decision was made by Reed and curator Udo Kittelmann to
permit visitors to sit on the bed. Reed, interview by author.
29. Reed explains that this caused some controversy, for people felt one
ought not experience art and, painting in particular, from high speeds.
Though arguably, as Greg Dickinson argues, different speeds of con-
sumption construct the possibility of different types of gaze, which in
turn yield different forms of experience and, consequently, memories of
the sites subjected to these gazes. He considers, in increasing order of
speed, the shopper’s gaze, the pedestrian gaze, and the one of relevance
here, the automotive gaze. For more, see Greg Dickinson, “Memories
for Sale: Nostalgia and the Construction of Identity in Old Pasadena,”
The Quarterly Journal of Speech 83,1 (1997): 1–27.
30. Chris Dercon, “Gleaning the Future from the Gallery Floor,” Senses of
Cinema 28 (September–October 2003). Accessed October 27, 2009.
http://sensesofcinema.com/2003/28/gleaning_the_future/.
31. Moreover, the film still, often assumed to be an indexical trace fixed in
a medium associated with memorialization, is exposed here for what it
typically is—a staged promotional photograph divorced from the flow of
images that constitute the actual film. The film still will be discussed in
more detail in chapter 3.
32. Victor Burgin, The Remembered Film (London: Reaktion Books, 2004),
25.
33. Ibid., 67.
34. Nicola White, “A City of Dreams Reflected in Bright Neon,” The Herald,
December 29, 1997. Accessed July 5, 2009. http://www.heraldscotland.
com/sport/spl/aberdeen/a-city-of-dreams-reflected-in-bright-neon-
1.362688.
 No t e s 167

35. Ibid.
36. See website Community Walk, “Trail 4: Merchant City/Candleriggs.”
http://www.communitywalk.com/ActiveArtTrails4.
37. For more on Hitchcock’s encounter with the Victorian convention of
using green light for ghosts and villains, see Donald Spoto, The Dark Side
of Genius: The Life of Alfred Hitchcock (New York: Da Capo Press, 1983),
22.
38. And it is an object for a Hitchcockian cinephile more precisely. In addi-
tion to his well-known 24 Hour Psycho, Gordon made a series of other
works in response to Hitchcock and his films: A Souvenir of Non-Existence
(1993), Psycho Hitchhiker (1993), Surface Mail White Portrait (1999),
Airmail White Portrait (1999), and Feature Film (1999), the subject of
chapter 5.
39. White, “A City of Dreams Reflected in Bright Neon.”
40. Community Walk, “Trail 4: Merchant City/Candleriggs.”
41. Indeed, for MacDonald, who makes no reference to Vertigo in the con-
text of his discussion of Empire, this is the work’s only meaning. See
Stuart W. MacDonald, “The Trouble with Post-Modernism,” Journal of
Art and Design Education 18,1 (February 1999): 17.
42. For an analysis of the colonialist and imperialist aspects of Vertigo, see
Christopher D. Morris, “Feminism, Deconstruction and the Pursuit of
the Tenable in Vertigo,” Hitchcock Annual (Autumn 1996–1997): 3–25.

2 Activating Memories and Museums

through the Expanded Essay Film
1. Harun Farocki provides the narration in the German version and Kaja
Silverman in the English version.
2. Harun Farocki, “Workers Leaving the Factory,” in Harun Farocki:
Working on the Sight-Lines, ed. Thomas Elsaesser (Amsterdam: Amsterdam
University Press, 2004), 243.
3. Farocki is uneasy about what he sees as the vagueness of the “essay film.”
He states, “This category is just as unsuitable as ‘documentary film,’ sure.
When there is a lot of music on TV and you see landscapes—they’ve
started calling that an essay film as well. A lot of stuff that’s just relax-
ing and not unequivocally journalistic is already called an essay. That’s
terrible of course.” Rembert Hüser, “Nine Minutes in the Yard: A
Conversation with Harun Farocki,” in Harun Farocki: Working on the
Sight-Lines, ed. Thomas Elsaesser (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University
Press, 2004), 313.
4. See Nora Alter, “The Political Im/perceptible in the Essay Film,” New
German Critique 68 (Spring/Summer 1996): 171.
5. Laura Rascaroli, “The Essay Film: Problems, Definitions, Textual
Commitments,” Framework 49,2 (Fall 2008): 34.
6. Timothy Corrigan, The Essay Film: From Montaigne, after Marker (New
York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 6
168 Not e s

7. Catherine Fowler, “Remembering Cinema ‘Elsewhere’: From

Retrospection to Introspection in the Gallery Film, Cinema Journal 51,2
(Winter 2012): 26–45.
8. Rascaroli, “The Essay Film,” 37.
9. Marker also engages with Hitchcock in La Jetée (1962) and Immemory (1997).
10. Paul Arthur, A Line of Sight: American Avant-Garde Film since 1965
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), 68
11. Paul Arthur, “Essay Questions: From Alain Resnais to Michael Moore,”
Film Comment 39,1 (January–February 2003): 62.
12. Daniel Morgan, Late Godard and the Possibilities of Cinema (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2013), 20.
13. Ibid., 21.
14. See Jacques Rancière, “Godard, Hitchcock, and the Cinematographic
Image,” in For Ever Godard, ed. Michael Temple, James S. Williams, and
Michael Witt (London: Black Dog Publishing, 2004), 214–31.
15. Morgan, Late Godard, 172.
16. Ibid., 174.
17. Ibid.
18. Ibid., 175.
19. Corrigan, Essay Film, 182.
20. Arthur, “Essay Questions,” 62.
21. Ursula Biemann, “The Video Essay in the Digital Age,” in Stuff It: The
Video Essay in the Digital Age, ed. Ursula Biemann (New York: Springer,
2003), 10.
22. Nora Alter, “Translating the Essay into Film and Installation,” Journal of
Visual Culture 6,1 (2007): 53. Alter argues the essay film’s translatability
can be traced back to both Benjamin’s acceptance of translations between
media and Lukacs, “who theorized the translation of the written essay
into a new aesthetic medium” (48).
23. Duncan White, “Expanded Cinema: The Live Record,” in Expanded
Cinema: Art, Performance, Film, ed. A. L. Rees et al. (London: Tate
Publishing, 2011), 24.
24. A. L. Rees, “Expanded Cinema and Narrative: A Troubled History,” in
Expanded Cinema: Art, Performance, Film, ed. A. L. Rees et al. (London:
Tate Publishing, 2011), 12.
25. Michael O’Pray, “Expanded Cinema and the New Romantic Film
Movement of the 1980s,” in Expanded Cinema: Art, Performance, Film,
ed. A. L. Rees et al. (London: Tate Publishing, 2011), 62.
26. Of course, these two spectatorial modes of responding to works are not
mutually exclusive.
27. The essay film can also be seen as a form with distinctive expressions
originating in worlds of both art and film. As Nora Alter explains, in the
1970s and 1980s, two strands were identifiable: the art world’s approach
to the essay film often involved a fusion of documentary and avant-garde
traditions, whereas in cinema, it brought together documentary with fic-
tion. Alter, “Translating the Essay,” 52.
 No t e s 169

