Sculpting Women: From Pygmalion to Vertigo to The Skin I Live In

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Notes

Notes

1 Munro, “Too Much Happiness,” [short story] in Too Much Happiness, p. 294.

2 Antony and the Johnsons, “For Today I am a Boy,” [song] on I Am a Bird Now.

3 Kercher, “Almodóvar and Hitchcock: A Sorcerer’s Apprenticeship,” in A Companion to Pedro Almodóvar, p. 59.

4 Ibid., Almodóvar quoted on p. 60.

5 Pedro Lange- Churión also focuses on the “internal dialogue” between The Skin I Live in and Vertigo (Lange-Churión, “Pedro Almodóvar's La Piel Que Habito: Of Late Style and Erotic Conservatism,” in Bulletin of Spanish Studies, p. 442). However, he argues that it reveals Almodóvar’s erotic conservatism. Lange-Churrión aligns the filmmaker’s perspective with that of the character Robert (Antonio Banderas), whereas I will argue that the film exposes the violence behind the male gaze that Robert epitomizes.

6 Almodóvar quoted in Kercher, Almodóvar and Hitchcock, p. 60.

7 Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” in Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings.

8 Ibid., p. 841. Mulvey also discusses Marnie (Dir. Alfred Hitchcock, 1964) and Rear Window (Dir. Alfred Hitchcock, 1954) along the same lines, although Vertigo is especially well suited to her theoretical approach.

9 Mulvey, Visual Pleasure.

10 Ibid., p. 835.

11 Ibid., p. 840.

12 Mulvey, Visual Pleasure.

13 White, “Vertigo and Problems of Knowledge in Feminist Film Theory,” in Alfred Hitchcock: Centenary Essays, p. 280.

14 Modleski, The Women Who Knew Too Much: Hitchcock and Feminist Theory; De Laurentis Alice Doesn't: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema; Hollinger, “The Look, Narrativity, and the Female Spectator in Vertigo,” in Journal of Film and Video.

15 Modleski, Women Who Knew.

16 Ibid.; White, Problems of Knowledge.

17 Modleski, Women Who Knew; Linderman, “The Mise-en-Abîme in Hitchcock’s Vertigo,” in Cinema Journal.

18 Linderman, Mise-en-Abîme, p. 52.

19 White, Problems of Knowledge.

20 Ibid., pp. 290–2.

21 Glenn, “The Traumatized Veteran: A New Look at Jimmy Stewart's Post-WWII Vertigo,” in Quarterly Review of Film and Video.

22 Ibid., p. 38.

23 Spinks, “The Hallucinatory (Cultural) Logic of Hitchcock's Vertigo,” in Quarterly Review of Film and Video; Wexman, “The Critic as Consumer: Film Study in the University, Vertigo, and the Film Canon,” in Film Quarterly.

24 Glenn, Traumatized Veteran; Spinks, Hallucinatory.

25 Fabe, “Mourning Vertigo,” in American Imago.

26 Ibid., p. 350.

27 Ibid., p. 351–3.

28 Ibid., p. 355.

29 Mulvey, Visual Pleasure.

30 Fabe, Mourning, p. 365.

31 Ibid.

32 Jonquet, Mygale; Boileau and Narcejac, Vertigo [original title: D’Entre les Morts or The Living and the Dead].

33 In this film, a surgeon kidnaps women and attempts to graft their faces onto his daughter, whose own face was disfigured in an accident of his doing.

34 Zhuravsky, “NYFF ‘11: Pedro Almodóvar Talks the Identity and Gender Themes of ‘The Skin I Live In’,” in Indiewire.

35 Fabe, Mourning, p. 363–4. There is also, of course, the striking ellipsis in Vertigo between when Scottie pulls a supposedly unconscious Judy/Madeleine out of the San Francisco Bay after a faked suicide attempt and when she wakes up naked in his bed. Presumably, he has removed her wet clothes in the meantime and she was only pretending to be unconscious.

36 Marcantonio, “Cinema, Transgenesis, and History in The Skin I Live In,” in Social Text, pp. 49–50.

37 Mulvey, Visual Pleasure.

38 White and Smith, “Escape Artistry: Debating ‘The Skin I Live In’,” in Film Quarterly.

39 Jung, “Yuxtaposición Artística en La Piel que Habito de Pedro Almodóvar: En Torno a las Obras de Tiziano, Louise Bourgeois, Guillermo Pérez Villalta y Juan Gatti,” in Neophilologus, p. 622.

40 Ibid., p. 621.

41 Barker, “Synthetic Skins: Mercedes Cebrián’s La Nueva Taxidermia (The New Taxidermy) and Pedro Almodóvar’s La Piel que Habito (The Skin I Live In),” in Affect and Belonging in Contemporary Spanish Fiction and Film: Crossroads Visions, p. 132.

42 Delgado, “Flesh and the Devil,” in Sight and Sound, p. 19.

43 Aldana Reyes, “Skin Deep? Surgical Horror and the Impossibility of Becoming Woman in Almodóvar’s The Skin I Live In,” in Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, p. 820.

44 Wye, Louise Bourgeois. Femme Maison. 1946–1947. Audio Guide to exhibition Louise Bourgeois: An Unfolding Portrait.

45 Ibid.

46 Quoted Saz, “Mujeres Al Borde De Un Ataque De Nervios: Elementos Subversivos,” in Actas del XI Congreso de la Asociación Internacional de Hispanistas, p .6.

47 Smith, “Pedro Almodóvar,” in A Companion to Spanish Cinema, p. 152.

48 James, “She’s All That: Ovid’s Ivory Statue and the Legacy of Pygmalion on Film,” in Classical Bulletin, pp. 66–7.

49 ’Lugo and Vernon, “Introduction: ‘The Skin He Lives In,’” in A Companion to Pedro Almodóvar, p. 1.

50 Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity.

51 Spinks, Hallucinatory, p. 237.

52 Žižek, “Vertigo: the Drama of a Deceived Platonist,” in Hitchcock Annual.

53 Ibid.

54 Ibid., p. 70.

55 Ibid.

56 Ibid.

57 Ravetto-Biagioli, “Vertigo and the Vertiginous History of Film Theory,” in Camera Obscura.

58 Cohen, “Hitchcock’s Revised American Vision: The Wrong Man and Vertigo,” in Hitchcock's America, p. 158.

59 Rancière, Cinematic Vertigo: Hitchcock to Vertov and Back. Intervals of Cinema, p. 24.

60 Weisel-Barth, “The Fetish in Nicole Krauss’ Great House and in Clinical Practice,” in Psychoanalytic Dialogues, p. 181.

61 Delgado, Flesh, p. 22.

62 Jung, Yuxtaposición.

63 Ibid., p. 328.

64 Lemma, “A Perfectly Modern Frankenstein: Almodóvar’s The Skin I Live In (2011, Sony Picture Classics),” in International Journal of Psychoanalysis, p. 1299.

65 Zhuravsky, NYFF.

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Jesse Barker

Jesse Barker is lecturer of Spanish and Latin American Studies at the University of Aberdeen, specializing in Spanish film. His first book, Affect and Belonging in Contemporary Spanish Fiction and Film: Crossroads Visions (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), examines 21st-century films and fictions that question individualism and privilege sensation, movement, and emotion—rather than identity—as the core elements of existential experience.