Vertigo
- This is a past program
Presented by the UCLA Film & Television Archive.
In-person: Adam Piron, director, Indigenous Program at the Sundance Institute.
Part of the UCLA Film & Television Archive screening series San Francisco Plays Itself: Scenes from the Bay. Learn more at cinema.ucla.edu.
Light Signal (2022)
A rumination on place, colonialism, and the light. Always the light.
16mm, color, 11 min. Director: Emily Chao.
Vertigo (1958)
Former San Francisco police officer (James Stewart) has developed acrophobia and must follow a woman (Kim Novak) who may be possessed by a ghost from the past. Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, widely considered his crowning achievement, has long been canonized as cinema’s essential image of San Francisco. In its sundry dissections, much of the focus centers on its portrayal of obsession while few have dug deep into its foregrounding of California’s dark legacy of the Mission Era. Join filmmaker and programmer Adam Piron for a live reading and visual essay, followed by a screening of the film, that offers a reading of Vertigo from a uniquely Indigenous vantage point and interprets Hitchcock’s masterpiece as a statement on the ongoing costs of a colonialism, specific to California, and the psychological violence that continues to ripple from its blast point.
Program note by Adam Piron.
35mm, color, 128 min. Director: Alfred Hitchcock. Screenwriter: Alec Coppel, Samuel A. Taylor. With: James Stewart, Kim Novak, Barbara Bel Geddes.
The UCLA Film & Television Archive is a division of UCLA Library, and presents its public programs in the Billy Wilder Theater at the Hammer, among other venues. For more information about the Archive, visit cinema.ucla.edu.
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