28. Valie Export, “Expanded Cinema as Expanded Reality,” Senses of Cinema

28 (October 2003): n.p. Accessed April 20, 2010. http://­sensesofcinema.
com/2003/28/expanded_cinema/.
29. Scott MacDonald, “Collection/Recollection: An Interview with Matthias
Müller,” Framework 46,1 (Spring 2005): 29–52. As will soon become
significant, Birgit Hein happened to be Matthias Müller’s instructor.
30. Müller quoted in MacDonald, “Collection/Recollection,” 44.
31. Modern Art Oxford replaced the original name, Museum of Modern Art
Oxford, in order to reflect the nature of its programming and the transfor-
mation of its identity from a museum to a gallery. Though originally meant
to collect works of modern art, the institution found it impossible to adhere
to this mandate. They have since decided to focus on temporary exhibi-
tions. For more on this, see Rembert Hüser, “QWERTY Cinema: Christoph
Girardet/Matthias Müller’s Phoenix Tapes,” in After the Avant-Garde:
Contemporary German and Austrian Experimental Film, ed. Randall Halle
and Reinhold Steingröver (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2008), 253.
32. Christa Blüminger, “On Matthias Müller’s Logic of Appropriation,” in
The Memo Book: The Films, Videos and Installations of Matthias Müller,
ed. Stefanie Schulte Strathaus (Toronto: YYZ Books, 2005), 77.
33. Hüser, “QWERTY Cinema,” 247.
34. Ibid., 261.
35. Federico Windhausen, “Hitchcock and the Found Footage Installation:
Müller and Girardet’s the Phoenix Tapes,” Hitchcock Annual 12 (2003):
106.
36. Girardet and Müller are aware of this charge and are rightly perturbed by
it. As they related to Windhausen, they did not set out to “illustrate the
words of film theorists and to simply produce another work about him,”
nor did they aim to produce “another didactic ‘highlight compilation.’”
Müller and Girardet quoted in Windhausen, “Hitchcock and the Found
Footage Installation,” 107.
37. Ibid., 109.
38. Ibid., 116.
39. Ibid., 119.
40. Ibid.
41. The 45-minute single screen version became the most popular after fes-
tival invitations started to arrive for Girardet and Müller. MacDonald,
“Collection/Recollection,” 44–45.
42. Müller quoted in MacDonald, “Collection/Recollection,” 45.
43. Windhausen, “Hitchcock and the Found Footage Installation,” 106.
44. Müller quoted in MacDonald, “Collection/Recollection,” 44. Indeed,
it was very much conceived of as a museum work that makes use of the
space physically and institutionally. Müller, for instance, explains that he
prefers the site of the museum to a festival because he believes more
people will see the work. Incidentally, this is what drove Farocki to the
museum too and perhaps drove the development of the expanded version
of Workers Leaving the Factory.
170 Not e s

45. As noted in chapter 1, the ensembles first made use of tape, but then
switched to DVD for later installations of the works.
46. John Baldessari quoted in Meg Cranston, “John Baldessari: Many
Worthwhile Aspect,” in Baldessari: While Something Is Happening Here,
Something Else Is Happening There, Works 1988–1999, by Meg Cranston,
Diedrich Diederichsen, and Thomas Weski (Köln: W. König, 1999), 28.
47. Laura Rascaroli, The Personal Camera: Subjective Cinema and the Essay
Film (London: Wallflower, 2009), 67–68.
48. Ibid., 68
49. Huyssen, Andreas. Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of
Amnesia (New York: Routledge, 1995), 25.

3 Remediation and Intermediality:

From Moving to (Film) Still
1. Though it seems strange to speak of an “original film” given Benjamin’s
influence on how we think about reproduction, I mean “original” here
in the sense of the complete filmic text as envisioned by Hitchcock and
screened in cinemas. The opposite of this is not necessarily a “copy,”
though there are a few, as we shall soon see, but instead creative retool-
ings of Hitchcock’s films through a variety of means.
2. Catherine Fowler, “Remembering Cinema ‘Elsewhere’: From
Retrospection to Introspection in the Gallery Film,” Cinema Journal
51,2 (Winter 2012): 27.
3. Though Bauer’s focus is on Hitchcock (Vertigo, Rear Window, and North
by Northwest), she has subjected other classical Hollywood films to similar
treatment, including Casablanca (1942) and Imitation of Life (1959).
4. As the extreme length suggests, Inghilleri’s titles also play a role in
recounting the narrative trajectory of her series of paintings.
5. The woman depicted in Inghilleri’s portraits is her younger cousin with
whom she has worked since the model was 12. She explains that she tried
working with others, but without much success. There is an understand-
ing between an artist and a model that for Inghilleri is essential. Isabelle
Inghilleri, email to author, May 9, 2013.
6. Ibid.
7. Ibid.
8. We may also recognize the outfit as one similar to (though darker in
color and styled slightly differently than) the one worn by Tippi Hedren
in the film. Inghilleri selected The Birds in part because of her experi-
ence of being terrified by the film at the age of nine or ten and in part
because it permitted her to collapse her interest in film and animals. She
writes, “I work a lot with animals in my art, for me the animal and nature
represent something that we cannot fully understand or control. In The
Birds nature is turning against us, birds are aggressive and humans are
weak, it’s a scary thought as there are a lot of birds in the world.” Email
to author, May 9, 2013.
 No t e s 171

9. Indeed, it is Lynch whose imprint is felt in the very first images in the
Theme Park series and, as such, Inghilleri’s images allude back to the start
and an early image that featured a single crow high in the sky, a premoni-
tion of things to come.
10. See Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding
New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000).
11. Ibid., 45.
12. Johan Callens, “Remediation in David Mamet’s The Water Engine,”
American Drama 14,2 (Summer 2005): 39–55; and Weihong Bao,
“The Politics of Remediation: Mise-en-scène and the Subjunctive Body
in Chinese Opera Film,” The Opera Quarterly 26,2–3 (2010): 256–90.
13. Jill Bennett, “Aesthetics of Intermediality,” Art History 30,3 (June
2007): 434.
14. Ibid., 436.
15. Ibid., 434.
16. Ibid., 435.
17. See Jens Schroetner, “Four Models of Intermediality,” in Travels in
Intermediality: Reblurring the Boundaries, ed. Bernd Herzogenrath
(Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College Press, 2012), 15.
18. Bennett, “Aesthetics of Intermediality,” 436.
19. Ibid.
20. Ibid., 443.
21. Ibid., 441. In some ways, this idea of coproduction has resonance with
Fowler’s claims about collaborative art practices and thus how Girardet
and Müller characterize their engagement with Hitchcock.
22. Douglas A. Cunningham, “Proposed Locations: On Postmodern Tributes
to Vertigo and Place: Cindy Bernard in Conversation with Douglas A.
Cunningham,” in The San Francisco of Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo: Place,
Pilgrimage, and Commemoration, ed. Douglas A. Cunningham, 212
(Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2012), 211–26.
23. In Location Proposal #2, the impossibility of return and the failure of
reification are even more forcefully articulated than in Ask the Dust. Here,
the digitally manufactured “photograph” is an image lacking in indexi-
cality and thus one without any connection to the place it purports to
represent. There is no “real” in which to “ground the image.” In this
way, it also reveals the inevitable failure met by cinephilic pilgrims seek-
ing an experience of Vertigo through an experience of the Muir Woods.
This place may be “represented” in the film, but it is not the actual site at
which Hitchcock’s image of Muir Woods was inscribed into celluloid.
24. However, the white cubes and black boxes that promise to offer expe-
riences of artworks free from interference typically disavow their own
highly ideological and contextualizing effects.
25. As Bernard states, Location Proposal #2 “was about a real self-conscious-
ness about one’s position relative to the image. I wanted the audience to
be as self-conscious about looking as possible.” Cunningham, “Proposed
Locations,” 245n24.
172 Not e s

26. John Sharp, “A Curiously Short History of Game Art,” Proceedings of

the International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games, May
29–June 1, 2012, 26–32. Accessed March 12, 2013. http://dl.acm.org.
proxy2.lib.uwo.ca/citation.cfm?id=2282348. For an argument about its
decline, see Matteo Bittanti and Domenico Quaranta, GameScenes: Art
in the Age of Videogames (Milan: Johan & Levi Editore, 2009), 26.
27. Palle Torsson, “Museum Meltdown FAQ,” Palle Torsson. Accessed
September 1, 2012. http://www.palletorsson.com/mm_6.php. Torsson
also explains, “In the beginning we planned to have the game on the
Internet, but the security chief refused to give us the drawings of the
museum. He was afraid that someone might use the game to plan a raid
against the museum.”
28. Palle Torsson, a committed anticopyright activist, makes high-resolu-
tion “.jpg” images of this series available for download on his website
at http://palletorsson.com/sellection/evil/full/. As such, and rather
ironically, it was impossible to gain official copyright permission from
him to reproduce any of these images here.
29. The artificiality of this linear perspective has prompted gamers invested in
building their own levels to enlist their peers in online discussion boards
to write new code to improve the look of their worlds. See, for example,
http://forums.epicgames.com/threads/884073-Help!-­Perspective-
code.
30. I say hesitantly because although some use gameophilia in the way one
might use cinephilia, gameophilia also refers to the sexual attraction a
player might feel toward a video game character.
31. Video games have their own fan culture practices, which include building
sculptural versions of video games’ objects and sets. Consider, for exam-
ple, Orhan Kipcak and Reinhard Urban’s ars Doom (1995). Collecting or
producing game art is another practice. This can take several forms, from
collecting sketches made by game developers to producing one’s own
sketches of the characters and worlds that constitute a game.
32. Modifying video games is a very common practice both among gamers
and artists, prompting Alexander Galloway to suggest that “modify[ing]
games is almost as natural as playing them.” Alexander Galloway,
“Countergaming,” in Try Again, ed. Juan Antonio Álvarez Reyes
(Madrid: La Casa Encendida, 2008), 80. He also argues that video game
mods share much in common with Peter Wollen’s conception of coun-
tercinema and that the relation between video games and their mods is
akin to mainstream and countercinema.
33. Steven Jacobs, “The History and Aesthetics of the Classical Film Still,”
History of Photography 34,3 (2010): 373.
34. Ibid., 374. The demands of photography in terms of lighting, shutter
speed, and the construction of space also meant actors had to be posed
differently in order to generate an effective, high-quality still (379).
35. Ibid., 373.
 No t e s 173

