Kim Novak’s Vertigo

In studio-era Hollywood, Kim Novak fought to craft her own identity.

In this affectionate documentary portrait, she elegantly redefines her legacy.

People have rarely given Kim Novak the credit she deserves. She has been dismissed as a generic 1950s studio blonde; her slippery performance in 1958 psychological thriller Vertigo (MIFF 1984) is too often attributed only to director Alfred Hitchcock’s genius; and her long, fiercely private retirement is treated as the wreckage of Hollywood misogyny. All the while, however, Novak has been her own auteur. She fought Columbia Pictures boss Harry Cohn to keep her own surname, and went on strike for better pay. Now 93, she recalls Vertigo as a satisfyingly metatextual collaboration, reframing her life’s dizzying, spiralling narratives as “a big, beautiful circle”.

In the prolific Alexandre O. Philippe, Novak finds an avid, erudite listener. His documentaries on cinema craft are frequently valentines to individual films: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (Chain Reactions, MIFF 2025), Alien (Memory – The Origins of Alien, MIFF 2019) and Psycho(78/52, MIFF 2017). Here, as in his William Shatner portrait You Can Call Me Bill (MIFF 2023), Philippe illuminates a complex person rather than worshipping a star. Kim Novak’s Vertigo celebrates an unforgettable movie through its subject’s refreshingly candid musings on the tensions between authenticity and mystique.

Content: Melbourne International Film Festival