![]() Alfred Hitchcock, better than any other director, used the visual glamour of the moving image to serve plots constructed on the Aristotelian model, a sequence of acts to stimulate and toy with the audience’s expectations. I will start with an auteur and a film that seem to unite in exemplary fashion the movement of cinematic images and the unveiling of a truth hidden behind appearances. And by the same token I will have to talk about the relation between cinema, philosophy, literature and communism. So I will talk about the relation between vision, movement and truth. And I will attempt to understand the philosophical meaning and political weight of that fault. How can the unrolling of moving images be married to that particular logic for unveiling the truth behind appearances? I would like to show that the most perfect synchronization of the two movements includes a fault. But as the sequence unfolds, expectations are dashed: the alliance of causes produces an entirely different effect from the one anticipated knowledge becomes ignorance and ignorance knowledge success changes to disaster or misfortune to happiness. The plot is a sequence of actions that seems to have a certain meaning and lead towards a certain end. In the western tradition, the second aspect is dominated by the Aristotelian logic of inversion. Understanding the art of moving images means first understanding the relation between two movements: the visual unrolling of images specific to cinema and the deployment and dissipation of semblances more broadly characteristic of the narrative arts. Below, we present Jacques Rancière's essay on the film from Intervals of Cinema, which casts back to Vertov's Man With the Movie Camera to uncover the faultline Hitchcock's work straddles. The Vertigo Effect, a series of more than 25 films marked, in one way or another, by Alfred Hitchcock's 1958 classic, commenced last night at BAM.
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