36. Ibid., 382.

37. He also removes the aesthetic signature of the film, its cinematographic
style, and source of atmosphere, leaving the architecture and contents of
the space alone to draw us back into the filmic world in question.
38. Jacobs, “History and Aesthetics of the Classical Film Still,” 375–76.
39. Ibid., 379.
40. Ibid., 378. Of course, Psycho is also important for a lot of firsts, including
ushering in how we watch films, given Hitchcock’s insistence that audi-
ences enter the theater at the beginning of the film and were prohibited
from entering late.
41. Jacobs, “History and Aesthetics of the Classical Film Still,” 386.
42. This term is now used in wider parlance to describe an image that makes
its subject seem more attractive than it actually is.
43. Today, of course, the connection is even stronger. Films function as pro-
motional vehicles for video games, now the bigger of the two indus-
tries. Moreover, games like Batman: Arkham Asylum (2009) let you be
Batman.
44. Schroetner, “Four Models of Intermediality,” 27.

4 Spatial Montage, Temporal Collage, and

the Art(ifice) of Rear Projection
1. We find versions of “spatial montage” defined in a number of contexts
(e.g., modernism) and in the work of a number of critics from Marshall
McLuhan to Lev Manovich. The latter especially has had an impact on
how spatial montage is now so often used in reference to digital images
and the spatial logic of the computer. See Lev Manovich, The Language
of New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002). For instance, David
Rodowick calls Sukarov’s Russian Ark (2002) a spatial montage because
of the edits to which it was subjected in digital postproduction. See David
Rodowick, The Virtual Life of Film (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2009), 169.
2. As we shall soon see, Jim Campbell’s Illuminated Average series (2000–
2009) is an apt example of this.
3. This doubling of the image also speaks rather directly to Hitchcock’s
tendency to play with doubles in his films. For more on the significance
of doubling in artworks based on Hitchcock’s own penchant for this
device, see Steven Jacobs, “The Video That Knew Too Much: Hitchcock,
Contemporary Art and Post-Cinema,” in Framing Pictures: Film and the
Visual Arts (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011); and Erika
Balsom, “Dial ‘M’ for Museum: The Hitchcock of Contemporary Art,”
Hitchcock Annual 17 (2011): 129–67.
4. Les LeVeque, email to author, August 15, 2013.
5. I will briefly consider the significance of the soundtrack to 4 Vertigo in the
next chapter.
174 Not e s

6. LeVeque, email to author.

7. Ibid.
8. LeVeque, email to author, September 2, 2013.
9. Ibid.
10. LeVeque, email to author.
11. Sharon Lin Tay and Patricia R. Zimmerman, “Throbs and Pulsations,”
Afterimage 34,4 (January–February 2007): 13.
12. Ibid.
13. LeVeque, email to author.
14. For more on this work, see Benjamin Samuel and Henry Keazor, “‘ . . . wie
die Ringe des Saturn’: Ein Gespräch mit Benjamin Samuel vor seinen
Werken Hitchcock30 und Kubrick13+9+10 im Frankfurter Filmmuseum,” in
Hitchcock und die Künste, ed. Henry Keazor (Marburg: Schürer, 2013),
33–47.
15. Ibid., 33.
16. Others in this series include Illuminated Average: Fleming’s The Wizard
of Oz (2001) and Illuminated Average: Welles’ Citizen Kane Breakfast
Table Sequence (2000).
17. For Erika Balsom, this is a gesture that “activates a self-consciousness
about the very strategy with which he and so many of his contemporaries
are engaged: he produces not simply a remake, but a remake about the
proliferation of remakes.” Balsom, “Dial ‘M’ for Museum,” 136.
18. See Germaine Dulac, “The Expressive Techniques of the Cinema,” in
French Film Theory and Criticism 1907–1939, Volume 1, ed. Richard Abel
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 311. For an in-depth
analysis of the significance of superimposition to film theory and Bazin,
in particular, see Daniel Morgan, “The Afterlife of Superimposition,” in
Opening Bazin, ed. Dudley Andrew and Hervé Joubert-Laurencin (New
York: Oxford University Press, 2011): 127–41.
19. Lauren Fiévet, “Artist Statement: Infrastructure,” Lauren Fiévet.
Accessed February 28, 2011, http://www.laurentfievet.com/aworks/9
/infrastructures-en.
20. Laurent Fiévet, “Artist Statement: Circulations,” Laurent Fiévet. Accessed
February 28, 2011. http://www.laurentfievet.com/en/aworks/3/circulations.
21. David Campany, “Motion Pictures,” Frieze 115 (May 2008): n.p. Accessed
June 20, 2010. www.frieze.com/issue/article/motion_picture1/.
22. Ibid.
23. As such, Lewis shares similar concerns with others like Ernie Gerh and
Phil Solomon.
24. Mark Lewis, “Artist’s Talk,” University of Western Ontario, October 20,
2011.
25. Philippe-Alain Michaud, “‘Upside Down’: Mark Lewis, or Upside Down
Cinema,” in Mark Lewis, ed. Saretto Cincinelli and Cristiana Collu
(Milan: Silvana, 2009), 183.
26. Rear Projection (Molly Parker) and Nathan Phillips Square, A Winter’s
Night, Skating are two of Lewis’s four rear projection films. The other
 No t e s 175

two are The Fight (2008) and Backstory (2009), a short documentary of
sorts focused on the Hansards, the family responsible for producing most
of the rear projections for Hollywood.
27. Shepherd Steiner classifies Lewis’s work as an “epistemological project.”
Shepherd Steiner, “The Beautiful and the Everyday in the Films of Mark
Lewis,” C Magazine 102 (Summer 2009): 32.
28. Initially, rear-projected images were quite small and used primarily to
show moving scenery through a car window. By 1932, however, new
technologies allowed for projection on screens 17 x 32 feet. Barry
Salt, “Film Style and Technology in the Thirties,” Film Quarterly 30,1
(1976): 27.
29. Julie Turnock, “The Screen on the Set: The Problem of Classical-Studio
Rear Projection,” Cinema Journal 51,2 (Winter 2012): 159.
30. Turnock (“Screen on the Set,” 158) explains that “plates” referred to
rear projection background footage, “process shots” to moving back-
grounds, and “transparencies” to still backgrounds.
31. Ibid., 161.
32. Robert Kapsis, “The Historical Reception of Hitchcock’s Marnie,”
Journal of Film and Video 40,3 (Summer 1988): 52.
33. Dominique Païni, “The Wandering Gaze: Hitchcock’s Use of Transparencies,”
in Hitchcock and Art: Fatal Coincidences, ed. Dominique Païni and Guy
Cogeval (Montreal: Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, 2001), 52.
34. Robin Wood quoted in Kapsis, “Historical Reception of Hitchcock’s
Marnie,” 52.
35. Christopher Morris, “Reading the Birds and The Birds,” Literature/Film
Quarterly 28,4 (2000): 255.
36. Païni, “Wandering Gaze,” 52.
37. Ibid., 55.
38. See Sarah Milroy, “Short Films, Great Impact,” The Globe and Mail, July
22, 2006, R7; and Michelle Jacques, “Background Characters: Mark
Lewis’ Backstory,” Fuse 32,4 (September 2009): 44.
39. See Michael Connor, “Small Sensations: Mark Lewis and the Movies,”
in Mark Lewis: Essays, ed. Karen Allen (Liverpool: Liverpool University
Press and Foundation for Art and Creative Technology, 2006), 12; and
David Campany, “Motion Pictures.”
40. Laura Mulvey, “A Clumsy Sublime? Back Projection in Alfred Hitchcock
and Mark Lewis,” in The Sublime Now, ed. Luke White and Claire
Pajaczkowska (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing,
2009), 283–92.
41. See Mark Lewis, “Foreword,” Afterall: A Journal of Art, Context, and
Enquiry 8 (Autumn/Winter 2003): 1–4.
42. Mark Lewis, email to author, August 12, 2013.
43. Mark Lewis quoted in Mark Francis, “Mark Lewis in Conversation with
Mark Francis at Fig-1,” Mark Lewis Press, Monte Clarke Gallery website.
Accessed October 4, 2011. www.monteclarkegallery.com.
44. Lewis, email to author.
176 Not e s

