Vertigo

Light Signal

U.S., 2022

A rumination on place, colonialism, and the light. Always the light.

16mm, color, 11 min. Director: Emily Chao.

Vertigo

U.S., 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 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.