Vertigo (1958)Vertigo (1958)

Abstract

Abstract “Vertigo (1958): Labor in a single shot” is the story of a delayed interpretation. In a theory/practice seminar, filmmaker Harun Farocki suggested that the author reproduce one of Vertigo’s iconic camera movements: the dolly-in that, in the museum scene, leads both the detective and the spectator’s looks from Madeleine’s spiral-shaped hairdo to Carlotta Valdes’s similarly coiffed hair. What would attract a filmmaker who devoted his career to critiquing image production and consumption under capitalism to a scene of haunted contemplation? Years later, Torlasco, after Farocki, proposes that we interpret it as an image of labor—the portrayal of a process that is at once perceptual, cognitive, and affective; an image of immaterial labor. In doing so, she rediscovers a mode of symbolic production that pivots around metonymy rather than metaphor, difference rather than similarity, a way of making sense in excess of the exchange economy that the scene otherwise supports.