45. Mark Lewis quoted in Klaus Biesenbach, “Interview with Mark Lewis,”
in Mark Lewis: Cold Morning, ed. Barbara Fischer (Toronto: Justina M.
Barnicke Gallery, 2009), 40.
46. Lewis, email to author.
47. For instance, Lewis cites Renoir’s attempts to represent two different
kinds of time in a single image. See Lewis, “Foreword,” 3. Later, both
Laura Mulvey and Mark Lewis explore the way in which Renaissance por-
traiture can be seen as an antecedent of rear projection. For example, a
portrait like Piero della Francesca’s Federico de Montefeltro and His Wife,
Battista Sforza (1465–66) is composed of two distinct planes that appear
unrelated, a foreground portrait of the sitter and a very separate back-
ground landscape.
48. Ibid.
49. Mark Lewis quoted in Cristiana Collu, “An Unexpected Subversion,” in
Mark Lewis, ed. Saretto Cincinelli and Cristiana Collu (Milan: Silvana,
2009), 172.
50. In this way, Molly Parker alludes to the tendency of subjects in the films
of the Lumières or the Mutoscope and Edison companies to look at the
camera. But she cannot reenact it. In fact, she points to the impossibility
of doing so. As Mark Lewis argues, this look, which at the turn of the cen-
tury was “a genuine act of curiosity,” has become a wholly self-conscious
one today, a look to the camera, because it is informed by the knowledge
of what cinema is. Now, either we acknowledge the camera, knowing
what it means as an apparatus and practice, or we ignore it. Both reac-
tions, however, are predicated on a history of the machine whereas a cen-
tury ago, this history did not exist. See Mark Lewis, “Is Modernity Our
Antiquity,” Afterall: A Journal of Art, Context and Enquiry 14 (Autumn
/Winter 2006): 115–16.
51. Lewis explains his reasons for choosing Molly Parker, writing, “I felt it
was important that the film should depict someone who is recognizable,
not necessarily in name, but crucially in terms of style and performance
(i.e. she is an actress). In addition, Molly Parker’s ‘neutral’ look has, in
my opinion, an uncanny similarity to the way female subjects were often
depicted in early modern portrait painting and in turn in the early mod-
ern cinema of the ‘20s and ‘30s (when rear projection was introduced).
This look can be characterized I think as a complex combination of ide-
alization and individuality, a look that is both universal and unique at the
same time.” Mark Lewis quoted in Connor, “Small Sensations,” 6.
52. That Molly Parker is framed in an “American shot” for most of the film
helps to secure this connection to classical Hollywood too.
53. See Marc LeSueur, “Theory Number Five: Anatomy of Nostalgia Films:
Heritage and Methods,” Journal of Popular Film 6,2 (1977): 187–97.
54. Laura Mulvey, “Rear Projection: Modernity in a Special Effect,” in Mark
Lewis: Cold Morning, ed. Barbara Fischer (Toronto: Justina M. Barnicke
Gallery, 2009), 28.
 No t e s 177

55. Ibid.
56. Ibid.
57. Lewis, email to author.
58. Ibid.
59. My thanks to Daniel Morgan for this astute observation.
60. See, “Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960),” in Laura Mulvey, Death 24x
a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image (London: Reaktion, 2006):
85–103.
61. Lewis, “Artist’s Talk.”
62. See Michael Rush, “In Depth Briefly,” in Mark Lewis: Essays, ed. Karen
Allen (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press and Foundation for Art
and Creative Technology, 2006), 26. There is also a connection to
the Hudson River School, one articulated both by Michaud, “Upside
Down,” 60; and Bernard Fibicher, “Painterly Aspects,” Canadian Art
20,3 (Fall 2003): 90–93.
63. Fibicher, “Painterly Aspects,” 92.
64. Païni, “Wandering Gaze,” 56. Païni reminds us too that Hitchcock was
deeply influenced by these painters.
65. Ibid.
66. Ibid., 63.
67. Mark Lewis, “Film as Re-imaging the Modern Space,” in Urban
Cinematics: Understanding Urban Phenomena through the Moving Image,
ed. François Penz and Andong Lu (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2011), 125.
68. As Païni explains, Hitchcock pioneered this in Secret Agent (1935), a
strategy that, to his mind, has not been adopted by any other director to
represent a couple dancing. Païni, “Wandering Gaze,” 63.
69. Ibid., 56.
70. Lewis, “Film as Re-imaging the Modern Space,” 125.
71. Teatro Piccolo Arsenale, “Mark Lewis in Conversation with Benjamin
Weil,” 53rd International Art Exhibition—La Biennale de Venezia,
June 3, 2009, http://www.labiennale.org/en/art/archive/exhibition
/conversations/.

5 The Acoustics of V ertigo : Soundtracks,

Soundscapes, and Scores
1. Much has been made of Psycho’s “scream” across visual and popu-
lar culture, but this is a single sound isolated from the film whereas
Vertigo’s soundtrack remains far more intact in artistic engagements
with it.
2. Consider, for example, the controversy swirling around The Artist’s
(2011) recycling of a portion of Herrmann’s score.
3. Jack Sullivan, Hitchcock’s Music (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,
2006), 222.
178 Not e s

4. Ibid., 225.
5. Ibid., 223.
6. Ibid., 224.
7. See David Cooper, Bernard Herrmann’s Vertigo: A Film Score Handbook
(Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing, 2001).
8. David Cooper, “Film Form and Musical Form in Bernard Herrmann’s
Score to Vertigo,” The Journal of Film Music 1,2/3 (2003): 240.
9. Ibid., 246.
10. Jochen Eisentraut, “Hitchcock and Herrmann, Music, Sexual Violence
and Cultural Change in Vertigo, Marnie and Psycho,” in Sound and Music
in Film and Visual Media: An Overview, ed. Graeme Harper, Ruth
Doughty, and Jochen Eisentraut (New York: Continuum 2009), 439.
11. Cooper, “Film Form and Musical Form,” 241.
12. Stan Link, “Leitmotif: Persuasive Musical Narration,” in Sound and
Music in Film and Visual Media: An Overview, ed. Graeme Harper, Ruth
Doughty, and Jochen Eisentraut (New York: Continuum 2009), 189.
13. Link, “Leitmotif,” 189.
14. Stan Link, “Nor the Eye Filled with Seeing: The Sound of Vision in
Film,” American Music 22,1 (Spring 2004): 76–90.
15. Royal S. Brown, “The Music of Vertigo,” in Feature Film, ed. Douglas
Gordon (London: Artangel, 1999), 6.
16. David Ryan, “‘We Have Eyes as Well as Ears . . . ’: Experimental Music
and the Visual Arts,” in The Ashgate Research Companion to Experimental
Music, ed. James Saunders (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009), 196.
17. Consider, for instance, the score for Fernand Léger’s Ballet Mécanique
(1924), which called for propellers among other novel sound
generators.
18. But these works also show how found sound is necessarily very different
from found footage, with the possibilities opened up by working from
notation, rather than from a recording of the actual source.
19. David Ryan, “We Have Eyes as Well as Ears,” 214.
20. Les LeVeque, “Selected Short Videos,” Les LeVeque. Accessed August 6,
2011. http://www.leslevequevideo.com/shorts.html.
21. Sharon Lin Tay and Patricia R. Zimmermann, “Throbs and Pulsations,”
Afterimage 34,4 (January–February 2007): 13.
22. Ibid., 16.
23. Ibid.
24. Bernard Herrmann, “A Lecture in Film Music (1973),” in The Hollywood
Film Music Reader, ed. Mervyn Cooke (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2010), 211.
25. These works depart from the dominant tendency to focus on Vertigo’s
soundtrack. In fact, Tajiri also eschews the less recognizable moments
in Psycho and Torn Curtain’s score for excerpts that do not dominate
the images. But while Psycho’s soundtrack, like Vertigo’s, is recogniz-
ably Hitchcockian thanks to Bernard Hermann’s familiar musical signa-
ture, Torn Curtain is less so given a different composer. It was during
 No t e s 179

