Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo and the Hermeneutic Spiral

This book offers a new approach to film studies by showing how our brains use our interpretations of various other films in order to understand Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo. Borrowing from behavioral psychology, cognitive science and philosophy, author Robert J. Belton seeks to explain differences of critical opinion as inevitable.

The book begins by introducing the hermeneutic spiral, a cognitive processing model that categorizes responses to Vertigo’s meaning, ranging from wide consensus t...