Emotion, Space and Society (2011) - The acrophobe and the funambulist: Existential and cinematic perspectives on the phenomenology of extreme vertical space

Details

• article: The acrophobe and the funambulist: Existential and cinematic perspectives on the phenomenology of extreme vertical space
• author(s): Jim LeBlanc
• journal: Emotion, Space and Society (2011)
• issue: volume 4, issue 1, pages 1-7
• DOI: 10.1016/j.emospa.2010.01.006
• journal ISSN: 1755-4586
• publisher: Elsevier Ltd
• keywords: Alfred Hitchcock, Barbara Bel Geddes, Bernard Herrmann, Existentialism, Fear of heights, Fort Point, Golden Gate Bridge, San Francisco, California, High wire walking, Hitchcock Chronology: 1955, Hitchcock Chronology: 1972, James Stewart, Kim Novak, Man on Wire, Mission San Juan Bautista, California, Monaco, France, New York City, New York, San Francisco, California, Vertigo (1958)

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Abstract

In his 1943 philosophical work, Being and Nothingness, Jean-Paul Sartre described vertigo as “anguish to the extent that I am afraid not of falling over the precipice, but of throwing myself over” (Sartre, 1943: 29). In this paper I use Sartre's remark as a point of departure for a more detailed existential phenomenological examination of the fear of heights as a vertical spatial phobia. Further, I reflect on acrophobia's opposite – the attraction to extreme heights, which I term “acrophilia” – before drawing some general conclusions about the fear of, and attraction to, heights as a psychological paradigm for the many situations in which we apprehend our existential freedom in dread and either succumb to this emotion or transcend it through a focused engagement in what Sartre and others have termed our existential “projects.” To illustrate this argument, I introduce two cinematic examples in which these emotional tendencies serve significant thematic functions: Alfred Hitchcock's 1958 suspense film, Vertigo and James Marsh's 2008 documentary, Man on Wire.