Torn Curtain that Hitchcock and Herrmann had their falling out after
Hitchcock rejected Herrmann’s score.
26. Jennifer Gonzáles, “Overtures,” in Christian Marclay, by Jennifer
Gonzales, Kim Gordon, and Matthew Higgs (New York: Phaidon,
2005), 34. Marclay refers to sound as merely a tool.
27. And as a rather famous turntablist, Marclay was also influenced by Hip
Hop and DJing practices.
28. See, for example, Russell Ferguson, “The Variety of Din,” in Christian
Marclay, by Russell Ferguson et al. (Los Angeles, CA: UCLA Hammer
Museum, 2003), 40.
29. Liz Kotz, “Marked Record/Program for Activity,” in Christian Marclay:
Festival, Volume 1 (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 2010), 12.
30. Marclay explains that he makes “music the way a visual artist would.”
Russell Ferguson, “Never the Same Twice, Christian Marclay Interviewed
by Russell Ferguson,” in Christian Marclay: Festival, Volume 1 (New
York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 2010), 67.
31. For instance, the three volumes that comprise the Whitney exhibi-
tion catalog, Christian Marclay: Festival, make no mention of Vertigo:
Soundtrack for an Exhibition.
32. We are reminded here of the difficulties related to the documentation of
performance, either due to the nature of the performance itself or the
artist’s refusal to allow their gestures to be captured. Still, it is usually
possible to find a surreptitiously acquired image or recording or other
documentation of even the most challenging work in this genre. This is
not the case with Vertigo: Soundtrack for an Exhibition.
33. Kerry Brougher, “Hall of Mirrors,” in Art and Film since 1945: Hall of
Mirrors, by Kerry Brougher, Russell Ferguson, and Jonathan Crary (New
York: Monacelli Press, 1996), 133.
34. While looking is the dominant sense activated in the art museum, the
experience is far from monosensory, mobilizing the haptic, auditory, and
even olfactory as well. Indeed, recent exhibitions and installations can be
more multisensory than the traditional cinematic experience.
35. Peter Wollen, “Mismatches of Sound and Image,” in Soundscape: The
School of Sound Lectures 1998–2001, ed. Jerry Sider and Diane Freeman
(London: Wallflower, 2003), 225.
36. See, for example, Laura Mulvey, Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the
Moving Image (London: Reaktion Books, 2006); Amy Taubin, “Douglas
Gordon,” in Spellbound, ed. Philip Dodd and Ian Christie (London:
British Film Institute and Hayward Gallery, 1996); and Steven Jacobs,
Framing Pictures: Film and the Visual Arts (Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press, 2011).
37. Claire Bishop, “Douglas Gordon: Are You Looking at Him?,” Flash Art
International 32 (Summer 1999): n.p. Accessed July 10, 2011. http:
//www.undo.net/it/magazines/934208970.
38. Raymond Bellour, “The Body of Fiction,” in Feature Film, ed. Douglas
Gordon (London: Artangel, 1999), 2.
180 Not e s

39. This recalls Yves Klein’s Symphonie Monoton—Silence (Monotone

Symphony—Silence) for which he conducted in front of an imaginary
orchestra at the Gelsenkirchen Opera House in West Germany in 1959.
40. Gordon quoted in Bishop, “Douglas Gordon.”
41. See, for instance, Paul Mattick, Jr., “Mechanical Reproduction in the Age
of Art,” Arts Magazine 65,1 (September 1990): 62–69.
42. Feature Film, the book, is an interesting object in its own right as part of
the afterlife of the exhibition. It also speaks to the consumption of works
of art and film at home, a practice that initiated this project for Gordon in
the first place. He sees this project and others like it as part of an “auto-
biographical exercise” because he first saw films like Psycho and Vertigo on
television. He recounts that his “experience of film was definitely much
more in the domestic situation rather than the communal cinematic or
cathedral of cinema.” Douglas Gordon, “Art Talk,” Vice Media. Accessed
March 3, 2013. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n3mm-LNkmXU.
43. Sullivan, Hitchcock’s Music, 232.
44. And it doesn’t divorce sound from image entirely, for Herrmann also felt
that a score always needed to be attached to the image track for which
it was written. In this case, the image track was “written” for the score,
but the connection nevertheless remains important. See Herrmann, “A
Lecture in Film Music (1973),” 221–22.
45. Andy Birtwistle, “Douglas Gordon and Cinematic Audiovisuality in
the Age of Television: Experiencing the Experience of Cinema,” Visual
Culture in Britain 13,1 (2012): 102.
46. Ibid.
47. Ibid., 106.
48. Ibid.
49. Gordon quoted in Sullivan, Hitchcock’s Music, 234.
50. Gordon quoted in David A. Ross, “The Expansive Lens,” Tate Etc. 14
(Fall 2008). Accessed March 2, 2013. http://www.tate.org.uk/context-
comment/articles/expansive-lens.
51. Gordon quoted in Bishop, “Douglas Gordon,” n.p.
52. Ibid.
53. Gordon, “Art Talk.”
54. See, for example, David R. Shumway, “Rock ‘n’ Roll Sound Tracks and
the Production of Nostalgia,” Cinema Journal 38,2 (Winter 1999):
36–51.
55. Gordon quoted in Bishop, “Douglas Gordon.”
56. Brown, “Music of Vertigo,” 8.
57. Birtwistle, “Douglas Gordon and Cinematic Audiovisuality,” 106. This
is consistent with Jennifer Higgie’s assessment of Feature Film: “If
Vertigo splits fictions apart, then Feature Film fractures expectations
about how film functions.” Jennifer Higgie, “Douglas Gordon,” Frieze
48 (September–October 1999). Accessed March 3, 2013. http://www.
frieze.com/issue/review/douglas_gordon/.
 No t e s 181

58. Adrian Searle, “Hitchcock’s Finest Hour,” The Guardian, April 3, 1999.
Accessed March 3, 2013. http://www.theguardian.com/books/1999
/apr/03/books.guardianreview1.
59. Gordon quoted in Bishop, “Douglas Gordon.”
60. Ibid.

Conclusion
Repossessing Cinema
1. Mieke Bal, “Exhibition Practices,” PMLA 125,1 (January 2010): 9.
2. Ibid., 10.
3. Ibid., 20.
4. See Brian O’Doherty, Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery
Space (Santa Monica, CA: Lapis Press, 1976).
5. Volker Pantenburg, “Post Cinema? Moving, Museums, Mutations,”
SITE Magazine 24 (2008): 4–5.
6. Bal, “Exhibition Practices,” 10.
7. Specifically, it was shown at London Metropolitan University in 2005,
Leeds Metropolitan University Gallery in 2006, and at Waterman’s Art
Gallery in 2007. It was destined for the Institute of Contemporary Arts,
but they pulled the plug at the last minute due to expense.
8. See Bill Krohn, Hitchcock at Work (London: Phaidon, 2000).
9. See Nick Haeffner, “From Auteurs to Digital Amateurs: Exploring
Vertigo, New Media and Gender Controversies with RePossessed,” in
RePossessed, Exhibition Catalog CD-ROM, 2005.
10. Ibid.
11. And as Haeffner reminds us, the phrase “freedom and power” is uttered
by different characters on three separate occasions over the course of
the film. Nick Haeffner, “Photography, Cinema and Contemporary
Art,” Nick Haeffner webpage. Accessed January 28, 2012. http://www.­
nickhaeffner.co.uk/styled-11/styled-9/index.html.
12. Ibid.
13. As Haeffner explains, “in such a world, this exhibition highlights these
possibilities and constraints, asking whether it might not still be possible to
repossess cinema as a common culture in which we all are stakeholders and
in which the public are not only consumers but also producers.” Ibid.
14. “ReConstructed,” in RePossessed, Exhibition Catalog CD-ROM, 2005.
15. The program is available at http://linux.otherspace.co.uk/RePossessed
.html, but requires signing in and consent that the content one creates
can be part of a community of other user-generated work.
16. Souli Spiropoulou, “ReFramed,” in RePossessed, Exhibition Catalog
CD-ROM, 2005.
17. Ibid.
18. Anne Robinson, “ReTurning,” in RePossessed, Exhibition Catalog
CD-ROM, 2005.
182 Not e s

19. Mulvey quoted in Robinson, “ReTurning.”

20. She also sees sound as functioning in a way similar to “remembered
sound” to adapt Burgin’s terminology. However, her soundtrack is not
sourced by Vertigo, but another fragment of a song, also grounded in the
cinema. Robinson explains, “on the soundtrack, I have used a remixing
of a single singing voice: an imperfect, slightly distorted and dreamlike
rendition of the song ‘Pack Up Your Troubles, C’mon get Happy’ as
sung by Judy Garland in the 1950 film Summer Stock. The singing dis-
rupts our vision.” Robinson, “ReTurning.”
21. For a description of the technology, see Richard Stevens and David
Raybould, “ReViewed: Creative Technology in the Gallery,” Innovation
North—Faculty Research Conference, July 9–11, 2007, Accessed January
25, 2012. http://creativetech.inn.leedsmet.ac.uk/ReViewed/files
/INN_Research_2007_RStevens_DRaybould.pdf.
22. Stevens and Raybould, “ReViewed,” in RePossessed.
23. Ibid.
24. Stevens and Raybould, “ReViewed: Creative Technology in the
Gallery.”
25. Laura Mulvey, Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image
(London: Reaktion Books, 2006), 192.
26. Ibid., 144.
27. Ibid.
28. Ibid.
29. According to Nicholas Haeffner, RePossessed asks “whether it might not
still be possible to repossess cinema as a common culture in which we all
are stakeholders and in which the public are not only consumers but also
producers.”
30. Mulvey, Death 24x a Second, 191.
31. Ibid.
32. Adrian Martin, “Cinephilia as War Machine,” Framework 50,1–2
(­Spring–Fall 2009): 222.
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 Index

Notes: Titles of works in italics refer to films unless a gloss indicates

otherwise, for example, (book) or (exhibition).
Locators in boldface indicate a page with illustration(s).

24 Hour Psycho, 15–16, 162n44 multisensory experiences, 130–1,

2 Spellbound, 93–4, 94 179n34
4 Vertigo, 93–6, 95, 124 Art and Film since 1945: Hall of
Mirrors (exhibition), 132
Accumulating Psycho (video), 97 art exhibitions. See exhibition
action stills, 84 practices; under individual names
Algonquin Park, Early March, art institutions. See gallery spaces;
109–11 museal spaces; under individual
Algonquin Park, September, 110–11 names
algorithms, 95–6, 124 Arthur, Paul, 48–9, 51
Alter, Nora, 47, 168n22, 168n27 artifice, 78, 125–6, 135. See also
Anderson, J. Tobias, 93 special effects
appropriation, 28–9, 76, 109–10, artists, 4, 7–11, 69. See also under
123–5, 128, 137. See also individual names
footage, found; intermedia and Ask the Dust: North by Northwest
intermediality 1959/1990 (photographic
art and artistic objects/practices, 4, series), 26–30, 28
76. See also exhibition practices; Ask the Dust: Vertigo 1958/1990
objects in art and film (photographic series),
epistemophilia-driven, 14 26–30, 28
influence of/on Hitchcock. See Atlantis Gallery, 134, 141
Hitchcock, Alfred The Atomists (photography/painting
sound in film and. See sound in film series), 74
as teaching devices, 22–3 audiences for art and film. See
as theoretical objects, 16–17, spectators and spectatorship;
163n51 viewers/visitors
art and film, 4–6, 10, 38, 68, 74, authors and authorial presence, 48, 51
76, 142, 151–2. See also essay
films; remediation back projection(s). See rear
exhibitions, 2–4, 141–5. See also projection(s)
installation art Bal, Mieke, 17, 76, 141–2
194 Index

Baldessari, John, 59, 61–2, 64 cinephiles and cinephilia, 9, 11–13,

Balsom, Erika, 6–7, 174n17 18, 21–2, 33–5, 88, 138. See
Bauer, Aurélie, 69–71, 72–5 also Lewis, Mark; RePossessed
Bedroom, 54, 56 (exhibition): ReFramed 1
Bellour, Raymond, 134 . . . inVertEgo; RePossessed
Bennett, Jill, 17–18, 74–6, 78 (exhibition): ReViewed
Bernard, Cindy, 10–11, 26–30, 28, epistemophilia and, 35. See also
76–9, 83, 171n25 The Phoenix Tapes (expanded
Bernard Herrmann’s Vertigo: A essay film)
Film Score Handbook (book), photography and, 68, 74
120–1 pilgrimages and, 25–7, 29–30,
Bernstrup, Tobias, 79 41, 125
The Birds, 71, 103, 170n8 spectators and, 16, 86, 151–2.
Birtwistle, Andy, 136, 138 See also Elsaesser, Thomas;
black boxes, 78, 142, 171n24 Mulvey, Laura
Blind Televisions (installation), 133 Circulations (installation), 98
Boat on the Elbe in the Early Fog collages, temporal, 19, 91–2, 109,
(painting), 110 112–13, 117
Bolter, Jay David, 72–3 computer games. See video games
Boyle, Robert, 102–3 Conlon, James, 133–6
Brown, Royal S., 138 Continuations of Hitchcock
Bruegel, Pieter (the Elder), 110 (installation series), 97–8
bullshots, 85, 173n42 Cooke, Lynne, 1
Burden of Proof, 56, 59 Cooper, David, 120–1
Burgin, Victor, 38 Corrigan, Timothy, 47, 51
Burgoyne, Robert, 14–15, 21 Cox, Peta, 13
C-prints, 38–9
camera and camera movement, 30, cultural studies, 75
108–11, 115. See also illusion Cunningham, Douglas, 29–30,
and disillusion; look (in film or 34–5
painting); zoom curatorial practices/strategies,
Campany, David, 100 141–3
Campbell, Jim, 97
Carlotta (Valdez) of Vertigo, 121 Damisch, Hubert, 16
Cary Grant (painting), 73–4 DeLillo, Don, 15
Chatonsky, Gregory, 125 Derailed, 54, 56
cinema. See films Dercon, Chris, 4
cinema and art. See art and film Dickinson, Greg, 166n29
Cinema Pieces, 1 digital images and digital imagery
cinematic impulse/turn, 4 technology, 12, 72–3, 76–9,
cinematic spaces, 58, 88. See also 84–5, 148, 151
space/spaces Doherty, Brian, 142
cinematographic strategies, 108–9. dolly zoom, 108
See also digital images and doubling of images, 93–4, 173n3
digital imagery technology; Draeger, Christoph, 97
special effects Dutch painters, 97
 Index 195

Eisenstein, Sergei, 122 appropriation and remaking.

Eisentraut, Jochen, 121 See appropriation
Elsaesser, Thomas, 11–12 consumption of, 145–6, 180n42
Empire, 39–42 essay. See essay films
ensembles. See Reed, David history, 8, 50
epistemophilia, 11, 13–14, 16–18, musealization and. See museal
21–2, 138. See also Lewis, spaces
Mark; RePossessed (exhibition): sound effects and soundtracks.
ReFramed 1 . . . inVertEgo; See sound in film
RePossessed (exhibition): video games and, 87, 148,
ReViewed 173n43
cinephilia and, 35. See also The film stills, 45–6, 86, 166n31,
Phoenix Tapes (expanded essay 172n34
film) relation to moving images,
spectators and spectatorship and, 83–5, 148
152 repurposing of, 88
Eros, Bradley, 6 filmmakers, 48. See also under
essay films, 18–19, 45–52, 167n3, individual names
168n27. See also The Phoenix first-person shooter games,
Tapes (expanded essay film) 79–80, 87
expanded, 46, 51–2 Fluxus movement. See sound art/
filmmakers and spectators, 48 sound in art
musealization and, 63 Fog (painting), 110
Evil Interiors (digital images series), Foley artists, 125–6
80–9 footage, found, 49, 53, 64, 123,
Evil Interiors: Psycho (digital image), 149. See also The Phoenix Tapes
81, 84–6, 88–9 (expanded essay film); Torn
exhibition practices, 141–3. See also Curtain: Endless Beginnings
gallery spaces; installation art Fowler, Catherine, 48–9
expanded cinema, 45–6, 51–2. See frame enlargements. See film stills
also essay films freedom and power (myth/theme),
Export, Valie, 52 145, 181n13. See also viewers/
eye tracking, 149 visitors
freeze frames. See digital images and
fan culture and practices, 14, 74, 82, digital imagery technology
172n31. See also spectators and Friedrich, Caspar David, 110–12
spectatorship; viewers/visitors
Farocki, Harun, 45–6, 167n3 gallery spaces, 36–7, 131, 141.
Feature Film (book), 136, 180n42 See also Atlantis Gallery;
Feature Film (exhibition), 133–8, 141 museal spaces; spectators and
Fibicher, Bernard, 111 spectatorship; viewers/visitors
Fiévet, Laurent, 97–8 game art, 79, 172n31. See also video
film/films, 4–6, 8–10, 102. See also games
art and film; expanded cinema; gameophilia, 82, 172n30
paracinema; under individual gamers. See viewers/visitors
titles Garnett, Tay, 104
196 Index

gaze, the, 13, 87, 111, 131–2, 146, influence of, 1–2, 6–10, 20–1,
149, 166n29. See also look (in 53–4, 71–2, 104, 123–4, 142,
film or painting); scopophilia 160n14, 178–9n25. See also
male, 96, 146 The Phoenix Tapes (expanded
Parker, Molly and, 106 essay film); Vertigo
German Romanticism, 110–11 influences on, 3, 97, 110, 160n14
Gesammtkunstwerk, 141–3 landscape and, 111–12
gestures, cinephilic, 33, 59, 62 on narrative, 50
Girardet, Christoph, 52–7, 61–2, publicity photos and, 84
64–5, 67, 169n36 rear projection(s) and, 102–9,
Giraudeau, Bertrand, 73–5 111, 113–15
Glasgow, Scotland, 39, 41–2 spatial montage and, 92
Godard, Jean Luc, 49–50 Hitchcock and Art: Fatal
Google Streetview, 125–6 Coincidences (exhibition), 3,
Gordon, Douglas, 14–16, 26, 59, 103
133–9, 180n42 Under Hitchcock (exhibition), 3
installation art, 39–42 Hitchcock Experimental
Vertigo and, 40–2, 136–8, 141 (exhibition), 3
Goya, Francesco, 61–2 Hitchcock films, 67–8, 94–5,
Grand Theft Auto—San Andreas 170n1. See also under individual
(video game), 146–8, 147 names
Grant, Cary. See Cary Grant geographies, 56–8, 78–9
(painting) props, 62, 69, 97
Grusin, Richard, 72–3 rear projection(s) and, 102–7, 111
tropes, 54–5
Haeffner, Nicholas (Nick), 143–5, Hitchcock Trilogy, 127
181n13, 182n29 Hollywood, 8–9, 89, 116, 161n21.
Halaban, Gail Albert, 25–6, 164n3 See also film stills
Her Man, 104–5 Home Stories, 53
Herrmann, Bernard, 119–22, Hopper, Edward, 25–6
124, 126, 132–6, 178–9n25, Hopper Redux (photographic
180n44. See also Bernard series), 25
Herrmann’s Vertigo: A Film Horowitz, Joseph, 120
Score Handbook (book) horror (genre), 80
Histoire(s) du Cinéma, 49–50 The Howlin’ Wolf, 106, 112
historiography/history, 7–8, 48–9, Hunters in the Snow (painting), 110
73. See also films: history Hüser, Rembert, 54
Hitch (exhibition), 3 Huyssen, Andreas, 63
Hitchcock 30, 96 hypermediacy. See intermedia and
Hitchcock, Alfred, 8–9, 20, 96, 144 intermediality
art/artists and, 68–9, 152.
See also under names of Illuminated Average #1: Hitchcock’s
individual artists Psycho, 97
doubles and, 173n3 illusion and disillusion, 101, 109
films and. See Hitchcock films image and sound. See sound art/
Hollywood and, 8–9, 161n21 sound in art; sound in film
 Index 197

image technologies, 79, 107. Langford, Martha, 29

See also digital images and LeSueur, Marc, 107
digital imagery technology; rear level editors, 79, 82, 86, 160n13
projection(s); special effects LeVeque, Les, 93–6, 124
images and narration, 45–6, 83 Lewis, Mark, 19–20, 99–100,
images, digital. See digital images 176n47. See also Nathan
and digital imagery technology Phillips Square, A Winter’s
images, moving. See moving images Night, Skating
images, stilled. See film stills Hitchcock connection, 99, 101,
indexicality, 37, 77–8, 171n23 104–5, 108, 110
Infrastructure (installation), 97, 98–9 influence of German Romanticism
Inghilleri, Isabelle, 70–5, 142, and Friedrich, 110–11
170n5, 170nn8–9 influence of Lumière brothers, 100–1
installation art. See also exhibition influence of Tay Garnett, 104
practices; montage, spatial rear projection(s) and, 104–10,
David Reed and, 33, 36–7, 166n24 112–13, 115–17
as expanded essay film, 51 Link, Stan, 121–2
interaction with, 166n28. See also Location Proposal #2 (film stills),
spectators and spectatorship; 76–9, 77, 171n23, 171n25
viewers/visitors look (in film or painting), 131–2,
intermedia and intermediality, 176nn50–51. See also gaze, the;
74–5, 82, 85, 88. See also Evil Gordon, Douglas; scopophilia;
Interiors (digital images series); vision
Location Proposal #2 (film RePossessed (exhibition):
stills); remediation ReFramed 1 . . . inVertEgo, 146
intervention, aesthetic, 6, 14–16, RePossessed (exhibition):
22, 67, 146. See also Girardet, ReViewed, 149
Christoph; Gordon, Douglas; Lumière brothers/Lumière drive,
Müller, Matthias; Reed, David 100–1
Lynch, David, 72, 170n9
Jacobs, Steven, 7, 83–4
Jenkins, Henry, 14 Madeleine of Vertigo, 119, 121,
Judy’s Bedroom (digital C-print), 38–9 138, 148
Judy’s Bedroom (installation), 31–8, Manovich, Lev, 173n1
32, 166n24 Marclay, Christian, 128–33
Marker, Chris, 48–9
The Kiss (digital C-print), 38–9 Marnie, 103
Klein, Yves, 1 Martin, Adrian, 152
knowledge, interdisciplinary, medial relationships and
75–6. See also epistemophilia; mediality. See intermedia and
intermedia and intermediality intermediality
Kotz, Liz, 128–9 Méliès, Georges, 101
memory, 38–9, 48–9. See also nostalgia
landscape representation, 27–9, 28, cultural, 14–15, 59, 76
110–12, 164–5n8 invoking, 62–3, 128, 131–2,
Lane, Chris, 143, 149 137–8
198 Index

Metz, Christian, 14 neon lights, 34, 39–41

Michaud, Phillip Alain, 100–1 Nine Piece Rope (film still), 92, 93
Modern Art Oxford (formerly North by Northwest, 98
Museum of Modern Art North by Northwest (painting), 70
Oxford), 53, 169n31 nostalgia, 9. See also memory
monitors, television. See television/ Notorious: Alfred Hitchcock and
television sets Contemporary Art (exhibition),
Monk by the Sea (painting), 111 2, 53
montage, spatial, 19, 55, 91–3, 105,
109, 116–17, 173n1, 176n47. objects in art and film, 10, 38,
See also rear projection(s); 59–62, 76. See also art and
superimposition artistic objects/practices; props
Moral Hallucinations: Channelling Obsessionen: Die Alptraum-
Hitchcock (exhibition), 2 Fabrik des Alfred Hitchcock
Morgan, Daniel, 49–50 (exhibition), 3
Morris, Christopher, 103 Oh! Hitchcock (exhibition), 2
moving images, 45–6, 83–5, 148 O’Pray, Michael, 51
Muir Woods. See Redwoods State optical crutches. See camera and
Park/Vertigo Muir Woods camera movement
Müller, Matthias, 52–7, 62, 64–5, optical effects. See zoom
67, 169n36 originals vs. copies, 135–6
Mulvey, Laura, 12–13, 104, 107, Orozco, Gabriel, 74–5
146, 148–9, 151–2, 176n47 Out My Window (photographic
museal spaces, 35–8, 58, 169n44. series), 25, 164n3
See also gallery spaces; public Outside the National Gallery, 117
spaces; The Phoenix Tapes
(expanded essay film) Païni, Dominique, 103–4, 111–15
activating, 63 Pantenburg, Volker, 142
computer games and, 80 paracinema, 5–6, 31
Museum Meltdown ([video] game Parker, Molly, 105–6, 106, 112,
art), 79 176nn50–1
Museum of Modern Art Oxford. See The Phoenix Tapes (expanded essay
Modern Art Oxford (formerly film), 19, 52–65, 57, 60
Museum of Modern Art photography/photos
Oxford) cinephilia and, 68, 74. See also
musical scores, 119–20, 124, 137 Bernard, Cindy; film stills; under
myths (cinema/cinematographers), individual photography series
9, 144–5 publicity, 73–4, 83–5
pilgrimages, cinephilic, 25–7,
narrative fiction film, 45–6, 50, 55, 29–30, 41, 125
59, 107. See also images and The Pitch, 109–10
narration Point Omega (book), 15–16
narrative painting, 31, 165n19 portraiture, 73–4
Nathan Phillips Square, A Winter’s presentations. See curatorial
Night, Skating, 112–13, 113, practices/strategies; exhibition
115–17 practices
 Index 199

process photography/shots. See rear RePossessed (exhibition), 3, 143–51,

projection(s) 181n7
props, 33–4, 54, 59, 61–2. See also ReConstructed, 145–6
Hitchcock films ReFramed, 145–6
Psycho (1960), 1–2, 82, 84–5, ReMixed, 146
159n3 RePlayed, 146–8
24 Hour Psycho (1993) and, 15 ReTurning, 148, 182n29
inhabiting, 87 ReViewed, 149
shower scene, 9, 161n24 ReVisited, 149–51, 150
Psycho (1998), 97 representation devices/practices,
Psycho (from Tajiri’s Hitchcock 26–33, 51, 58, 61–4, 68,
Trilogy), 127 79–81. See also landscape
public spaces, 36, 166n29. See also representation
museal spaces Robinson, Anne, 143, 148, 182n29
Romanticism, German, 110–11
Rancière, Jacques, 50 Rope, 93
Rascaroli, Laura, 47–8, 51, 63 Rutland, 54–8, 57
Raybould, David, 149 Ryan, David, 122
the real and the virtual. See artifice
Rear Projection (Molly Parker), 104, Saboteur, 113–15
105–7, 106, 108–10, 112 Samuel, Benjamin, 96
rear projection(s), 19, 99, 101–16, San Francisco, 33, 41, 125–6, 149
175n28, 176n47 Sans Soleil, 48–9
Hitchcock, and, 102–9, 111, Schroetner, Jens, 88
113–15 scopophilia, 13, 124, 131–2. See also
Lewis and, 104–10, 112–13, gaze, the
115–17 Scottie of Vertigo, 78–9, 108, 119,
Rear Window, 164n3 121, 125–6, 132, 148
Rear Window (painting series), Scottie’s Bedroom (digital C-print),
69–70 38–9
Redwoods State Park/Vertigo Muir Scottie’s Bedroom (installation),
Woods, 76, 77 31–5, 32, 37–8, 57–8
Reed, David, 18, 26, 30–1, 57–8, scrapbooking, 74–5
169n19 screenshots, 85
paintings and installation art Searle, Adrian, 138
(ensembles), 31–9 Shadows of a Doubt (exhibition), 3
Vertigo and, 33–9 Shower (film sculpture), 1–2, 159n3
Re-edit (software program). See shower scene. See Psycho (1960)
ReFrame (software program) Snow Storm—Steam Boat off a
ReFrame (software program), 145–6 Harbour’s Mouth (painting), 98
reification of profilmic space, 18, sound and image. See sound art/
30–3, 166n23 sound in art; sound in film
remediation, 19, 72–4, 76–89, sound art/sound in art, 122–4,
146–8. See also Evil Interiors 130–1, 134–6
(digital images series); Location sound effects. See sound in film
Proposal #2 (film stills) sound, found, 123–4, 178n18
200 Index

sound in film, 20, 119–23, 177n1 technology, limits of, 145–6

appropriation of, 124–5, 128 Telephones, 129
artificial vs. real, 125–6 television/television sets, 37, 44,
Hitchcock and, 135–6 58, 145–6. See also Blind
images and, 125–8, 135, 137, Televisions (installation)
180n44 Tetrad Series, 59, 61–2
quality of, 135–6 Theme Park (painting series), 70–2,
sound in art and, 131 72, 170n9
triggering memories, 127, 137 time, 36–7, 39
soundtracks, 130–1, 135. See also cinematic, 97
musical scores in film vs. painting, 71
space/spaces, 110–11. See also moving images and, 91
cinematic spaces; landscape space and, 77, 88, 112
representation; museal spaces; Torn Curtain: Endless Beginnings,
public spaces 127–8
appropriating, 76 Torsson, Palle, 79–80, 83–9
architectural, 116–17 Turner, J. W. M., 98
inhabiting, 88 Turnock, Julie, 102
time and, 77, 88, 112
special effects, 103, 109, 124–5. Unreal Tournament and Unreal
See also neon lights; rear Tournament 1 and 3 (digital
projection(s); sound in film; images), 80–2
superimposition; zoom Up and Out, 129–30
spectators and spectatorship, 12–13,
15–16, 151–2, 182n29. van Alphen, Ernst, 17
See also fan culture and Van Sant, Gus, 97
practices; viewers/visitors Vertigo, 7, 132, 134. See also
engagement and participation, 88, Location Proposal #2
121–2, 144 (film stills)
epistemophilia and, 152 Gordon and, 40–2, 134, 136–8
essay films and, 48 indexicality and, 78
expanded cinema and, 52 musical score and sound
Spiropoulou, Souli, 143, 146 effects, 119–21, 123, 125,
Stevens, Richard, 149 134, 136–8
still images. See film stills Reed and, 33–4, 36–9
storyboarding, 69–71, 73, 75, 1 RePossessed (exhibition) and, 143,
44 145–51, 181n11
Sullivan, Jack, 120 Sans Soleil and, 48–9
superimposition, 96–7, 117, 126 Vertigo@home, 125
Vertigo: Soundtrack for an
Tajiri, Rea, 127 Exhibition, 128, 130–3,
Tape Fall (installation), 128 179n32
“Tapp und Tast Kino (Touch Vertigo:Three Character Descriptions,
Cinema),” 52 127
Tay, Sharon Lin, 96 Vertigo zoom, 108–9, 119
 Index 201

video games, 79–88. See also Walley, Jonathan, 5

gameophilia; level editors Wanderer Looking over the Sea of Fog
fan culture and practices, 172n31 (painting), 110–11
film and, 87, 148, 173n43 white cubes, 78, 142, 171n24
modifying, 82, 172n32 Whitman, Robert, 1–2, 159n3
players as viewers, 87 Why Won’t You Love Me? 54, 56
Torsson and, 79, 85, 87–8 Windhausen, Federico, 55–6,
Video Quartet (installation), 129 169n36
viewers/visitors. See also gaze, the; Window (film sculpture), 1
spectators and spectatorship Wollen, Peter, 131
dialogue with art, 142 Wood, Robin, 103
eye tracking, 149 Workers Leaving the Factory, 45–6
freedom and power of, 145–6, Workers Leaving the Factory in
149–51, 150, 182n29 Eleven Decades, 46
putting into the picture, 86–7, 134 The Wrong House (exhibition), 3
vision, 61, 69. See also look (in film
or painting) Zimmerman, Patricia, 96
visual effects. See special effects zoom, 111. See also dolly zoom;
visual syntax. See illusion and disillusion Vertigo zoom